Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:03:16.489Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Public Credit; or, The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Terry Mulcaire
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The feminine figure of “Public Credit,” which appears prominently and frequently in early-eighteenth-century Whig texts, is a rich and complex symbolization of early liberal political and economic ideology. In readings of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the Whig libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the collective authors of Cato's Letters, a polemic that had a major influence on American revolutionary ideology), I show that their representations of Credit speak not to the empirical truth of economic value but openly to its imaginary desirability. Credit thus represents a manifest political and cultural strategy of these Whig writers for articulating and defending the values of a liberal market society by representing them as desirable—or, in other words, as aesthetic values.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 5 , October 1999 , pp. 1029 - 1042
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Modem Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph, and Steele, Richard. Selected Essays from The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian. Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1973.Google Scholar
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Barrell, John. The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.Google Scholar
Bloch, Ruth. “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America.” Signs 13 (1987): 37–58.10.1086/494385CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.10.7591/9781501711794CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carswell, John. The South Sea Bubble. London: Cresset, 1961.Google Scholar
Caygill, Howard. Art of Judgement. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.Google Scholar
Chytry, Joseph. Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.Google Scholar
Coleman, James S. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. The Best of Defoe's Review. Ed. William L. Pyne. New York: Columbia UP, 1951.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. Defoe's Review. Facsim. of bk. 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1938.Google Scholar
Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756. London: Macmillan, 1976.Google Scholar
Diggins, John Patrick. The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. New York: Basic, 1984.Google Scholar
Dijkstra, Bram. Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation. London: Macmillan, 1987.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamowy, Ronald. “Cato's Letters, John Locke and the Republican Paradigm.” History of Political Thought 11.2(1990): 273-94.Google Scholar
Ketcham, Michael. Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.Google Scholar
Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana.” PMLA 110 (1995): 1023–34.Google Scholar
Klein, Lawrence. “Shaftesbury, Politeness and Religion.” Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Phillipson, Nicholas and Skinner, Quentin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Klein, Lawrence. “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1984-85): 186–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1984.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962.Google Scholar
McDonald, Forrest. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1976.Google Scholar
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Plumb, J. H., and McKendrick, Neil. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. “Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century.” Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. Levine, George. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Sherman, Sandra. Finance and Fictionality in the Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford UP, 1976. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1984.Google Scholar
Trenchard, John, and Gordon, Thomas. Cato's Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious and Other Important Subjects. Ed. Hamowy, Ronald. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1995.Google Scholar
Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic. Williamsburg: Inst. of Early Amer. History and Culture; Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.Google Scholar