Liberalizing contracts : nineteenth century promises through literature, law and history / Anat Rosenberg.

London ; New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

©2018

KD1573 .R67 2018

9781138923706 (hbk. ; alk. paper)
1138923702 (hbk. ; alk. paper)
9781315684888 (ebk)

x, 263 pages ; 24 cm.

(OCoLC)1001453396

"[This book] examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. [The author] does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. [The author] argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress 'from status to contract.' On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move 'from status' has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses - particularly gender and class - rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As [the author] shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies, there is no teleology to such an account."-- Back cover.

"A GlassHouse book."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-256) and index.

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Purchased from the income of the Murray Fund