Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (review)

Among the mass of pamphlets collected by the seventeenth-century army secretary and man of business William Clarke is a volume (Worcester College AA. 8. 18) containing nothing but civil-war and Restoration era arguments about keeping and repudiating the oaths (most notably, the Protestation, the Solemn League and Covenant, and the Engagement) by which rulers, subjects, and citizens attempted to bind themselves or others to the powers that then were. The succession of these imposed promises was proof not only that they were ignored and violated — or "interpreted" and "constructed" — but also that they were intrinsic to individual and corporate identity. Such "wayward" promises (usually configured as "contracts," promises made for a consideration) were at the heart of seventeenth-century public discourse.

So Victoria Kahn has clearly found a topic worthy of the exercise of her formidable intellect. She pursues an agenda that hops across disciplines (literature and genre theory, political thought, legal and political history, aesthetics, and cultural studies) as if they were so many stepping stones in her private garden. It is an impressive display of erudition and insight, though put to purposes that are at times highly personal and normative: Wayward Contracts is not a work for those unwilling to enter fully into Kahn's complex hermeneutical universe. After an introduction, Kahn sets out what she calls an "Anatomy of Contract, 1590–1640," beginning by outlining the distinguishable but frequently conflated discourses of natural law and natural rights, of common-law rights and the emerging implications of contract, and of the gymnastics of federal theology, by which Calvinist theologians simultaneously denied and asserted the necessity and efficacy of human will in salvation. She then turns to what is a crux for seventeenth-century political thought and a hinge of her own system: voluntary servitude. Jurists and moralists debated its legality or propriety, often trying to distinguish between "the rational act of voluntary subjection and the irrational act of voluntary servitude" (58), an exercise fraught with the ambiguities and equivocations in which Kahn delights.

Turning then to a "Poetics of Contract, 1640–1674" Kahn engages first the standard topoi of early Stuart constitutional and political conflict (the Five Knights and Shipmoney cases, and the challenge of Henry Parker and the royalist response): this reviewer found the account excessively "textual" and at times imperfectly informed (e.g., the twice-made assertion [84, 96] that Henry Parker's Observations upon his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses was in any significant sense a response to Charles I's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions). After some further turns to the left and right — sometimes it seems that whatever Kahn had read had to be absorbed or concatenated into Wayward Contracts — she turns to her core authors, Hobbes and Milton, "as representative of two antithetical approaches to the discourse of contract" (283). She provides useful readings of both, stressing the implicit "romance" and imagination contained within the explicit positivism of Leviathan and the role of "interpretation" in Milton's first great apologia of political violence, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. While ultimately her conclusions do not much depart from received opinion — "Hobbes's eloquence was almost always in the service of absolute obedience" and Milton's "imaginative energies were far more often engaged by breach of contract and dissent" (222) — the journey to them is invigorating. Kahn effectively concludes with a reading of Samson Agonistes, particularly strong in its analysis of Milton's rejection of pity, though also without open acknowledgement that Samson's destruction of innocent and "guilty" alike, as well as himself, is indistinguishable from that of a suicide bomber.

No brief summary can do justice to the range of Kahn's concerns: gender, the politics of genre, her reconstruction of a liberal genealogy with the passions put back in. In the final analysis, though, this is a study determined by a literary-critical program: the legal and theological matters...