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

Why did the language of contract become the dominant metaphor for the relationship between subject and sovereign in mid-seventeenth-century England? In Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn takes issue with the usual explanation for the emergence of contract theory in terms of the origins of liberalism, with its notions of autonomy, liberty, and equality before the law.


Drawing on literature as well as political theory, state trials as well as religious debates, Kahn argues that the sudden promi...