Henry James Sumner Maine

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822 to 1888) was an English legal historian and historical anthropologist, and a leading Victorian critic of democracy. Educated at Christ's Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he became regius professor of civil law at Cambridge in 1847, later served as a legal member of the Council in India and as vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta, and held the corpus chair of jurisprudence at Oxford before becoming master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His first book, Ancient Law (1861), made his name. He argued that the legal relationships of early societies rested on long-established custom and the patriarchal family, and that societies moved in their legal relations from status to contract as common ownership gave way to private ownership. Critics have read him both as an opponent of mass democracy and as an innovator in anthropology and comparative history, and he himself rejected the claim that every society passes through the same series of changes. His other major works include Village Communities, Early History of Institutions and Popular Government.