Wayward Contracts

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.

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