Secrets of the Modern World: F.W. Maitland

About this book

It was in the 1870s that, in his attempt to win a Trinity College Fellowship at Cambridge, a young scholar called Frederic William (F.W.) Maitland submitted a dissertation entitled ‘A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge’. He published it at his own expense when he was twenty-five. In this long and brilliant work Maitland summarized and analyzed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the two hundred years before his own work, including the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, Mill and others. The central theme is the way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings. Having sketched out the philosophical problems in this early work, I believe that his later life’s work on English historical records allowed him to re-examine how the modern liberty had emerged. Maitland tried to show that from very early on there had been a peculiar liberty of the individual in England, particularly in relation to property and power. In opposition to most of his contemporaries, including Sir Henry Maine, he disliked the idea of the movement of all societies from Community (Status) to Association (Contract). He saw a basic liberty and individualism in England from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. Thus freedom and liberty of action, he argued, are indeed key features of the curious English structure which, in his day, was spreading all over the world. Yet if the individual is not embedded in the wider group in the usual ways, what about the second great unifying force, hierarchy? Basically Maitland takes up Tocqueville’s central theme, namely the nature and implications of equality and inequality. What he shows is that the nature of English law and social structure is such, and has always been such, that there are few, if any, inherited differences based on birth. All differences, whether of social rank, of parental power or of gender are the result of contract, or as modern sociologists might say, of achievement rather than ascription. Thus he presents a picture of a competitive and fluid social structure as far back as the records take us. All this, he is aware, is very unusual and very important.