Maitland, F. W., State

Maitland, F. W., State, Trust and Corporation, ed. by Runciman, David/Ryan, Magnus (= Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003. LV, 136 S.

In the first years of the twentieth century the famous legal historian Frederick William Maitland wrote five essays on the state and other corporations. He was  inspired by Otto von Gierke's Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht and, in 1900, had produced a translation of the latter's Political Theories of the Middle Ages (original title: Die publicistischen Lehren des Mittelalters).

Genossenschaft is a difficult concept which can be rendered, inter alia, as corporation. What concerned Maitland was the origin and development of corporations as forms of human association: there were families, guilds, village communities and, the largest of them all, the state, which eventually surpassed and comprehended the others. The five essays in question, written between 1900 and 1904 and taken here from the 1911 edition of Maitland's Collected Papers, are the following: The Corporation Sole, The Crown as Corporation, The Unincorporate Body, Moral Personality and Legal Personality and Trust and Corporation.

It was a good idea to edit in one volume these essays on the legal, historical and philosophical origins of the idea of the state, as they have become classics of enduring value, even though  some of the legal problems that preoccupied Mailand soon became things „of the past” (p. XXVII). The volume under review contains the first new edition of these essays for sixty years, which is in itself a real merit, but it also contains a general introduction, a bibliography, a glossary and a very helpful annotation. The editors, David Runciman, University Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Cambridge, and Magnus Ryan, Lecturer in Late Medieval Studies at the Warburg Institute and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, have done a good job in making those Maitland essays again easily accessible. „Easily” is perheps somewhat misleading, for in spite of glossary and notes, the subject of the English corporation and the English trust will never be easy to understand for Continental scholars, who can hardly believe their ears when they are confronted with a „corporation sole” (a contradictio in terminis ?) and an „unincorporate body” (literally a bodiless body ?). The editors rightly speak of a legal system that seemed „unembarrassed by questions of consistency” and of „absurdities” which served some practical purpose, which, after all, is the function of a legal fiction, or even the „mere ghost of a fiction” (p. XIX). Continental scholars will be grateful to the editors for making the English corporation and the English trust accessible if not quite understandable.

Ghent                                                                                                             R. C. van Caenegem