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HISTORY, LAW AND FREEDOM: F. W. MAITLAND IN CONTEXT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2017

JAMES KIRBY*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, University of Cambridge E-mail: jek55@cam.ac.uk

Abstract

This article considers the intellectual development of the historian and jurist F. W. Maitland (1850–1906). Its focus is the development of his ideas about the importance of intermediate groups between the individual and the state. Maitland expounded these ideas in a dazzling series of late essays which became the wellspring of the tradition known as “political pluralism.” Yet, as this article shows, the same ideas also played a crucial role in Maitland's great works of legal and historical scholarship, including The History of English Law. If this is appreciated, then the liberal, Germanist and constitutionalist basis of Maitland's thought becomes clear. So too does Maitland's position as a “new” liberal thinker, committed to freedom and constitutionalism, but critical of individualism and parliamentary sovereignty. In short, it is only if Maitland's political essays are read alongside his works of history and law that either can really be understood.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Joshua Bennett, Duncan Kelly and this journal's anonymous readers for their criticism of this article in draft.

References

1 Brundage, Anthony and Cosgrove, Richard A., The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870–1960 (Stanford, 2007), 216Google Scholar; Elton, G. R., F. W. Maitland (London, 1985), 97103Google Scholar; Hudson, John, ed., The History of English Law: Centenary Essays on “Pollock and Maitland (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; Milsom, S. F. C., “Maitland,” Cambridge Law Journal 60/2 (2001), 265–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar (an address on the unveiling of a memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey); Southern, R. W., “The Letters of Frederic William Maitland,” History and Theory 6/1 (1967), 105111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 110.

2 The standard work is Runciman, David, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, F. W., The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1898)Google Scholar. I refer to this as Maitland's History of English Law because his coauthor made only minimal contributions—namely most of the introduction and the chapters on Anglo-Saxon and contract law: Fifoot, C. H. S., Frederic William Maitland: A Life (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 139–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The essays have been collected in Maitland, F. W., State, Trust and Corporation, ed. Runciman, David and Ryan, Magnus (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This comprises the essays “The Corporation Sole,” “The Crown as Corporation,” “The Unincorporate Body,” “Moral Personality and Legal Personality” and “Trust and Corporation,” as well as an excerpt from Maitland's “Introduction” to Gierke, Otto, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. Maitland (Cambridge, 1900)Google Scholar, vii–xlv. For the publication history of the essays, all of which date from 1900–5, see Mark Philpott, “Bibliography of the Writings of F. W. Maitland,” in Hudson, The History of English Law, 261–78.

5 Notable exceptions include Ernst Kantorowicz, H., The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1997; first published 1957), 45Google Scholar; George Garnett, “The Origins of the Crown,” in Hudson, The History of English Law, 171–214; Burrow, John, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1988), 141–2Google Scholar, 150–51; and Burrow, “‘The Village Community’ and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England,” in McKendrick, Neil, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), 255–84Google Scholar. So far as I am aware, no major study of pluralism draws on any of Maitland's works other than the essays now collected in State, Trust and Corporation. This is true for Laborde, Cécile, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–25 (Basingstoke, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicholls, David, The Pluralist State: The Political Ideas of J. N. Figgis and His Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Runciman, Pluralism.

6 Laski, Harold J., “The Sovereignty of the State” (1915), in Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, 1917), 125Google Scholar. This is identified as the first use of the term in Wright, Julian and Jones, H. S., “A Pluralist History of France?”, in Wright and Jones, eds., Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France (Basingstoke, 2012), 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 15.

7 For an introduction to Gierke's thought see Black, Antony, “Editor's Introduction,” in Otto von Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective: A Translation of Selections from “Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht” (“The German Law of Fellowship”), trans. Fischer, Mary (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, xiv–xxx.

8 Cf. the better-known idea of the “general will” and, more precisely, the idea that the state had a “moral personality.” For the origins of the latter see Holland, Ben, “Pufendorf's Theory of Facultative Sovereignty: On the Configuration of the Soul of the State,” History of Political Thought 33/3 (2012), 427–54Google Scholar, at 444.

9 Black, “Editor's Introduction,” xvi–xviii.

10 The best summary is Maitland's own: Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xviii–xx, xxx.

11 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 9–12.

12 For Savigny's fiction and concession theory see Heiman, George, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Otto, Associations and Law: The Classical and Early Christian Stages, trans. Heiman, George (Toronto, 1977), 168Google Scholar, at 28–30.

13 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 6, defined the Genossenschaft as a “body subject to German law and based on the free association of its members—that is, an organisation with an independent legal personality.”

14 John, Michael, Politics and the Law in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Origins of the Civil Code (Oxford, 1989), 97–9Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 114.

16 Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” 121–2.

17 The legal personality of trade unions was effectively recognized in Taff Vale Railway Company v. Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants [1901] AC 426. English trade unions, unlike their German counterparts, had sought to eschew legal personality: this was because with personality came liability, including for losses caused to employers by strike action. Maitland had made the legal argument for associations to have legal personality in a paper he read a few months before the decision: “Universitas potest delinquere” [1900], in Cambridge University Library (CUL) MS Add. 7000, ff. 153–67.

18 Partin, Malcolm O., Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and the Church: The Politics of Anti-clericalism, 1899–1905 (Durham, NC, 1969)Google Scholar chap. 2. For Maitland on the subject see Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” 66–7.

19 Nicholls, The Pluralist State, 65; Runciman, Pluralism, 64, 90.

20 See, generally, Fifoot, Frederic William Maitland.

21 Stein, Peter, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar; Collini, Stefan, Winch, Donald and Burrow, John, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 7.

22 Redlich, Josef, quoted in The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 2 vols., ed. Fifoot, C. H. S. and Zutshi, P. N. R. (Cambridge and London, 1965–95)Google Scholar, 2: 267 n. 6, original emphasis. References to Maitland's letters are to the letter number rather than the page number.

23 Cf. Maitland's approbation of J. S. Mill's historical views: Maitland, F. W., “A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge” (1875), in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, ed. Fisher, H. A. L., 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1911), 1: 1161Google Scholar, at 136.

24 Quoted in Schultz, Bart, Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2004), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Maitland to Dicey, A. V. (1896), in Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 2: 116Google Scholar.

26 Burrow, “The Village Community.”

27 Jones, H. S., Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6; Joshua Bennett, “Doctrine, Progress and History: British Religious Debate 1845–1914” (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2015), 242–61.

28 Maitland, F. W., “The Body Politic,” in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, 3: 285303Google Scholar.

29 Maitland, “Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality,” 79, 113–16 (Comte and Mill); Maitland, Ermengard, F. W. Maitland: A Child's-Eye View (London, 1957)Google Scholar, 10 (agnosticism).

30 Maitland to Lord Acton (20 Nov. 1896), in Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 2: 122.

31 Maitland, F. W., Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge, 1897), 356.Google Scholar

33 [Selina] Reynell, “William, Frederic Maitland: A Memoir by the Late Mrs Reynell,” Cambridge Law Journal 11/1 (1951), 6773Google Scholar, at 68–9.

34 Stein, Legal Evolution, 56–63.

35 Reynell, “Frederic William Maitland,” 72.

36 Note also that Maitland would have learned to call the corporation an “artificial person”—the language of fiction theory—when reading for the Bar, since this was the term used by standard legal authorities: Fifoot, C. H. S., Judge and Jurist in the Reign of Victoria (London, 1959)Google Scholar, 77–8.

37 Frederick Pollock and Maitland, F. W., The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 1st edn, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1895)Google Scholar, 1: 469. References to the History of English Law are to the second edition unless otherwise stated.

38 F. W. Maitland, “The Survival of Archaic Communities” (1893), in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, 2: 313–65, at 337.

39 Maitland to Pollock (18 Oct. 1890), Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 87.

40 For Germanism see Wieacker, Franz, A History of Private Law in Europe, with Particular Reference to Germany, trans. Weir, Tony (Oxford, 1995), 319–26Google Scholar; John, Politics and the Law, 23–5; Lewis, John D., The Genossenschaft-Theory of Otto von Gierke: A Study in Political Thought (Madison, 1935), 1719Google Scholar.

41 Dreyer, Michael, “German Roots of the Theory of Pluralism,” Constitutional Political Economy 4 (1993), 739CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 14–17; John, Politics and the Law, 98–9; Wieacker, History of Private Law, 324–5.

42 Wieacker, History of Private Law, 358–60.

43 Maine, H. S., Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London, 1911; first published 1861)Google Scholar, 72; Stein, Legal Evolution, 89–90.

44 Maitland, F. W., “Introduction,” in Bracton's Note Book, vol. 1, ed. Maitland (London, 1887)Google Scholar, 1–138, at 9; Maitland, “Introduction,” in Maitland, ed., Select Passages from the Works of Bracton and Azo (London, 1895)Google Scholar, ix–xxxvii, at xiv.

45 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Bracton's Note Book, 9; Maitland, F. W., English Law and the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1901)Google Scholar, 84. Cf. the Germanist idea of the reception of Roman law as a tragedy which had rent people's law from jurists’ law: Wieacker, History of Private Law, 324.

46 For an overview see Burrow, “The Village Community.”

47 Ibid., 271–3. See also Maine, Ancient Law, 111–12, 149–51.

48 For an overview of this “Romanist” view see Ashley, W. J., “The English Manor,” in Fustel de Coulanges, The Origin of Property in Land, trans. Ashley, Margaret (London, 1891)Google Scholar, vii–xliv.

49 Maitland summarized the debate in F. W. Maitland, “Tenures in Roussillon and Namur,” in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, 2: 251–65, at 261, and Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 340–42.

50 Heiman, “Introduction,” 20–22, 33–4.

51 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, vi, 221–3.

52 Maitland, “Tenures in Roussillon,” 263. See also Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 341–2, 344; and cf. Sidgwick's verdict on Gierke: journal entry 11 Jan. 1886 in A. S[idgwick] and E. M. S[idgwick], Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, 1906), 437.

53 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 342–4.

54 Maitland, “The Survival of Archaic Communities,” 363.

55 Spencer, Herbert, First Principles, 2nd edn (London, 1867), 396Google Scholar, original emphasis. Spencer is quoted here not as a special influence on Maitland, but rather as a leading theorist of evolution.

56 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 346–8. See also ibid., 150; and Vinogradoff, Paul, “Frederic William Maitland,” English Historical Review 22/2 (1907), 280–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 285, 289.

57 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 341, 356.

58 He similarly rejected Maine's claim that the family, not the individual, was the unit of primitive law: Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 2: 240–48, 255. See also Stephen D. White, “Maitland on Family and Kinship,” in Hudson, The History of English Law, 91–113, at 92–9.

59 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, vi.

60 Maitland, F. W., Township and Borough: Being the Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in the October Term of 1897 (Cambridge, 1898)Google Scholar.

61 For Maitland's work at this time see Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 188, 194, 2: 122, 142.

62 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: v. Compare also (e.g.) the following revisions: ibid., 1st edn, 1: 469, with 2nd edn, 1: 486; 1st edn, 1: 619, with 2nd edn, 1: 630.

63 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 486 n. 1. Cf. ibid., 636 n. 1.

64 Brunner, Heinrich, “Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law,” Political Science Quarterly 11/3 (1896), 534–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 539. That this was the trigger for his return to Gierke is suggested by Maitland's singling out of Brunner as a critic in the preface to the second edition: Maitland, History of English Law, 1: v.

65 See, for example: Pirenne, Henri, “L'origine des constitutions urbaines au moyen âge,” Revue historique 53/1 (1893), 5283Google Scholar, 57/2 (1895), 293–327; Weber, Max, “The City” (“Die Stadt”), in Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, 3 vols. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, 3: 1212–1372; Sombart, Werner, Der Bourgeois: zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Munich, 1913)Google Scholar. For a contemporary literature review see Ashley, W. J., “The Beginnings of Town Life in the Middle Ages,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 10/4 (1896), 359406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 634.

67 Maitland, Township and Borough, vi; Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 2: 142. For Gierke on the medieval town see Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 32–71, esp. 33.

68 Maitland, Township and Borough, 80, 84–5. A more detailed account is given in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 683–7, which places special emphasis on the importance of the borough's revenues from market tolls (and hence commercial life) in its attainment of personality.

69 Maitland, Township and Borough, 23.

70 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 687. For the vindication of realism more generally see Maitland, Township and Borough, 17 n. 2, 19–20.

71 Maitland, Township and Borough, 33.

72 Maine, Ancient Law, 149–51, original emphasis.

73 Ibid., 111–12, original emphasis.

74 Maitland, Township and Borough, 23, 27.

75 Ibid., 15. Cf. Gierke's championing of modern group life: Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 168–229; John, Politics and the Law, 109–10.

76 Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” 69.

77 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 636. Cf. Maitland, Township and Borough, 13.

78 Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 251 (glycosuria); Fifoot, Frederic William Maitland, 181–3.

79 Fifoot, Frederic William Maitland, 188–90; Fisher, H. A. L., Frederick [sic] William Maitland: A Biographical Sketch (Cambridge, 1910), 112Google Scholar.

80 Fifoot, Frederic William Maitland, 215, 268–70.

81 Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 222, 234, 2: 164, 185.

82 CUL MS Add. 6999 is a large collection of fragments on corporate personality, some of which were apparently given as lectures in 1899. The paper “Universitas potest delinquere” (see n. 17 above) also concerns group personality. The manuscript works focus on the legal rather than the political side of the question.

83 See, e.g., Maitland, F. W., Roman Canon Law in the Church of England: Six Essays (London, 1898), 48Google Scholar, 94, 101–5; Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 14.

84 Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” 66–7. Cf. Gierke, Political Theories, 98–100.

85 See Gierke, Political Theories, 4–5.

86 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 502–3; Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xix.

87 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 105–6.

88 Maitland, “The Corporation Sole,” 10, 28–30; Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” 32.

89 Maitland, “The Corporation Sole,” 11–12.

90 Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” 35–6.

91 This point is brought out more strongly in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 506–7, 511–12.

92 This is a simplified version of Maitland's definition in Maitland, F. W., Equity; Also The Forms of Action at Common Law. Two Courses of Lectures, ed. Chaytor, A. H. and Whittaker, W. J. (Cambridge, 1909), 44Google Scholar.

93 See Maitland's classic definition: Equity, 1, 17–19.

94 Posthumously published as Maitland, Equity.

95 Maitland, Township and Borough, 16.

96 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xxix–xxxviii. “Trust and Corporation” was first published in Josef Redlich's translation as “Trust und Korporation,” Zeitschrift für das Privat- und öffentliche Recht der Gegenwart 32/1 (1905), 1–76. “The Unincorporate Body” (published posthumously) covers some of the same ground.

97 Maitland, “The Unincorporate Body,” 53. The “very learned German historian” quoted here is identified as Gierke in Maitland, Equity, 23, but the remark is not found in any of Gierke's extant letters to Maitland: CUL MS Add. 7006 nos. 66, 72; 7007 no. 260; 7008 no. 338.

98 Maitland, “The Unincorporate Body,” 52.

99 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xxxiii; “Trust and Corporation,” 79–82, 85–6.

100 Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” 98–104.

101 Ibid. 104–18.

102 Ibid. 102–3

103 Ibid. 106–10.

104 Maitland, “The Unincorporate Body,” 59.

105 For experiments in living see Mill, J. S., “On Liberty,” in Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar (chap. 4), 1–128, at 89.

106 For this conception see Burrow, John, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim; Saunders, Robert, “Parliament and People: The British Constitution in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern European History 6/1 (2008), 7287CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I use the term “English constitutionalism” rather than Burrow's “Whig history” since this is a subject of far wider significance than the latter term might suggest: see Kirby, James, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 2016), 106–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107 Stubbs, William, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, Library edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1880)Google Scholar, 1: 2–12. Cf. Hutton, W. H., Letters of William Stubbs (London, 1904), 159Google Scholar (“pliant tool”); Kirby, Historians and the Church of England, 85–102.

108 For Maitland's constitutionalism see Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: xxxiv, 20–21, 24, 171–3, 2: 673–4; Maitland, “History of English Law” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1902), in Selected Historical Essays of F. W. Maitland, ed. H. M. Cam (Cambridge, 1957), 97–121, at 97–8, 112–13.

109 For an overview see Maitland, “History of English Law,” 104, 108.

110 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 27.

111 Note that Maitland's well-known work on constitutional history was merely a hurriedly written course of lectures published posthumously against his wishes: Maitland, F. W., The Constitutional History of England: A Course of Lectures, ed. Fisher, H. A. L. (Cambridge, 1908)Google Scholar, v.

112 F. W. Maitland, “Introduction to Memoranda de Parliamento, 1305” (1893), in Selected Historical Essays of F. W. Maitland, 52–96, at 53, 91–4. The explosive force of this work was only appreciated from 1910 onwards: H. M. Cam, “Introduction,” in ibid., ix–xxix, at xv–xvii.

113 F. W. Maitland, “The Shallows and Silences of Real Life” (1888), in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 467–79, at 468.

114 Maitland, “Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality,” 83 n. 2.

115 Austin, John, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. Rumble, Wilfrid E. (Cambridge, 1995; first published 1832), 21, 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 Maine, Ancient Law, 6; Feaver, George, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine 1822–1888 (London, 1969)Google Scholar, 27, 156–8.

117 Maitland, Constitutional History, 101–2.

118 See n. 83 above.

119 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xliii.

120 Ibid.; “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” 66. The pretension to universality in Austin's theory of sovereignty meant that he too was classed by Maitland (following the German historical school's critique of legal positivism) as an obsolete exponent of natural law (Naturrecht): Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xliii–xliv; Maitland, “History of English Law,” 118.

121 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, x.

122 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1: 688. Cf. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 348–9, 353–4.

123 Maitland, “English Law, 1307–1600” (1894), in Selected Historical Essays of F. W. Maitland, 122–34, at 125.

124 Stubbs, Constitutional History, 1: 282–3, 504, 611–12; Dicey, A. V., Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London, 1885), 167–8.Google Scholar

125 Maitland, Township and Borough, 94–5; “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xxxiv.

126 The cumbersome phrase “political theory and public law” must stand in for what Maitland wished he could call “publicistic doctrine,” i.e. the publicistischen Lehren which were the subject of the section of Gierke that he translated: Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, viii, xliii.

127 Ibid., xliii.

128 Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” 33, 38–41. Cf. Jones, H. S., The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic (Cambridge, 1993), 6–16.Google Scholar

129 Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” 66.

130 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, x, xxxv, xliii.

131 Ibid., xliii.

132 Ibid., xxxv–xxxvii (East India Company and Locke); Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” 127 (Cuba).

133 Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” 124, 126–7. For the quasi-trusteeship of borough corporations at this time see Loughlin, Martin, Legality and Locality: The Role of Law in Central–Local Government Relations (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 205–12.

134 Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” 126. Contrast the dismissive treatment of Maitland's metaphorical trust by David Runciman and Magnus Ryan: “Editors’ Introduction,” in Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, ix–xxix, at xxiii.

135 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xliii.

136 For the Rechtsstaat see John, Politics and the Law, 4–5, 89, 243–4; and for Gierke's conception in particular see Heiman, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Associations and Law, 42–6, 51–3.

137 Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, paperback edn (Oxford, 1993), 302–4Google Scholar.

138 Maitland was a moderate Liberal in politics. He was for many years (like his mentor Sidgwick) a Liberal Unionist, but as a supporter of free trade he moved back towards the Liberal Party proper when the Unionists swung towards protectionism (c.1903): Letters of Frederic William Maitland, 1: 95, 370, 383, 423. It should be noted here that academic Liberal Unionism came in many varieties, not all of which—as the case of Maitland shows—were based on a Diceyan devotion to parliamentary sovereignty: cf. Jones, Emily, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History (Oxford, 2017), 135–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139 Spencer believed in a progress from “militancy” to “industrialism,” i.e. from the state to contract, comparable to Maine's from status to contract: Jones, H. S., Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke, 2000), 7980Google Scholar. For the place of contract in European social theory see Jones, French State in Question, 150–55 (including a discussion of Maitland, 152–3).

140 Black, “Editor's Introduction,” xviii.

141 Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, ix, xi, xli.

142 Bosanquet, Bernard, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1958)Google Scholar, xxvii, xxix; Runciman, Pluralism, 79, 173–5.

143 Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Civil Society, trans. Harris, Jose and Hollis, Margaret (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 17–19. Tönnies linked Gesellschaft with Roman law: ibid. 218.

144 Fournier, Marcel, Émile Durkheim: A Biography, trans. Macey, David (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar, 354–8. See also Durkheim, Émile, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. Brookfield, Cornelia (London, 1992), 106Google Scholar; Jones, French State in Question, 154–6.

145 Quoted in Harris, Jose, “English Ideas about Community: Another Case of ‘Made in Germany’?”, in Muhs, Rudolf, Paulmann, Johannes and Steinmetz, Willibald, eds., Aneignung und Abwehr: Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim, 1998), 143–58Google Scholar, at 157. Cf. Jones, French State in Question, 177, which rightly notes that Maitland, like Tocqueville, admired associational life for its free, diverse and progressive qualities.

146 Ghosh, Peter, Max Weber and “The Protestant Ethic”: Twin Histories (Oxford, 2014), 339–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

147 Ho Kim, Sung, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge, 2004), 76–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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149 Max Weber, “Economy and Law” (“The Sociology of Law”), in Weber, Economy and Society, 3: 641–900, at 717. He noted, at 720–21, citing Maitland, that the Genossenschaft as such had no existence in England. It seems from this and a later reference (722–3) that he had read “Trust und Korporation” (see above, n. 96).

150 Ghosh, Max Weber, 373–5. Weber, “The City,” 1222, 1224, discussed Maitland's “fortification theory” of borough origins, for which, see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 192–3, 216–19.

151 Ghosh, Max Weber, 361–2.

152 Stapleton, Julia, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994), 32–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L. Carpenter, P., G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 1973), 1518Google Scholar; Newman, Michael, Harold Laski: A Political Biography (Basingstoke, 1993), 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 23, 27. Figgis had assisted with the translation of Gierke: Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, xlv n. 5.

153 Wormald, Patrick, “Frederic William Maitland and the Earliest English Law,” Law and History Review 16/1 (1998), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 25.

154 Burrow, “‘The Village Community’,” 276.