Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-07T02:34:25.001Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Henry Maine and mid-Victorian ideas of progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2009

Alan Diamond
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

The most celebrated and influential of Henry Maine's ideas, adumbrated and repeated elsewhere, received its classic formulation in the two concluding paragraphs of Chapter 5 of Ancient Law. ‘The movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation in its place. The Individual is steadily substituted for the Family, as the unit of which civil laws take account…’ (AL: 168). Epitomized in the concept of contract we have ‘a phase of social order in which all these relations [of persons] arise from the free agreement of Individuals’ (169). The chapter concludes with Maine's best-known phrase to express ‘the law of progress thus indicated’: using the term ‘Status’ to exclude powers and privileges which are even remotely the result of agreement, ‘we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract’ (170).

Unquestionably Maine's most famous dictum, it is also arguably one of his more ambiguous ones. The economy of epigram requires a compression of logic. Attention has rightly been drawn by Professor Feaver, in his authoritative study of Maine, to the significance of ‘has hitherto’, to deny that the tendencies to collectivism later in the century which Maine, like many of his contemporaries, so deplored, contradicted his most famous generalization in the sense that the latter appeared to contain an unfulfilled prediction (Feaver, 1969: 55).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine
A Centennial Reappraisal
, pp. 55 - 69
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×