F.W. Maitland and the Making of the Modern World

Abstract

In his attempt to win a Trinity College Fellowship, 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 25.¹ In this long and scholarly piece, he summarized and analysed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the 200 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. He examined the relations of the state and the citizen from the feudal period onwards, the relations of community and individual from Anglo-Saxon origins, and of the family and the individual.