… is from page 15 of the 1998 Liberty Fund reprint of John Maxcy Zane’s remarkable 1927 volume, The Story of Law:
But Hobbes was definitely committed to the dogma that human law is a rule imposed by a superior ruler upon an inferior subject, and that not nature but authority creates law. This dogma long made jurisprudence a nightmare….
Legal history teaches that the science of jurisprudence, without which progress would have been impossible, is not the work of the few but of the many, not the work of lawgivers or of great men, but of the steadily and silently built structure of voiceless millions, “who bravely led unrecorded lives and dwell in unvisited tombs.”
At the very end of the above passage, Zane quotes from George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch – but Zane gets the quotation slightly wrong (although the meaning is unchanged). This passage from Middlemarch was the Cafe’s Quotation of the Day this past October 19th.
