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).