Henry James Sumner Maine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"This controversy was launched in 1851, when the famous jurist. Sir A. Maine, published his Primitive Law , in which he asserted that the patriarchal family was the original unit of society, and that larger social units had been built up by the aggregation of these family units into clan and tribe. In support of this view, he cited chiefly Biblical examples. In the same year, the Swiss jurist Bachofen was preparing his Das Mutterrecht , asserting that the original state of man had been one of sexual promiscuity, from which had emerged matriarchies, which had only later been replaced by or converted into patriarchies." — Robert Briffault, The Mothers, |
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Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, Template:Post-nominals (15 August 1822 – 3 February 1888), was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian.