Works
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) (See Wikisource), 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 1886 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 (clxii. 181) 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.
Read more about this topic: Henry James Sumner Maine
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