In 1957, Ian Watt suggested in The Rise of the Novel that Protestantism and capitalism are the informing logics behind novelistic representations of society. Defoe's novels, inaugurating the new genre in Watt's account, represent communities that privilege individual pursuit of economic possession and manifest the strife and alienation that inevitably plague order founded on such ethic. The society envisioned in these novels, Watt points out, resembles the one theorized in the political philosophy of John Locke. Following C.B. Macpherson, we have come to identify this political philosophy as the origins of modem liberalism and to label it possessive individualism. On such account, rights-based politics are designed to protect private property, and the autonomy of individuals necessarily comes at the expense of social commitment. As Watt puts it, [t]he hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality-all are weakened (64). Thus, in the novelistic vision of possessive individualism, characters are essentially isolated accumulators of property; Defoe's characters, as Watt describes them, are an embodiment of economic (63), and they, essentially, all belong on Crusoe's island (112). More recently, critics have challenged the notion that Defoe's vision of modem society is one of tenuously linked, alienated outcasts. For example, John Bender, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), argues that Defoe represents the formation of a society whose bond is based on a homogenizing norm inculcated by social institutions, for which the penitentiary is a paradigm. In the same manner in which Foucault suggests that the rise of liberal individualism is accompanied by the rise of the penitentiary, Bender argues that the highly individualized personalities of Defoe's characters are a product of the disciplining of consciousness to conform with hegemonic norms. Political cohesion, in this model, is derived from the internalization of ideology and the subjectivization of consciousness, a feat achieved through the very architecture of modem cities and through the social institutions that organize daily life. In the possessive model assumed by Watt, persons are first and foremost autonomous economic agents who become rightful citizens only after they have become owners; they voluntarily surrender some of their natural freedoms to the state in exchange for its power to protect their property rights. The political bond, on this account, is a chosen and precarious alliance of I'd like to thank Frances Ferguson for her inspiring and generous advice throughout, Amanda Anderson for her invaluable suggestions at crucial moments, Ronald Paulson for bringing An Essay upon Projects to my attention, and Irene Tucker, Rachel Cole, and Galia Sartiel for their illuminating comments on early drafts.