"The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing"
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Maine is quietly demystifying the aura around “ancient codes,” treating them less like tablets of divine wisdom and more like paperwork made possible by a new tool. The line’s force comes from its cool, almost bureaucratic reductionism: not “justice” or “morality” but the “art of writing” as the prime mover. He’s making a materialist argument about law’s origins without waving a flag that says MATERIALISM. “Doubtless” does extra work here, signaling the confidence of a Victorian scholar who thinks he’s excavating a pattern beneath the romance of antiquity.
The intent is polemical in a polite register. Maine is pushing back against theories that imagine law beginning in abstract principles or heroic legislators. Writing, in his framing, is the enabling technology that turns custom into code. Oral norms can be flexible, negotiated, and locally enforced; written law freezes practices, standardizes them, and makes them portable. Once rules can be copied and consulted, they can also be imposed, audited, and remembered in ways that exceed any single community’s living memory.
The subtext is about power. “Discovery and diffusion” suggests a chain reaction: as literacy spreads, so does the state’s capacity to claim authority over distant subjects. Codes aren’t merely recorded; they’re consolidated. In Maine’s 19th-century context, this argument also flatters modern legal systems as products of administrative sophistication rather than mythic origins, while inviting a skeptical look at “ancient” legitimacy. If writing helps create law, then law is, at least partly, an artifact of infrastructure: ink, clerks, archives, and the political will to make words stick.
The intent is polemical in a polite register. Maine is pushing back against theories that imagine law beginning in abstract principles or heroic legislators. Writing, in his framing, is the enabling technology that turns custom into code. Oral norms can be flexible, negotiated, and locally enforced; written law freezes practices, standardizes them, and makes them portable. Once rules can be copied and consulted, they can also be imposed, audited, and remembered in ways that exceed any single community’s living memory.
The subtext is about power. “Discovery and diffusion” suggests a chain reaction: as literacy spreads, so does the state’s capacity to claim authority over distant subjects. Codes aren’t merely recorded; they’re consolidated. In Maine’s 19th-century context, this argument also flatters modern legal systems as products of administrative sophistication rather than mythic origins, while inviting a skeptical look at “ancient” legitimacy. If writing helps create law, then law is, at least partly, an artifact of infrastructure: ink, clerks, archives, and the political will to make words stick.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Ancient Law: Its Connection to the Early History of Society (Henry Sumner Maine), 1861 — sentence is attributed to Maine in this work (exact page not confirmed here). |
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