Reflections on Mormon history: Zion and the anti-legal tradition

SIR HENRY MAINE, OUR FIRST GREAT MODERN legal historian of the English language and law, in describing the paradigmatic shift from early feudal European society to a world of secular, territorial nation-states and market economy, observed that we had moved "from status to contract." "Status" assumes an immutable condition not changeable by individual choice and action. "Contract" assumes that one can change existing conditions by choice and action. No statement describes with more insight the nineteenth-century Mormon concept of Zion.