"...although law places an important (positive and negative) role in organizing repression, its efficacy is just as great in the devices of creating consent. It materializes the dominant ideology that enters into these devices, even though it does not exhaust the reasons for consent. Through its discursiveness and characteristic texture, law-regulation obscures the politico-economic realities, tolerating structural lacunae and transposing these realities to the political arena by means of a particular mechanism of concealment-inversion...The dominated classes encounter law not only as an occlusive barrier, but also as the reality which assigns the place they must occupy. This place, which is the point of their insertion into the politico-social system, carries with it certain rights as well as duties-obligations, and its investment by the imagination has a real impact on social agents."
and Friedrich Engels:
"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it "the reality of the ethical idea," "the image and reality of reason," as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is the product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of "order"; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state."