1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 62.

2. For a brief overview of the various ways in which written information circulated in British America from the last half of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth, see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 16-64. However, Brown has very little to say in this book about the circulation of fictional materials.

3. William Whately, A Bridebush or a Direction for Married Persons (London, 1619), p. 89.

4. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 305. For a discussion of this version of the Jacobean and Caroline theory of patriarchalism, see Gordon H. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).

5. Edward Topsell, The Householder: or Perfect Man (London, 1610), ^* 5v.

6. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 3d ed. (London, 1634), p. 17.

7. William Gouge, for example, is particularly careful to praise the monarch. One of his marriage treatises explains, "God gaue vs such a King as we now haue, of the stronger sexe ... furnished with such knowledge and zeale, as neuer King since Christ had." An Exposition of Part of the Fift and Sixt Chapters of S. Paules Epistle to the Ephesians, wherein is handled all of the duties as belong to Household Gouernment (London, 1630), p. 3.

8. Quoted in Mary Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought," in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), pp. 80-95. The quoted material is from p. 86.

9. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ed. Lowell W. Coolidge, in vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 229. The year before (1642), in a very popular tract, Henry Parker had used much the same language when he wrote, "They which contract to obey to their own ruin, or having so contracted, they which esteem such a contract before their own preservation are felonious to themselves." "Observations Upon Some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses," in Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Graham Storey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 41.

10. By that time, Ernest Sirluck has noted, Milton had "completely integrated the case for divorce with that for Parliament's supremacy." Complete Prose Works, 2:157.

11. Tetrachordon, ed. Arnold Williams, in vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, pp. 571-718. The quote is found on p. 612.

12. Milton identifies the sign of a true marriage with the formation of a "whole man" and a domestic unit. See, for example, Tetrachordon, in Complete Prose Works, 2:601-13.

13. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), p. 283.

14. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II.1.1-14.

15. There is a long-running debate among political philosophers concerning Locke's response to Filmer's arguments: Did he come down on the side of the elites who possessed property or on the side of labor and the natural rights of ordinary man? See, for example, C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). For a critique of Macpherson, see Peter Laslett, "Market Society and Political Theory," Historical Journal 6 (1964), 150-54; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 14-48. For a brief review of Macpherson's historical claims, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 150-60; Andrej Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 177-90. We do not claim to be determining anything about Locke's theory of property beyond the rhetorical strategies that enable its arguments to appear logical. In opposing Filmer's representation of the English social body as the monarch's body, Locke imagines the social body as a genetic, or self-replicating, cellular structure.

16. On this point, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 174, and James Tully, Discourse on Property, pp. 116-18.

17. We wish to thank Kathryn Milun for sharing her research on the terra nullius trope, as set forth in her manuscript "Pathologies of Modern Space."

18. Neal Wood writes that Locke refers to a so-called "waste land" to make the distinction between land that has a public status as opposed to land owned by parish and country or "commons." John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 61-62.

19. Typical of Locke's use of masculine pronouns is this example: "If such a state of Reason, such an Age of Discretion made him free, the same shall make his Son free too" (II.59.11-12).

20. Locke, of course, enjoyed some of the fruits of traditional clientage. But none of the offices he was given through the influence of Lord Ashley—later the Earl of Shaftesbury—were particularly lucrative or politically powerful. The older model of clientage and patronage had quite simply passed away. In the introduction to his edition of the Two Treatises, Peter Laslett states in a note: "Locke was so conscious of status, his own in particular, that he actually cancelled the title-page of one of his books because it described him as Esq., and substituted another calling him Gent" (42). Laslett goes on to ask, "Can [Locke] be called, as so often he is, the spokesman of a rising class, the middle class, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie?" and offers this response: "He is perhaps best described as an independent, free-moving intellectual, aware as others were not of the direction of social change'' (43-44).

21. However, Locke's model household was still imagined only for a privileged minority in England. It was unlikely, for example, that either the poor family or the working family could provide the kind of household Locke considered suitable for his political model. According to Peter Laslett, Locke thought that the poor existed because of "a relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners" and that a working family "had no right to expect its children to be at leisure after the age of three" (43).

22. As we noted in chapter 1, both Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton respond to a discrepancy between the individuated perspective produced by Paradise Lost and the lack of such individuals in the culture for which the poem was written. They consider the discrepancy itself as the historical marker of the poem. See Fredric Jameson, "Religion and Ideology," 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, and Jon Stratton (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), pp. 315-36, and Terry Eagleton, "The God That Failed," in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 342-47.

23. Feror example, Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 105-25, sees Josselin's diary as showing that parental feeling and affective bonds have remained unchanged since at least the early modern period. A similar view of Josselin's diary is maintained by Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 136-37; Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), pp. 136-37; and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.

84. But the diary is also seen as supporting quite a contrary view of the family: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 214; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 288-89; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 64. See also Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life (London: Verso, 1988), p. 29.

24. The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1976).

25. In "L'Histoire sociale des rêves," Annales 28 (1973): 329-42, Peter Burke identifies some of the material in the dreams recorded by Archbishop Laud, Elias Ashmole, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Sewell that makes them all unmistakably seventeenth-century dreams.

26. Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines Or a Late discovery of a fourth Island in Terra Australis Incognita (London, 1668). Neville is better known for another kind of political tract. Like Harrington's Oceana, Neville's Plato Redivivus sought to explain what had gone wrong with the old relationship between property and monarchy, leading to the collapse of the latter. In these tracts, the transmission of property ideally followed exact inheritance rules, alleviating the conflict between hereditary rights (represented by the Lords) and property rights (represented by the Commons) that had destabilized monarchy. According to J. G. A. Pocock's introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 60-64, Neville's use of the family to argue for strict inheritance rules was precisely what Edmund Burke would later find interesting in republican writing. We, however, see an implicit contradiction between the geneticism organizing the irreverent Isle of Pines and the genealogy organizing aristocratic historiography—the difference between replicating the individual and extending the aristocratic body.

27. Neville, Isle of Pines, title page. For an account of the enormous popularity of this text in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America, see the introductory essay by Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Isle of Pines, 1668: An Essay in Bibliography (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1920).

28. A. Owen Aldridge has discussed the importance of this element in "Polygamy in Early Fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras," PMLA 65 (1950): 464-72.

29. From the fourteenth through the end of the sixteenth century, statutes were periodically enacted and royal proclamations issued that were designed to regulate dress. These laws were supposed to make rank visible. Cloth of gold, for example, could only be worn by members of the royal family, velvet by the aristocracy; silk was permitted to the gentry but not to people of low birth; and so forth. The regulations covered cuts, the use of special fabrics and furs, dyes of a particular hue, and thread and trim. The regulation of these features of dress distinguished between members of the royal family, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons, and knights, between servingmen, yeomen, and husbandmen, and even between wage earners having incomes of 200, 100, 40, 20, 5, and 2 pounds per annum. Despite the obvious difficulties in enforcing these laws, nineteen such proclamations were issued during the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The proclamations were posted throughout the land to ensure that everyone ranked himself or herself in these terms and interpreted the rank and income of other people accordingly. And even though this legislation was vacated in 1604, there were at least a half a dozen attempts in the first two decades of the seventeenth century to introduce new sumptuary regulations. For an account of this legislation and its impact, see N. B. Harte, "State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England," in Trade, Government and Economy in PreIndustrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 132-65.

30. Michael McKeon contends that the genealogy originating in the otherwise unnoteworthy bookkeeper is not grounded in the aristocratic kinship practices it may seem at first to parody. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 251-52.

31. In carrying on a direct conversation between himself and God, Josselin's diary is characteristic of the diaries kept by many devout men and women. For an account of the practice and kinds of diary keeping in England during this period, see Élisabeth Bourcier, Les Journaux privés en Angleterre de 1600 à 1660 (Paris: Publications de Sorbonne, 1976). For an overview of diaries kept by women, see Sara Heller Mendleson, "Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs," Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 181-210.

32. William Haller has explained how diaries kept by puritan saints provided at times biographical information that was appended to the sermons read at their funerals; some kind of personal testimony to one's spiritual struggles was expected to be part of such services. "Always and everywhere in Puritan circles oral tradition extensively supplemented the written hagiography. If the saint had kept no diary, he had at any rate unbosomed himself to his friends." The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570-1643 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 101-2. Though a diary might supply this kind of information, there is no indication that Josselin's diary was written with such a public ceremony in mind.

33. Diary keeping was regularly thought of as a means of tallying up one's gifts from God. Rise of Puritanism , pp. 38-39, 96-99. Owen C. Watkins has discussed this feature with regard to other puritan diarists in The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken, 1972), pp. 18-25. See also George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 6-7, 28-31; J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 72-73, 82-86.

34. On this point, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

35. The framework of a single chapter will not allow us to explain why Hobbes has been excluded from our account of the discursive take-off that allowed words to produce a whole new set of origins both for themselves and for the English "people." But we can suggest (both here and in our later discussion of Defoe) how we would deal with this question. We would begin with the question that perplexed C. B. Macpherson: How can one "reconcile Hobbes's acceptance of bourgeois morality, and his prescription of a state designed to protect and facilitate a life of competition, with the contemporary bourgeois dislike or neglect of Hobbes's doctrine?" Introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 53. We would not attempt to answer the question—as Macpherson does, unsuccessfully—by identifying features in Hobbes's political theory that might have set that theory at odds with the ideology of democracy. Such an argument would not explain a thing if, as we argue, the logic that propelled the writing that emerged in the wake of the English Revolution was inherently conservative. In part 1 of Leviathan, Hobbes puts forward a creationist definition of human nature; in doing so, he reveals his affiliation with the cultural moment that was passing away rather than with one that was emerging. According to Hobbes's epistemology, the mind neither constitutes a territory unto itself nor acquires knowledge in the same way that men acquire property. He lacks a semiotic, then, that would account for the production of interior (personal) and exterior (political) discursive worlds.

36. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.i.2.

37. "Children, when they first come into it, are surrounded with a world of new things, which, by a constant solicitation of their senses, draw the mind constantly to them, forward to take notice of new, and apt to be delighted with the variety of changing Objects ... and so growing up in a constant attention to outward Sensations, seldom make any considerable Reflection on what passes within them, till they come to be of riper Years; and some scarce ever at all" (II.i.8).

38. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 6.

39. In Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 69, Jay Fliegelman writes: "The same 'inclination' that in 1697 Locke had identified with passion and insisted must be suppressed is identified with providence in Defoe's novel." See also Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, pp. 74-81.

40. Literary critics tend either to see Robinson Crusoe as a working out of some model of spiritual autobiography or to focus on Crusoe's acquisition of private property. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, and Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim, have been particularly useful in directing our attention to the puritan writing upon which Defoe drew. The classic description of Crusoe's economic individualism is in Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 60-92. For readings that seek to reconcile the two opposing trends in Crusoe criticism, see, for example, McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, pp. 315-37; John Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 21-63, and Richetti's Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 13-18, 92-96.

41. Homer O. Brown's "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH 38 (1971): 562-90, is particularly useful in calling attention to the contradictions in the novel that arise out of fear.

42. Michael McKeon describes this episode as "the beginning of the movement of narrative 'atonement,' when Character and Narrator come together." Origins of the English Novel, p. 318. We agree with McKeon and others that this is a turning point in the novel, but we would like to rephrase the reason why it is so. When critics focus on events at the level of consciousness, there is a tendency to overlook the degree to which intellectual labor is responsible for displacing and subordinating manual labor.

43. In God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Leopold Damrosch, Jr., notes that " Crusoe reflects the progressive desacralizing of the world that was implicit in Protestantism and that ... ended by disenchanting it altogether" (192). This Weberian concept of Protestantism as progressive secularization overlooks the fact that mystification does not depart with the desacralization of the universe. Indeed, Robinson Crusoe demonstrates how the magical qualities once attributed to God are transferred onto the "self" as God becomes part of personal life in the form of useful knowledge in the service of the individual.

44. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 121-40, identifies this question as the inevitable consequence of challenging the Christian notion of soul, which had ensured man's essential difference from animals and set him above them. With that challenge came the problem of how to preserve the difference between human nature and bestial nature. The problem was resolved by stressing the difference between reason and sensation rather than their continuity and reason's dependency on sensations.

45. For an important discussion of how Defoe's narrative "delineates the subjective order—the structure of feeling" of a disciplinary institution such as the penitentiary, see John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 43-83.

46. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1:288-300. See our discussion in chapter 5.

47. Reprinted in Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 53.

48. Marx, Capital, pp. 168-73.

49. Maximillian E. Novak, in both "Crusoe the King and the Political Evolution of His Island," SEL 2 (1962): 337-50, and Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California, 1962), has suggested that Robinson Crusoe should be read in terms of a theory of property. Although it may start out in that way, in our estimation Crusoe is not so resolved. If, as Novak has suggested, democracy does offer a solution to the problem posed by this novel, then we are forced to rethink the conventional notion of democracy, bringing it much more into line with Foucault's notion of discipline than mainstream literary criticism or historians are generally willing to do. Other critics—such as G. A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter—have argued that the novel is about the spiritual rather than the economic. This seems to us a matter of emphasis. Property in Crusoe is precisely the sort of issue that distinguishes this text from more "orthodox" spiritual autobiographies.

50. See Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company: Jeremy Bentham's Silent Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 58-75.

51. Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-84.

52. On this point, see Leonard Tennenhouse, "Simulating History: A Cockfight for Our Times," The Drama Review 34 (1990): 137-50.