Wayward ContractsWayward Contracts
The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674
Title rated 0 out of 5 stars, based on 0 ratings(0 ratings)
eBook, 2004
Current format, eBook, 2004, , Available but not Holdable.eBook, 2004
Current format, eBook, 2004, , Available but not Holdable. Offered in 0 more formatsWhy 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.
Title availability
About
Contributors
Subject and genre
Details
Publication
- Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2004., ©2004.
Opinion
More from the community
Community lists featuring this title
There are no community lists featuring this title
Community contributions
There are no quotations from this title
There are no quotations from this title
From the community