Public Credit; or, The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace

Abstract

The feminine figure of “Public Credit,” which appears prominently and frequently in early-eighteenth-century Whig texts, is a rich and complex symbolization of early liberal political and economic ideology. In readings of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the Whig libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the collective authors of Cato's Letters, a polemic that had a major influence on American revolutionary ideology), I show that their representations of Credit speak not to the empirical truth of economic value but openly to its imaginary desirability. Credit thus represents a manifest political and cultural strategy of these Whig writers for articulating and defending the values of a liberal market society by representing them as desirable—or, in other words, as aesthetic values.