Introduction
The modern international community is a fluid and dynamic network of ties, each with its own set of demands. Behind the fulfillment of societal requirements lies a complicated structure of different sorts of organizations. With the establishment of the contemporary worldview, the term “organization” was altered, taking into consideration the viewpoint of the scientist who analyzed it. There are now several classifications and operational models. The evolutionary theories of organization and law developed by Henry Maine and Lewis H. Morgan share a common understanding of these terms.
Henry Maine
The British lawyer and historian Henry Maine, who pioneered the field of legal anthropology, is often regarded as its founder. He was allowed to practice law in 1847 and taught at the University of Cambridge at the same time (Hadjigeorgiou, 2020). While teaching at Cambridge, he wrote his classic book “Ancient Law”, the first study of the phenomenon of law since the Neolithic Revolution, which began in a classless society (Moore, 2005). The strong impulse that led to the creation of the first little particles of what, millennia later, would comprise the law was the shift from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life, as well as the agricultural revolution.
Lewis Henry Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan is credited with developing contemporary theories concerning the evolution of the human family. Kinship Systems and the Properties of the Human Family, Morgan’s famous work, comprised both his firsthand observations of Indians and literary material (Feeley-Harnik, 2021). Morgan examined Native American kinship language and found it was a relic of earlier forms of marriage.
Morgan claims that when explaining kinship in prominent families, humans employ two simplification schemes. One descriptive system identifies complicated kinship through the most basic kinship relationships: wife’s mother, sister’s husband’s brother (Moore, 2005). Morgan also described another system as classificatory, in which the same name is used to refer to multiple relatives with the same social role.
Comparison
In his publications, Maine extensively used the comparative-historical method, aiming to create a holistic picture of the history of law and early social institutions among Indo-European peoples by studying Hindu, ancient Roman, Germanic, ancient Irish, and Slavic law (Ledwinka, 2020). Morgan, in turn, saw the Indians as having a peculiar system of classification. He observed that the Indian family consisted of a husband, wife, and children. It could be dissolved with both the husband and the wife taking the initiative to end the marriage.
A man refers to his own children as sons and daughters, and to his brothers’ children as sons and daughters, but to his sisters’ children as nephews (Morgan & Leacock, 2021). Lady refers to her sisters’ children as her children and her brothers’ offspring as nephews. Morgan believes that this unusual word has been passed down to us from an earlier type of family in which marriage was between several siblings, a form of group marriage (Schwartz, 2020). Maine did not go into such details and put more effort into comparisons.
Maine, in particular, established a comparison between the rural community in India and those in Slavic and Germanic peoples, thus extending the primary results of Maurer’s communal theory to a wide range of Indo-European peoples. Maurer’s communal theory applies to a wide range of people. However, the starting point of Maine’s theory, a proponent of patriarchal theory, is the notion of the patriarchal family as the original unit of social structure. Toward the end of his life, Maine took up the study of international law and bourgeois democracy.
Maine’s work on these issues was written from a liberal-conservative perspective, unlike Morgan, who viewed the organization of society from a more traditional angle. He revealed that women raised children together, making no distinction between their own and their sisters’ children; men did not know where their child was and did not worry about it. This was Morgan’s key discovery: forms of family and marriage changed and evolved, just as other natural and social phenomena do.
The models teach readers that different cultures have different social institutions and social relations. The audience also learns that every culture, including non-self-sufficient and dysfunctional ones, has its own right. Models point out that a social organization is a historically established, ordered system of activities within a society, people, or social relations, with hierarchical subordination and some structure. The norms of law and morality do not necessarily fix social relations within social organizations; some associations lack public recognition, yet this does not cancel their existence.
Maine, like Morgan, brought evolutionary and anthropological perspectives to the study of society and law. He began his career as a legal anthropologist, investigating phenomena such as crime, punishment, dispute resolution, and formal regulation. On the concept of law, he diverged from other legal theorists who used the term exclusively to refer to a limited number of normative systems associated with state power and to rigidly defined criteria for which norms belong to the system and which do not (Morgan & Leacock, 2021). Maine’s interpretation of law is much broader, and his concept is comparable to the universal definition of normative systems.
Henry Maine, the author of Ancient Law, identified the family as an elementary group; a group of families formed a clan, a group of clans formed a tribe, and a group of tribes formed a state. Maine’s main work was Ancient Law, which included the renowned fifth chapter on prehistoric civilizations and the insight that society moved from status to treaty. Morgan’s fame has endured due to his pioneering approach to what would become the science of kinship (Morgan & Leacock, 2021).
Despite both Maine and Morgan investigating the organization of society and the “evolution” of the legal system, they examined significantly different stages of development. Maine followed what is now known as archaic law or the laws of ancient peoples. Morgan concentrated his research on the primordial rules of pre-literate cultures.
Morgan began his observations by striving to record and preserve existing customs — the fundamental law of the Indian nations of North America — while Maine attempted to explain the order of older civilizations. The idea of fundamental law was more restricted in Maine’s vision of social structure. In contrast, Morgan’s early discoveries regarding primitive law stemmed from his detailed field notes and interpretations of the Iroquois tribe’s way of life.
Nonetheless, Maine’s and Morgan’s evolutionary conceptions of organization and law share specific characteristics. Each mentions the work of the other because they both investigated the same problems at roughly the same time and independently arrived at comparable conclusions about the organization of early society (Hadjigeorgiou, 2020). Morgan and Maine were converging influences arising from opposing forms of fact and assumption. Morgan was essentially an ethnologist, whereas Maine was essentially a lawyer. The fundamental contrasts between them were an unintended consequence of Maine’s immersion in Roman and Hindu family law and Morgan’s immersion in Jewish law.
Another significant outcome of Morgan’s research was the study of kinship among Indians. This study helped readers understand what kin was. Some remnants of the kin system were retained in Ancient Greece and Rome. As a result, the name of a Roman incorporated the name of the ancestor’s family.
The name Gaius Julius Caesar denoted that the renowned commander’s forebears were from the Julius family. Women, on the other hand, merely had generic names, such as Julia or Cornelia. If the parents had different given names, the kid was given the father’s name (Morgan & Leacock, 2021). However, Morgan’s study revealed what the clan was in pre-state culture. Clans of one fraternity were regarded as brothers, whereas clans of another fraternity were considered cousins.
A woman married a member of another clan. A man married into his wife’s clan, and his children followed in his footsteps. If the marriage failed, the guy would return to his own clan, but the children would remain in the mother’s clan. The pattern of ties was slightly different in more sophisticated tribes. The Great Father, not the Great Mother, was regarded as the clan’s founder. Moreover, it was not the man who passed into his wife’s clan, but the lady who passed into her husband’s clan. This shows Morgan’s patriarchal view of the family, similar to Maine’s.
Conclusion
As a result, Maine and Morgan tackled the science of researching ancient culture from a startlingly contemporary angle. They both understood the need to gather credible data and historical examples. They gathered information from a variety of sources but acknowledged the importance of strong proof for making broad statements.
As a result, Morgan and Maine rose to prominence as the best generalizers of their generation. They made the most significant contribution to the knowledge of organization and law by approaching the topic from several perspectives. They assist in seeing law in its many expressions, both within and as a product of society. The essential feature of the models is the anthropology of law, which breaks down the concept of law as an isolated, autonomous system that lives solely by its own rules and grows in isolation from the rest of society.
References
Feeley-Harnik, G. (2021). Lewis Henry Morgan: American beavers and their works. Ethnos, 86(1), 21-43.
Hadjigeorgiou, A. (2020). The legacy of Sir Henry Maine in the 21st century. Noesis, (34), 159-192.
Ledvinka, T. (2020). The disenchantment of the lore of law: Jacob Grimm’s legal anthropology before anthropology. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 52(2), 203-226.
Moore, S. F. (2005). Law and anthropology: A reader. Blackwell.
Morgan, L. H., & Leacock, E. B. (2021). Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. Left Of Brain Onboarding Pty Limited.
Schwartz, J. Z. (2020). Lewis Henry Morgan’s early theory of progress: His evolving view of the passions and social development. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18(2), 229-258.