Henry Maine
In the prefatory remarks to his collection of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, Cliffe Leslie famously pronounced that “the English economist of the future must study in the schools of both Mr.
Stubbs and Sir Henry Maine, as well as in that of Mr. Mill” (1879: vii). While the work of Stubbs remained a closed book to most outside of Oxford, two books of Maine had, already by the end of the 1870s, exerted a profound impact upon English students of economics: Ancient Law (1861) and Village Communities in the East and West (1871). The first book outlined a history of jurisprudence from primitive times, proposing the central thesis that progress had entailed a movement in the conception - and hence legal reality - of social relations, from primitive ideas of status as determined by rules of kinship through to modern ideas of individuals freely contracting with one another. The second book proposed a model of institutional development, from the primitive social form of the village community through to the various institutions of modern commercial society. In distinctive ways, these two books stand behind much of the methodological criticism and the substantive historical thought of English students of economics in the 1870s.Cliffe Leslie made Maine’s Ancient Law a foundational text in his methodological revolt against orthodox deductive political economy. In his seminal essay of 1870, “The political economy of Adam Smith”, he argued that Smith had originated two economic “schools one deductive the other inductive”. The latter, the historical school, had hitherto been eclipsed by the former. However, the recent work of Henry Maine, Cliffe Leslie argued, had discredited the deductive methodology that the orthodox school had inherited from Smith. The orthodox deductive methodology, so Cliffe Leslie claimed, rested upon ideas of “Nature” and “Natural Law” that Maine had recently shown to be derived from the jurisprudential thinking of Roman Stoicism, resting upon a fallacious conflation of natural and moral orders (Cliffe Leslie 1870: 552).
By way of the strange survival of natural law philosophy into the modern age, an ancient - and otherwise long- superseded - framing of particular social relationships and states of society as “natural” had come to be embedded at the heart of eighteenth-century political economy. For Cliffe Leslie in 1870 the lesson to be derived from Ancient Law was that the entire deductive tradition of political economy must be discarded: the future belonged to the historical school.Marshall engaged with the relevant arguments of Maine, ultimately arriving at different conclusions to Cliffe Leslie. In his early manuscripts we find notes on both Cliffe Leslie’s 1870s paper (Marshall 2010: M 4/19, f.6) and Maine’s discussion in Ancient Law of the modern history of the ancient idea of the “Law of Nature” (unpublished manuscript: M 4/13, f.20). The fruit of this engagement is made clear when we turn to the Principles of Economics, which was first published in 1890, nearly two decades later. Here we find Marshall echoing Maine as he directed Cliffe Leslie’s arguments on to the Physiocrats who, Marshall complains, placed at the heart of their thought the idea of “the Law of Nature which had been developed by the Stoic lawyers of the later Roman Empire”, with the inevitable result that they confused “the laws of economic science and the ethical precepts of conformity to nature” - a confusion, Marshall adds, that Adam Smith “had not quite got rid of” (Marshall 1890 [1961] I: 756, n. 2). This theme is developed further in the introduction to the theory of distribution in (what became) book VI of the Principles, where Smith and Ricardo are criticised for adopting the physiocratic terminology of natural law and, thereby, suggesting that a state of society in which wages barely cover the necessaries of life is in some way natural (Marshall 1890 [1961] I: 507-8). These early notes, and later discussions in the Principles, reveal that Marshall was in agreement with Cliffe Leslie’s view that Maine’s Ancient Law shed light upon the problematic way in which ancient natural law philosophy had become entwined in the early history of modern economic theory.
However, what the discussions in the Principles also illustrate is that Marshall drew from this historicist criticism the lesson that the traditional theory must be revised, or at least restated, rather than discarded.This is not the place to enter into a general discussion of the role of historicism in Marshall’s methodological and theoretical innovations (on this, see Cook 2009: chs 6-8). It can certainly be argued that Marshall developed a revised deductivism, in which theory was applied in a local rather than general manner, and in which appreciation of the particularities of local context became extremely important; and, indeed, this is very much the image of Marshall that emerges from the most recent scholarship (see, especially, Raffaelli et al. 2006) and which has begun to replace the older portrait of Marshall as the founder of a new “neoclassical” orthodoxy. However, what matters to us here is, in the first place, the evident flaw in any picture of an English Methodenstreit in which historical economists do battle with intransient deductivist theorists under the leadership of Marshall. At the very least, the reality was more complicated; and a case could clearly be made for characterising later disputes as taking place within some general historicist consensus. However, this is not all. It is certainly possible to quibble with the value of the particular theoretical revisions that Marshall made to orthodoxy in light of Maine’s historicism. But by 1890 Cliffe Leslie’s more radical alternative of completely jettisoning theory in favour of a purely inductive science had lost credibility. To see how this came about and what it meant we need to turn to the reception of Maine’s Village Communities.
Maine’s Village Communities built upon the work of the German Historical School of law, most notably G.L. von Maurer’s Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark (1854). Earlier in the century the great historical jurist, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, aided by the famous historian of ancient Rome, Barthold Niebuhr, had pioneered an account of the development of private property from the nomadic tribe to the ancient city, in which some of the land in ancient Rome (the ager publicus) was shown to have been publicly owned but possessed and farmed by private persons.
In the mid-century von Maurer had described the early Germanic village or mark community as also containing mixed forms of property ownership. Maine’s first innovation was to recognise von Maurer’s early Germanic mark community in the village community of nineteenth-century India. His second innovation was to build upon the genealogical connections established by nineteenth-century comparative philology and bring Indian, ancient Roman, and Germanic (including English) social forms together within a single account of so-called Aryan social evolution. The starting-point of this account was the nomadic tribe, in which all property was held in common and individual identity entirely defined in terms of kinship relations within the tribe. The basic idea was that, when a tribe bound together by ties of kinship and holding its land in common settled down to till the soil, two changes commenced: the gradual transformation of the social bond - from ties of kinship to ties based on shared territory (from being a Frank to being a citizen of France, as it were); and the gradual transformation of common into private property.Maine’s model of social progress was developed by several students of history in the 1870s. Perhaps the most important of such studies was E.A. Freeman’s Comparative Politics (1873), which was carefully read by Marshall. Essentially, Freeman used Maine’s model in order to explain the difference between ancient and modern societies as the products of two distinct paths of development out of an original primitive Aryan village community: in the ancient city-state citizenship remained bound up with kinship and blood ties and property was not wholly liberated from its initial communal state; the Germanic village community, by contrast, had undergone a more far-reaching transformation, through feudalism, and ultimately generating (by a process of amalgamation) the modern nations of Europe. Specifically, economic adaptations of Maine’s model in this period can be found in several of Cliffe Leslie’s essays of the 1870s, Marshall’s various historical writings of the same decade, and the first book of William Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce, which was first published in 1882.
Cunningham’s rendering of early English history is worth reviewing, not least because just about every element of it had been rejected by 1914. Cunningham begins with the English tribes prior to their invasion of (what would become) England. Like “other Aryan tribes”, the English are said to have but recently migrated out of Asia and, according to the accounts of the German tribes given by Caesar and Tacitus, to be only just emerging from a state of nomadic pastoralism. Cunningham’s first book tells the story of how these English tribes settled down and gradually established private ownership of the land together with that system of inherited and forced contracts known as feudalism. To give but one example: a key early step in this organic development occurs when the extensive occasional agriculture of nomads gives way to the intensive cultivation of a village community. At this point an incentive arises to bestow care and forethought on that plot of arable land that is repeatedly cultivated, and Cunningham suggests that at this point the communal tillage of the village is parcelled out into private holdings. That his story is deduced from a general model rather than inferred from local evidence is indicated by his comment at this point in his chapter that it is “impossible to decide with certainty” whether this development had occurred before or after the English settled in England (Cunningham 1882 [1890]: 41-2).
By the time that Cunningham brought out a second edition of The Growth of English Industry, in 1890, this first book of his volume appeared out of date and untenable. Such, at any rate, was the opinion expressed by the economic historian W.J. Ashley (1891: 154), who in a review of Cunningham’s second edition observed that when his first edition had appeared in 1882 “English historical students were still under the spell of Maurer and Nasse and Maine: they all believed devoutly in the primitive Teutonic freeman and the mark, or free village community.
Since then, however, Mr. Seebohm has arisen”. Ashley was referring to Frederic Seebohm’s English Village Community (1883), which did for ploughed fields what others in the 1880s were doing for the skulls of British ploughmen. Seebohm’s basic claim was that “the continuity between the Roman and English system of land management was not really broken” by the Anglo- Saxon conquest (1883 [1905]: 418). Such claims fitted into a growing conviction among archaeologists and anthropologists that the evidence of skull types suggested a general continuity of population before and after the English invasion. In place of the older story of organic English social development together with folk migration and genocidal conquest of parts of the British Isles, a new historical picture was emerging. According to the new wisdom, Anglo-Saxon warriors simply took over existing Romano-British institutions and turned the British population into serfs. From this new historiographical perspective, as Ashley tartly put it, Cunningham needed to rewrite the first part of his book (Ashley 1891: 155).The various responses to the work of Seebohm (and others) reveal the intellectual bankruptcy of English historical economics in the 1890s. Seebohm’s arguments were bound up with a model of invasion and subsequent overlordship that was fundamentally incompatible with Maine’s model of folk migration and organic social development. That a village community contains within itself a seed of development that may one day generate a medieval town is quite irrelevant if that village community is invaded by a band of warriors who enslave the inhabitants and force them to work as agricultural serfs. Marshall’s response was to stick to his original plan of introducing his Principles with a long introductory historical discussion, but to remove the account of the evolution of village community into a modern nation state that had once been its kernel. The result was the emasculation of Marshall’s historical thought (Cook 2013). Cunningham, as we have seen, resolutely refused to acknowledge any crisis and stuck with his original account through his second - and subsequent - editions; thereby attracting Ashley’s rebuke and appearing ever more outdated as the years went by. Ashley’s response was to discard the entire pre-feudal part of the story: as he put it in his Introduction to English Economic History and Theory (1888: 13), an economic history of England must begin with the eleventh century, at which date England was known to be covered by feudal manors, “and we cannot begin earlier because it is by no means agreed how that condition of things came about”. However, one cannot amputate the initial stages of an organic evolutionary model and continue to maintain that the later stages still follow the earlier established pattern. By the early 1890s Ashley had repudiated Cliffe Leslie’s ambition to transform economics into a historical discipline and henceforth directed his energy rather to the establishment of economic history as a separate discipline (Koot 1988: 110).
It is from this perspective that we should view the various spats and skirmishes of the 1890s and beyond. Cunningham is no doubt the historical actor most responsible for generating the misleading impression that the arguments of these years amounted to an English Methodenstreit. What was needed in the wake of the challenge to Maine’s organic model was a revised or even new model of social development. Cunningham in this period went on the offensive, but signally failed to engage with the real issues. In the 1890 edition of his Growth of English Industry he actually intensified his reliance upon Maine’s model, arguing that the role of custom identified by Maine as a hallmark of the primitive (but not the modern) world was also fundamental in the modern world. Then, in the pages of the Economic Journal of 1892, he launched his infamous attack upon Marshall’s historical introduction to the Principles, published under the title “The perversion of economic history”. Thus Cunningham’s response to the intellectual crisis faced by traditional English historicism was vociferous, but singularly lacking in theoretical acumen. He refused to acknowledge (other than implicitly) that Maine’s historical model was a theoretical model, and his ever-louder protestations of the virtues of induc- tivism simply betray an inability to come to grips with the real challenges facing that model. Perhaps the most notable element of this whole story is that later historians, on encountering Cunningham’s wasteland of futile gesture and empty rhetoric, declared it a Methodenstreit.