Wayward Contracts
The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674
Published on 26. July 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
392 pages
978-0-691-17124-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Winner of the 2006 Best Book Prize, Pacific Coast Conference on British StudiesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
656 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-17124-1 (9780691171241)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
01/2009
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
€140.95
Available for download
Person
Victoria Kahn is Professor of English and Bernie H. Williams Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Machiavellian Rhetoric (Princeton).
Content
Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1 From Virtue to Contract 8 The Psychology of Contract 13 Poetics and the Contract of Genre 15 The Usual Story 20 The Road Ahead 25 PART I: An Anatomy of Contract,1590-1640 29 CHAPTER 2. Language and the Bond of Conscience 31 Natural Rights Theory: The Social Contract and the Linguistic Contract 33 The Common Law: Magna Carta and Economic Contract 41 Covenant Theology: Divine Speech Acts and the Covenant of Metaphor 48 CHAPTER 3. The Passions and Voluntary Servitude 57 The Slave Contract 60 The Law of the Heart 64 Free Consent 73 PART II: A Poetics of Contract, 1640-1674 81 CHAPTER 4. Imagination 83 Five Knights: From Promise to Contract 85 Shipmoney and the Imagination of Disaster 90 Henry Parker and the Metaphor of Contract 95 Falkland, Chillingworth, Digges, and the Fiction of Representation 104 CHAPTER 5. Violence 112 Prophesying Revolution 113 The Metaphorical Plot 120 CHAPTER 6. Metalanguage 134 The Problem of Essex 138 Hobbe's Critique of Romance 141 The Contract of Mimesis 147 Hobbesian Fictions 151 Method and Metalanguage 154 Hobbes's Readers or Inescapable Romance 166 CHAPTER 7. Gender 171 Political Contract and the Marriage Contract 174 The Politics of Romance 177 Passion and Interest 180 Contract on Trial 185 The Sexual Contract 189 The Paralogism of Romance 192 CHAPTER 8. Embodiment 196 Resistless Love and Hate 198 Paradise Lost and the Bond of Nature 207 Pity or Fear of Violent Death 214 CHAPTER 9. Sympathy 223 Wise Compliance 227 The Politics of Pity 234 Sympathy between Men 241 CHAPTER 10. Critique 252 Reason of State 254 Samson as Exception 262 Reasoning about the Exception: Dialectic and Equivocation 264 Taking Exception to Pity and Fear 270 Political Theology and Tragedy 276 CHAPTER 11. Conclusion 279 Notes 285 Index 365