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Introduction Liberalism’s Incestuous Subject In , in the first edition of his dictionary, Noah Webster defined incest as ‘‘the crime of cohabitation or sexual commerce between persons related within the degrees wherein marriage is prohibited by the law of a country.’’1 As definitions go, this one seems rather straightforward. Yet, as far as incest goes, it presents numerous questions. The one thing we think we know about incest is that its prohibition is universal and has been in existence since humans organized themselves into something resembling families. Of course, this one thing is an illusion, and Webster’s definition gets at some of the problems with that illusion. First, this particular definition hitched incest to the system of criminal law rather than to biblical injunction. Secinspires the question: If the prohibition of incest was dependent on nationally bounded legal systems, was it possible that a nation could simply forego the prohibition of incest? Finally, in Webster’s definition the crux of the prohibition was dependent on marriage, yet it was unclear if the prohibition of marriage between near kin was part of incest or something else altogether. What is clear is that, for a universal prohibition that, for several centuries, has been treated as one of the fundamental laws of human culture , Webster, perhaps unwittingly, introduced a great deal of ambiguity. Perhaps aware of this, perhaps simply trying to cut words, Webster modified the definition in an abridged version of his dictionary in . Gone was the ambiguity; the definition was shorter but more capacious and seemingly universal. Incest was now ‘‘cohabitation of persons within prohibited degrees of kindred.’’2 Cohabitation did more work than enumerating sex and marriage had in the original definition. Cohabitation was a legal category in itself but was also frequently used to describe a man and woman living together outside of marriage. Implicit in the term was some  Introduction degree of intimacy. In that, it incorporated sex and potentially gestured at marriage. But if marriage and sex were encompassed by cohabitation, crime was gone altogether. This definition passed no judgment, made no claims. Finally, the particularity of the original definition, which hinged on the inclusion of national laws, was gone. With this elision one could presume that there were ‘‘prohibited degrees of kindred’’ everywhere, that men and women potentially cohabited everywhere, and thus that the prohibition of incest was universal. A history of the incest prohibition in nineteenth-century America entails excavating this space between the universal and the particular in various articulations of the prohibition. In this period, the incest prohibition was in flux. No matter how frequently or forcefully one invoked the fundamental nature of the prohibition, its universal and uniform character, the function of the prohibition, its parameters, and indeed, its meaning, were increasingly unclear. If the universal and seemingly self-evident character of the prohibition is, to a greater or lesser extent, an illusion in every age, that does not mean it is the same illusion or doing the same work across time. The question is thus why and to what end was the language of universalism deployed in relation to the prohibition of incest in nineteenthcentury America. Put differently, if the incest prohibition was supposed to be a foundational law of human society, universal in nature, that inaugurated both kinship and culture, why were so many people in the nineteenth century so worried that the family was inherently incestuous and that one of the great sexual and marital dangers of the period was incest? In the chapters that follow, I trace articulations of the incest threat and the incest prohibition in the nineteenth century as a problematic of liberalism and the liberal subject.3 Society in the early republic and antebellum America was, without suggesting a totalizing interpretation, increasingly liberal.4 To treat incest in the context of liberalism, or, conversely, to treat liberalism in the context of incest, demands that both, despite their various universal claims, have a history. The central figure of both liberalism and the nineteenth-century incest prohibition was the liberal subject, that autonomous, rational individual who acted on his own desires, was endowed with the capacity for consent, was not dependent on others, and had his choices and desires ratified in contracts. This subject enjoyed a life in public—in market exchanges and fraternal societies, in the institutions of representative democracy, and in an ever-expanding print culture. Yet, at the same time...

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