Wayward Contracts or Identities Affiliations and Allegiances

Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674

Author: Victoria Ann Kahn

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.

Table of Contents:

Ch. 1	Introduction	1
Pt. I	An anatomy of contract, 1590-1640	29
Ch. 2	Language and the bond of conscience	31
Ch. 3	The passions and voluntary servitude	57
Pt. II	A poetics of contract, 1640-1674	81
Ch. 4	Imagination	83
Ch. 5	Violence	112
Ch. 6	Metalanguage	134
Ch. 7	Gender	171
Ch. 8	Embodiment	196
Ch. 9	Sympathy	223
Ch. 10	Critique	252
Ch. 11	Conclusion	279

Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances

Author: Seyla Benhabib

Where do political identities come from, how do they change over time, and what is their impact on political life? This book explores these and related questions in a globalizing world where the nation state is being transformed, definitions of citizenship are evolving in unprecedented ways, and people's interests and identities are taking on new local, regional, transnational, cosmopolitan, and even imperial configurations. Pre-eminent scholars examine the changing character of identities, affiliations, and allegiances in a variety of contexts: the evolving character of the European Union and its member countries, the Balkans and other new democracies of the post-1989 world, and debates about citizenship and cultural identity in the modern West. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the political and intellectual ferment that surrounds debates about political membership and attachment, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and law.