Best known as a history of progress, Ancient Law is the enduring work of the 19th-century legal historian Henry Sumner Maine. Even those who have never read Ancient Law may find Maine's famous phrase "from status to contract" familiar. His narrative spans the ancient world, in which individuals were tightly bound by status to traditional groups, and the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous beings, free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Maine's dichotomy between status-based societies and contract-based societies is a variation on a theme that has absorbed the social sciences for a century: the distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). This theme has been elaborated upon by such eminent scholars as Tönnies, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Parsons. Along with many lesser scholars, they have considered what we gained and what we lost when we left behind a social world held together by communal, primordial bonds, and adopted one based upon impersonal temporary agreements among individuals. Maine wrote Ancient Law to increase knowledge about the internal mechanics of developing societies. He felt a key objective was better understanding of how law develops over time. Failure to understand temporal processes in relation to legal development, he argues, leads to the creation of false dichotomies. The most important of these is the alleged division between the ancient and the modern, which Maine described as an "imaginary barrier" at which modern scholars feel they must stop and go no further. Maine's desire to breach this barrier led him to present this complex and richly nuanced analysis of legal evolution. This book will be of interest to historians, political philosophers, and those interested in the development of law.

Ancient Law

MAINE, SIR HENRY SUMNER

Scala, Dante J.

Legal History

Routledge

Popular Government

Sir Henry Sumner Maine was one of the great intellects of the Victorian era. In Popular Government he examines the political institutions of men. He saw that popular governments, unless they are founded upon and consonant with the evolutionary development of a people, will crumble from their own excesses. George W. Carey is Professor of Government at Georgetown University and editor of the Political Science Reviewer.

POPULAR GOVERNMENT

Liberty Fund, Inc.

Originally published in 1883. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Dissertations On Early Law and Custom: Chiefly Selected From Lectures Delivered At Oxford (1883)

Foreign & International Law

Cornell University Library

Dissertations On Early Law and Custom: -1891

Lectures On the Early History of Institutions: -1878

Village-Communities in the East and West: Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford (1871)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Originally published in 1883. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Dissertations on Early Law and Custom: Chiefly Selected From Lectures Delivered at Oxford (1883 )

Originally published in 1906. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Ancient Law, Its Connection With the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas [1906]

History

Ancient Civilizations

Originally published in 1864. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society , and Its Relation to Modern Ideas [1864]

Originally published in 1875. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Lectures on the Early History of Institutions [1875]

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