The institutional world of law1 can be perceived either from an internal or external perspective. 2 The internal perspective is the one adopted by lawyers, who-to use Artur Kozak’s expression-are not only legal ‘experts’, but also legal ‘believers’, in the sense that they treat legal concepts and notions as if they really existed. 3 A legal believer, attached to the internal point of view of the institutional world of law, is unable to notice the law’s idxeological character. 4 As Althusser famously put it, if we are in ideology, DOI: 10.1515/wrlae-2015-0021* Ph. D. in law (University of Amsterdam); external fellow at the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law (CSECL), University of Amsterdam. All views expressed in this paper are personal views of the author and do not represent the position of any institution. 1 I use the notion of an ‘institutional world’following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann,