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E. Adamson Hoebel and the Anthropology of Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
“Like it or not — and many from Plato to Marx have disliked it — law is a central concept in human society; without it, indeed, there would be no society.” The truth of this statement from the jacket of Lloyd's The Idea of Law (1966) is implicitly borne out by the fact that, prior to the emergence of social science as a discipline, an empirically minded member of Western society, interested in the function and structure of his civilization, had to turn to the study of law as the only avenue to this knowledge. This was my experience (there was little of modern social science in Czechoslovakia in 1945), and that of many social scientists of the past. It is then no surprise that many anthropologists of the nineteenth century were either practicing lawyers or had a solid legal education, as, for example, Adolf Bastian, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Johan Jakob Bachofen, and John Ferguson McLennan, to name a few. It is only interesting to note that Morgan's epochal Ancient Society (1877) was preceded by Maine's famous treatise Ancient Law (1861), which he wrote rather than one on ancient social structure, ancient religion, or some other cultural specialty.
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- Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1973.
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