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At the start of the third Christian millennium we are aware of massive political, economic and ideological changes which condition the chances of liberty, wealth and equality. Yet it is surprisingly difficult for us to understand these forces, for we cannot see what surrounds us so closely. This book analyses our condition by looking at the work of two great thinkers, one of whom provides a deep historical perspective, the other a wide comparative analysis. F.W. Maitland (1850-1906) was more than the greatest professional historian of modern times, he was a philosopher who provides a brilliant sketch of how our strange world has come about, particularly in his work on associations and trusts. Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) more than any other created the institutions of modern Japan. As an outsider he provides a brilliant insight into the heart of the new capitalist and industrial civilization which had emerged in the west.
- Sales Rank: #733860 in Books
- Published on: 2002-03-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .88" w x 5.50" l, 1.34 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 332 pages
About the Author
ALAN MACFARLANE is Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. His previous books include Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840, The Savage Wars of Peace and The Riddle of the Modern World.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Valuable Introduction to Maitland and Fukuzawa
By Henry Miller
Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane was a junior colleague of the late Ernest Gellner, from whom he seems to have inherited an interest in what has sometimes been called the "Grand Question," namely why, after several millenia of agrarian stability in the grip of the kings and priests (or sword and book, as Gellner metonymized those elements of agrarian society in his excellent Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History), some human societies (i.e., Western Europe) should have broken out of the cycle of agrarian power politics and begun to achieve unprecedented economic growth, with all the attendant political and social effects that make up the "modern" world.
In an earlier book, The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality, Macfarlane presents and analyzes the thoughts of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Tocqueville, as they attempted to understand and describe what was happening to their world (a series of Macfarlane's lectures to Cambridge undergraduates on these and related thinkers is available on Macfarlane's Youtube channel, and is worth seeking out). This book, The Making of the Modern World, extends the work of Riddle by essentially doing the same for two much lesser known thinkers, F.W. Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa.
The selection of subjects is not arbitrary. Whereas the earlier thinkers were speculating about contemporaneous changes, these late 19th century thinkers had more perspective, and more historical data, with which to work. Unfortunately, not much else ties Maitland and Fukuzawa together, so that The Making of the Modern World essentially forms a dual volume of independent studies (a fact Macfarlane has since recognized by publishing each monograph separately, in substantially the same form, as a free e-book on his website; also available for purchase under the titles Secrets of the Modern World: Author Name).
I.
Legal historian F.W. Maitland (1850-1906) is not often ranked among the political philosophers, but Macfarlane's presentation suggests that he should be (a view that is impliedly endorsed by the publication in 2003, a year after Macfarlane's work, of Maitland: State, Trust and Corporation (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)). Maitland took on fundamental questions, but he did so through "learning wide and deep, tough and technical" (p. 23), steeped in centuries-old legal records interposing their difficulties of "the hand-writing, the dog latin and law-french, the abstruse forms of procedure and technical terms," all requiring that he "reconstruct a largely vanished world-view in order to understand them" (p. 35).
And what were the fundamental questions for which Maitland sought answers in Norman and Plantagenet law books? Chiefly, it was the source of England's divergence from continental political trends which, by the 16th and 17th centuries, were pointing towards the primeval traps of agrarian society, the capture of wealth by a predatory ruling and military class with an attendant suppression of commerce and invention. Broadly, Maitland attributes this divergence to the difference between English common law and the Roman civil law that was adopted across northern Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries (see p. 75). In Maitland's words:
"The English common law was tough, one of the toughest things ever made. And
well for England was it in the days of Tudors and Stuarts that this was so.
A simpler, more rational, a more elegant system would have been an apt
instrument of despotic rule" (qtd. p. 76)
The trust is perhaps the prime example. In the trust, Maitland thought he had discovered a key, perhaps the key, to civil society. The trust, unlike the corporation, allows private citizens to form durable legal associations without the consent of the state, effectively building powerful entities in society that buffered the individual from the state. Roman civil law, apparently, knows the corporation, but not the trust. But the very messiness of English jurisprudence allowed this subversive entity to develop in the interstices of law and equity, until Henry VIII tried, unsuccessfully, "to crush it in the Statute of Uses (1535). But the horse had already bolted" (p. 91).
As this probably inadequate precis suggests, much of the discussion of Maitland's work is necessarily technical, and may put off a reader otherwise interested in these grand historical questions. Macfarlane even theorizes that this explains Maitland's obscurity: his "profound sociological and philosophical analysis was covered over with a veneer of technical legal history which has deceived subsequent historians into thinking of him just as a historian or legal historian" (p. 120).
I think Macfarlane goes a long way in this book towards stripping off that veneer and revealing Maitland's profundity. He is workmanlike in his presentation. He is no prose stylist, and as he notes at the outset, he has quoted extensively from his subjects, to let them "talk to us in their own words" (p. x). In some contexts, this practice can be tedious (indeed, I think it probably is so in Riddle, where Macfarlane is discussing much better-known thinkers), but here it serves the reader well, given both Maitland's obscurity and his fragmented and voluminous oeuvre. Macfarlane has done yeoman's work in pulling together themes that may be only latent in the pages of Maitland's technical legal history, and this book serves as a valuable introduction to Maitland for the non-lawyer reader or student.
II.
Shamefully, I had never heard of Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose importance in Japan is indicated by his image being carried on one of the two modern Japanese banknotes (p. 140). He is a fascinating individual, but largely because he was in the thick of the fascinating period in which Japan made a rapid transition from feudal agrarian society to a Western-style commercial-industrial society. Owing partly to character, partly to circumstance, he was an early learner of Dutch and then English (a very strange thing to be in his society), which put him in an insuperable position to be an expositor of "the West" to the Japanese.
Macfarlane carefully describes Fukuzawa's life, his work, and the society in which he lived, and he helpfully identifies common themes in Fukuzawa's thought and that of other thinkers (e.g., Smith, Tocqueville, etc.) observing the same transition in other times and places. He is to be commended for "introducing [Fukuzawa] to an English-speaking audience" despite his own avowed limitations (e.g., not reading Japanese) (p. 140), given that at the time of publication (2002) there was no book-length study dedicated to Fukuzawa. Two such books have since appeared (Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist (Library of World Biography Series); Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi), which perhaps were spurred by Macfarlane's foray into the field. Regardless, given Fukuzawa's importance in Japan and the relative paucity of English-language literature on him, it is no harm to have Macfarlane's non-specialist study available as well.
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