The Age of Projects (review)

Perhaps because of its conference origin, the term "projects" takes on various meanings. In its most interesting and successful meaning, "projects" refer to the intellectual framing of practical plans conducive both to the general welfare and to the private welfare of those undertaking the specific project. For others, "projects" is a figurative term that means almost anything—a scientific experiment, an invention, a civic construction, a stockjobbing scheme, architectural plans. Essays organized by the figurative meaning of "projects," though often informative in themselves, seem attached to the topic by intellectual duct tape. Mr. Novak's arbitrary headings—"Retrieving the Past," "Improving the Present," and "Envisioning the Future"—ably supply an organization for his thoughtful and suggestive Introduction. Beginning with Defoe's Essay upon Projects as a "mixture of hope and optimism with an expectation of failure," he provides sympathetic and perceptive previews of each essay, concluding that "the projects of the age were more often than not the product of the mind imagining possibilities rather than being able to bring them to success."

In the category of essays "Retrieving the Past," Margery Kingsley's "Family, Inheritance, and Clarendon's History of the Rebellion" concerns the transmission of values as well as property within families, but not the divinely ordained transmission of patriarchal political authority (Sir Robert Filmer). Clarendon's History itself is a family document—made public by his sons and seeking to instruct and influence his granddaughter, Queen Anne. In the seventeenth century, artifacts became significant devices for asserting authority, creating national identity, and preserving the family. Clarendon saw family inheritance as "a mechanism by which the social structures and institutions of the past could be replicated" in the face of repression. Family history functions as a middle term between individual action and ideology. Paul Hammond's "The Interplay of Past and Present in Dryden's 'Palamon and Arcite"' and Elliott Visconti's "Trojan Originalism: Dryden's Troilus and Cressida" look at Dryden's coded use of the past in classical myth and the past of earlier literary works—in Dryden's translation of Chaucer's "Knightes Tale" and his version of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. While "recovering the past," William Weber's "Canon versus Survival in 'Ancient Music' of the Eighteenth Century" is only loosely connected to projects; it traces the continued performance of earlier music in the changing patterns of concert programs in the eighteenth century.

The most interesting and effective essays focus on "Improving the Present." Steven C. A. Pincus's "A Revolution in Political Economy?" explores the connections between the political revolution of 1688-1689 and the economic revolution signaled by the founding of the Bank of England. The conflict was between an idea of the economy as limited and based on land (favored by the Tories and by James II) and an idea of the economy as resting on an expanding commercial society (supported by merchants and by the Dutch). The villainous Tory was Josiah Child, who headed the East-India Company until the revolution. His fall, along with that of James II, therefore signaled a shift in attitudes toward trade. "The Glorious Revolution, then, produced, and by many was intended to produce, a revolution in political economy." The subtitle of Kimberly Latta's, "'Wandering Ghosts of Trade Whimsies': Projects, Gender, Commerce, and Imagination in the Mind of Daniel Defoe" clearly states her interests. Abandoning the mercantilist view that wealth was finite and limited, Defoe saw the imagination as generative rather than merely imitative. The problems for the open-ended creation of meaning by "wit" and of wealth by trade lie in discerning and enforcing appropriate limits. Defoe sought a midpoint between chaotic imagination and tyrannic government.

The remaining essays in this section are not concerned with the political and economic senses of "projecting" or with Defoe, and their place in this collection is questionable: David Boyd Hancock's "Living Forever in Early Modern Europe: Sir Francis...