RARE \"Ancient Law\" Henry James Sumner Maine Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

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RARE \"Ancient Law\" Henry James Sumner Maine Signed 3X5 Card:
$139.99

Up for sale a RARE! "Ancient Law" Henry James Sumner Maine Signed 3X5 Card dated 1880. 

ES-6397E

Sir

Henry James Sumner Maine, KCSI (15 August 1822 – 3 February 1888), was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his

book Ancient Law that

law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the

thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status to

traditional groups, while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as

autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with

whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the

forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and sociology of law. Maine was the son of Dr. James Maine,

of Kelso, Roxburghshire. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, where a

boarding house was named after him in 1902. From there he went up to Pembroke College,

Cambridge, in 1840. At Cambridge, he was noted as a classical

scholar and also won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for

poetry in 1842.He won a Craven scholarship and graduated as

senior classic in 1844, being also senior chancellor's medallist in classics. He

was a Cambridge Apostle. Shortly

afterwards, he accepted a tutorship at Trinity Hall. In 1847, he

was appointed Regius

Professor of Civil Law, and he was called to the bar three

years later; he held this chair till 1854. Meanwhile, in 1852 he had become one

of the readers appointed by the Inns of Court. The post of legal member of council in India was

offered to Maine in 1861; he declined it once, on grounds of health. The

following year Maine was persuaded to accept, and it turned out that India

suited him much better than Cambridge or London. He was asked to prolong his

services beyond the regular term of five years, and he returned to England in

1869. The subjects on which it was Maine's duty to advise the government of

India were as much political as legal. They ranged from such problems as the

land settlement of the Punjab, or the introduction of civil marriage to

provide for the needs of unorthodox Hindus,

to the question of how far the study of Persian should be required or encouraged among European

civil servants. Plans of codification were prepared, and largely shaped, under

Maine's direction, which were implemented by his successors, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Dr Whitley Stokes. Maine

became a member of the secretary of state's council in 1871 and remained so for

the rest of his life. In the same year he was gazetted a K.C.S.I. In 1869, Maine

was appointed to the chair of historical and comparative jurisprudence newly

founded in the University of Oxford by Corpus Christi College. Residence at Oxford was not required, and the

election amounted to an invitation to the new professor to resume and continue

in his own way the work he had begun in Ancient Law. In 1877, the

mastership of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,

where Maine had formerly been tutor, became vacant. There were two strong

candidates whose claims were so nearly equal that it was difficult to elect

either; the difficulty was solved by a unanimous invitation to Maine to accept

the post. His acceptance entailed the resignation of the Oxford chair, though

not continuous residence at Cambridge. Ten years later, he was elected to

succeed Sir of International Law at Cambridge. Maine's health,

which had never been strong, gave way towards the end of 1887. He went to the

Riviera under medical advice, and died at Cannes, France, on 3 February 1888. He left a wife, Jane, and

two sons, of whom the elder died soon afterwards. An oil portrait of Jane

remains in the possession of their descendants. Maine wrote journalism in 1851

for the Morning Chronicle,

edited by John Douglas Cook. With

Cook and others, in 1855, he then founded and edited the Saturday Review,

writing for it to 1861. Like his close friend James Fitzjames Stephen,

he enjoyed occasional article-writing, and never quite abandoned it. Maine

contributed to the Cambridge Essays an essay on Roman law and

legal education, republished in the later editions of Village

Communities. Lectures delivered by Maine for the Inns of Court were the

groundwork of Ancient Law (1861),

the book by which his reputation was made at one stroke. Its object, as stated

in the preface, was "to indicate some of the earliest ideas of mankind, as

they are reflected in ancient law, and to point out the relation of those ideas

to modern thought." He published the substance of his Oxford

lectures: Village Communities in the East and the West (1871); Early

History of Institutions (1875); Early Law and Custom (1883).

In all these works, the phenomena of societies in an archaic stage are brought into

line to illustrate the process of development in legal and political ideas

(see freedom of contract). As

vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta,

Maine commented on the results produced by the contact of Eastern and Western

thought. Three of these addresses were published, wholly or in part, in the

later editions of Village Communities; the substance of others is

in the Rede lecture of 1875,

in the same volume. An essay on India was his contribution to the composite

work entitled The Reign of Queen Victoria (editor Thomas Humphry Ward,

1887).

His brief work in international law is represented by the posthumous

volume International Law (1888). Maine had published in 1885

his one work of speculative politics, a volume of essays on Popular

Government, designed to show that democracy is not in itself more stable

than any other form of government and that there is no necessary connexion

between democracy and progress. In 1886, there appeared in the Quarterly

Review an article on the posthumous work of J. F. McLennan, edited and completed by his brother, entitled

"The Patriarchal Theory".The article, though unsigned by the rule of

the Quarterly at the time, was Maine's reply to the McLennan

brothers' attack on the historical reconstruction of the Indo-European family

system put forward in Ancient Law and supplemented in Early

Law and Custom. Maine charged McLennan in his theory of primitive society

with neglecting and misunderstanding of the Indo-European evidence. A summary

of Maine's writings was in Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's

memoir. 

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