  The picture is more complicated, however. The Marxist view of law as ideology does, after all, have some affinities with rival views on the sources of law. The Marxist view concedes to the positivist, for example, that law emerges from the practices of society, though the practices are extra-legal – political, economic and social – rather than the practices of institutional facts internal to a legal system. Social forces are ultimately determining of the content and form of a legal system. Indeed, the Marxist Louis Althusser’s idea of ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 1971) has a positivist flavour in its insistence that political reality can be exhaustively described by reference to structures rather than norm-bearing agents. We might expect that the radical exponent of ideology would resist the combination of a positivist-ideology view. The radical would find in the positivist emphasis on institutions a too uncritical attitude to the ideological structures that shape those institutions. But it seems possible that the positivist position could be interpreted to remove any ascribing of legitimacy to the institutions that define law in order to accommodate the critique of the radical ideology position.