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

Wayward Contracts

Wayward Contracts

THE CRISIS OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION IN ENGLAND, 16401674

Victoria Kahn

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kahn, Victoria Ann.

Wayward contracts : the crisis of political obligation in England, 16401674 / Victoria Kahn.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-642-1

1. English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism.

2. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory17th century. 3. Great BritainPolitics and government16421660. 4. Great BritainPolitics and government16601688. 5. ContractsGreat BritainHistory17th century. 6. Political obligationHistory17th century. 7. Social contractHistory17th century. 8. Contracts in literature. I. Title.

PR438.P65K34 2004

820.9358094109033dc22 2004042850

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Helene

You sense that something is not right. If matters were otherwise, then you would have a sense of well-being. Or you cannot make another persons circumstances right.

Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity

As empirically constructed and produced objects, works of art, even literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life.

Theodor Adorno, Commitment

There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making and keeping promises.

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Contents

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS THE PRODUCT of a happy period at the University of California at Berkeley and at Irvine. I want to thank my colleagues at both campuses for the lively intellectual environment that was crucial to the completion of the book. At Berkeley, I am particularly grateful to David Bates, Lorna Hutson, and Nancy Ruttenburg for their lunchtime conversation, advice, and commentary on the early chapters of the manuscript. Louise George Clubb first invited me to visit Berkeley in 1996 and I have benefited from her generosity ever since. Thanks are due to Carol Clover for suggesting the title of this book and for her passing comment that voluntary servitude seemed like a good thing to write about. At Irvine, I owe a special debt to Brook Thomas for reading early drafts of some of my thoughts on Hobbes and natural rights, for timely bibliographical suggestions, and for his exemplary collegiality. Also at Irvine, Jane Newman and Patrick Sinclair were delightful midweek companions.

It seems appropriate for a book on contract theory that I should have discovered a community of readers in the process of writing it. Constance Jordan, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Jason Rosenblatt, and Nancy Struever read a large chunk of the manuscript and gave me encouraging responses when I most needed them. Catherine Martin and David Bates heroically read the same chapters several times and offered invaluable advice. For their comments on individual chapters or parts thereof, I want to thank Marshall Grossman, Jeffrey Knapp, A. A. Long, Lois Potter, J. P. Sommerville, Tracy Strong, and David Quint. I was very fortunate in my readers for the press, Don Herzog and Steven Zwicker, whose engagement and astute criticism helped to sharpen my argument. Mary Murrell was a loyal and supportive editor, and Brian MacDonald was a scrupulous copyeditor. In the process of writing this book, I have had many occasions to be grateful to Liz Huyck, my research assistant at Princeton many years ago, who is personally responsible for my large xerox library of obscure seventeenth-century texts. At Berkeley, Robyn Marasco was a splendid research assistant on some last-minute tasks. The project received financial support in the form of a grant from the NEH, as well as a UC Presidents Fellowship, and a UC Berkeley Humanities Research Grant. I am grateful to Constance Jordan, Kathy Eden, and David Quint, for their letters of recommendation. Marsha Silverberg was the Gracious Guardian of the East Coast Diskettes. As always, Nancy Troy was an inspiring example and a supportive friend, as was my sister Lisa Davenport, whose regular telephone salutation was Are you working?

The subject matter of this book has followed the career of Helene Silverberg who, in the course of its writing, moved from Political Science to the Law. This book, and life in general, are better in every way because of her.

All works of Cicero and Seneca are quoted from the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press.

CHAP T E R 1

Introduction

To breed an animal with the right to make promisesis not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? and is it not the real problem of man?

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

A worthy person of our age was accustomed to say, that contracts in writing were invented only to bind villains, who having no law, justice, or truth, within themselves, would not keep their words, unless such testimonies were given as might compell them.

Algernon Sidney, Discourses concerning Government

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY is the period in which scholars have located the emergence of a distinctively modern conception of political obligation. From Maine and Weber through Macpherson and Walzer, they have recorded the shift from a world of status to one of contractfrom a world, that is, of hierarchical feudal relations to one made up of autonomous individuals who rationally consent to their self-imposed government. In contrast to the medieval pact of subjection, in which a corporate body of the people subjects itself to the sovereign, the new discourse of obligation yielded a protoliberal subject who freely enters into a social and political contract. It is the aim of this book to reconstruct the discourse of contract in the making and, in doing so, to revise this story of political obligation. Specifically I show that seventeenth-century contract theory was defined by a struggle over the role of language and representation, and of the passions and interests, in binding and releasing the political subject. Instead of presupposing a rational and autonomous individual who consents to the political contract, seventeenth-century contract theorists were compelled to create a new political subject ex nihilo. Rather than assuming that government was natural and only needed to be legitimated by consent, early modern writers argued that the state was an artifact that was brought into being by a powerful, if sometimes fictional, speech act. For these reasons, I argue, early modern contract theory is best thought of as a radically new poetics of the subject and the state, one that was manifest across a wide range of texts and genres in mid-seventeenth-century England.

In revising the usual accounts of contract theory, I take a cue from Nietzsches skeptical remarks in The Genealogy of Morals. I assume, he commented acerbically, we have got over that sentimentalism that would have [the state] begin with a contract. According to Nietzsche, the emergence of the contracting subject coincided with the development of Judeo-Christian notions of conscience, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility. Contract theory was implicated in the ongoing battle between Rome and Israel, between the warrior ethos and the slave mentality, which involved the sublimation of the warriors aggression into the new faculty of conscience. This battle was replayed in the Renaissance between Machiavelli on the one hand and Luther and Calvin on the other. Against this mystified discourse of conscience and contract, Nietzsche counterposed a demystified discourse of power. In Nietzsches alternative account, which sounds not coincidentally like Burckhardt in