VICTORIA KAHN. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 370. $49.50

Abstract

Thinking about contract and resistance flourished in seventeenth-century England, and so did a fully fledged discourse of passions and interests. Given the prevailing division of labor between historians and literary scholars, it may not surprise that the coincidence has garnered little attention, but practitioners of both disciplines should applaud Victoria Kahn for correcting the oversight. By throwing a sharp focus on a number of pivotal mid-century texts, she shows how debates over contract and meditations on the affections underpinned each other, with the affectivities of contract theory being matched by the contractualism of explorations of affect. The two discourses overlapped imaginatively since each worked through metaphor, and each required interpretation. Arguments about contracts as sources of rights and duties hinged, Kahn suggests, on acts of imagination that found in the passions motives for contracting, that conjured an order in which the contractors could be moved by words, and that related those qualities and actions “mimetically” for readers.