Wayward contracts : the crisis of political obligation in England, 1640-1674 / Victoria Kahn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kahn, Victoria Ann.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Politics and literature.

Contracts--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Contracts.

Political obligation--History--17th century.

Political obligation.

Social contract--History--17th century.

Social contract.

Contracts in literature.

Great Britain--Politics and government--1642-1660.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Politics and government--1660-1688.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (383 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

CHAPTER 1. Introduction

PART ONE: An Anatomy of Contract, 1590-1640

CHAPTER 2. Language and the Bond of Conscience

CHAPTER 3. The Passions and Voluntary Servitude

PART TWO: A Poetics of Contract, 1640-1674

CHAPTER 4. Imagination

CHAPTER 5. Violence

CHAPTER 6. Metalanguage

CHAPTER 7. Gender

CHAPTER 8. Embodiment

CHAPTER 9. Sympathy

CHAPTER 10. Critique

CHAPTER 11. Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [285]-364) and index.

ISBN:

9786612087332

9781282087330

1282087339

9781400826421

140082642X

OCLC:

521224278