Front cover image for Wayward Contracts : the Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674

Wayward Contracts : the Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674

Why did the language of contract become the dominant metaphor for the relationship between subject and sovereign in mid-seventeenth-century England? In Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn takes issue with the usual explanation for the emergence of contract theory in terms of the origins of liberalism, with its notions of autonomy, liberty, and equality before the law. Drawing on literature as well as political theory, state trials as well as religious debates, Kahn argues that the sudden prominence of contract theory was part of the linguistic turn of early modern culture, when government was imagined in terms of the poetic power to bring new artifacts into existence. But this new power also brought in its wake a tremendous anxiety about the contingency of obligation and the instability of the passions that induce individuals to consent to a sovereign power. In this wide-ranging analysis of the cultural significance of contract theory, the lover and the slave, the tyrant and the regicide, the fool and the liar emerge as some of the central, if wayward, protagonists of the new theory of political obligation. The result is must reading for students and scholars of early modern literature and early modern political theory, as well as historians of political thought and of liberalism
eBook, English, 2009
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009
1 online resource (330 pages)
9781400826421, 140082642X
1027518806
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
CHAPTER 1. Introduction
From Virtue to Contract
The Psychology of Contract
Poetics and the Contract of Genre
The Usual Story
The Road Ahead
PART I: An Anatomy of Contract, 1590-1640
CHAPTER 2. Language and the Bond of Conscience
Natural Rights Theory: The Social Contract and the Linguistic Contract
The Common Law: Magna Carta and Economic Contract
Covenant Theology: Divine Speech Acts and the Covenant of Metaphor
CHAPTER 3. The Passions and Voluntary Servitude
The Slave Contract
The Law of the Heart. CHAPTER 11. Conclusion
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
Y
Z. Free Consent
PART II: A Poetics of Contract, 1640-1674
CHAPTER 4. Imagination
Five Knights: From Promise to Contract
Shipmoney and the Imagination of Disaster
Henry Parker and the Metaphor of Contract
Falkland, Chillingworth, Digges, and the Fiction of Representation
CHAPTER 5. Violence
Prophesying Revolution
The Metaphorical Plot
CHAPTER 6. Metalanguage
The Problem of Essex
Hobbes's Critique of Romance
The Contract of Mimesis
Hobbesian Fictions
Method and Metalanguage
Hobbes's Readers or Inescapable Romance
CHAPTER 7. Gender. Political Contract and the Marriage Contract
The Politics of Romance
Passion and Interest
Contract on Trial
The Sexual Contract
The Paralogism of Romance
CHAPTER 8. Embodiment
Resistless Love and Hate
Paradise Lost and the Bond of Nature
Pity or Fear of Violent Death
CHAPTER 9. Sympathy
Wise Compliance
The Politics of Pity
Sympathy between Men
CHAPTER 10. Critique
Reason of State
Samson as Exception
Reasoning about the Exception: Dialectic and Equivocation
Taking Exception to Pity and Fear
Political Theology and Tragedy