  The negative view of ideology taken by Marxists might suggest a crude conception where legal ideology is a tool cynically wielded by the powerful to ensure submission by the powerless. However, it offends the “conception of right,” if “a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class” (Engels, letter to C. Schmidt, October 27, 1890). And because ideology such as law takes a formal and normative form, the powerful are in its grips too, persuaded by an account of the inevitable and just order from which they profit.  Moreover, ideology is no mere fiction; it is produced by real social conditions and reflects them. Ideology thus must succeed in constituting a consensus about capitalism, and it must do so by giving expression to capitalism’s recognizable features. Equality before the law, for example, is both elicited by, and reflects, the reality of capitalist economic relations, even if it is an equality that is formal and incomplete. Consent will not be forthcoming if legal ideology bears no relation whatsoever to the social conditions it seeks to justify.  The idea that ideology inverts reality is important here. In his camera obscura metaphor in The German Ideology, Marx contends that reality appears upside down in ideology, much like the photographic process provides an inverted image. The inverted image is telling; it is a recognisable depiction of reality, even if it is at the same time a distorted one ((Marx and Engels [TGI], 25). Karl Mannheim (1936) elaborated further on the idea of the complex relation between reality and ideology by pointing to the human need for ideology. Ideologies are neither true nor false but are a set of socially conditioned ideas that provide a truth that people, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, want to hear.