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At home in England, or projecting liberal citizenship in Moll Flanders
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2001 by Yahav-Brown, Amit
In 1957, Ian Watt suggested in The Rise of the Novel that Protestantism and capitalism are the informing logics behind novelistic representations of society. Defoe's novels, inaugurating the new genre in Watt's account, represent communities that privilege individual pursuit of economic possession and manifest the strife and alienation that inevitably plague an order founded on such an ethic. The society envisioned in these novels, Watt points out, resembles the one theorized in the political philosophy of John Locke. Following C.B. Macpherson, we have come to identify this political philosophy as the origins of modern liberalism and to label it "possessive individualism." On such an account, rights-based politics are designed to protect private property, and the autonomy of individuals necessarily comes at the expense of social commitment. As Watt puts it, "[t]he hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality-all are weakened" (64). Thus, in the novelistic vision of "possessive individualism," characters are essentially isolated accumulators of property; Defoe's characters, as Watt describes them, are all "an embodiment of economic individualism" (63), and they, essentially, "all belong on Crusoe's island" (112).
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More recently, critics have challenged the notion that Defoe's vision of modem society is one of tenuously linked, alienated outcasts. For example, John Bender, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), argues that Defoe represents the formation of a society whose bond is based on a homogenizing norm inculcated by social institutions, for which the penitentiary is a paradigm. In the same manner in which Foucault suggests that the rise of liberal individualism is accompanied by the rise of the penitentiary, Bender argues that the highly individualized personalities of Defoe's characters are a product of the disciplining of consciousness to conform with hegemonic norms. Political cohesion, in this model, is derived from the internalization of ideology and the subjectivization of consciousness, a feat achieved through the very architecture of modern cities and through the social institutions that organize daily life.
In the "possessive individualism" model assumed by Watt, persons are first and foremost autonomous economic agents who become rightful citizens only after they have become owners; they voluntarily surrender some of their natural freedoms to the state in exchange for its power to protect their property rights. The political bond, on this account, is a chosen and precarious alliance of economic convenience. In the recent critique of this model of liberalism assumed by Bender, individuals are first and foremost embodiments of ideology, and they become rightful citizens only insofar as they conform to the norms into which they have been disciplined. In this model, the choices of individuals are significantly predetermined by the social institutions that surround them and shape their consciousness from birth. The political bond, on this account, rests not so much on the action of choice as on the content of one's choices, as it is determined by institutional structures.
Neither of these models seems to me to explain adequately the social organization represented in Defoe's novels. Defoe's heroes are, indeed, extraordinarily mobile, and his plots do incessantly repeat the rags-to-riches myth of highly resourceful men and women. However, his heroes also invariably gravitate back to England throughout their lives, even though they make most of their money outside their native country. And England seems to wield this unchosen and economically disadvantageous power in Defoe's plots despite the fact that the social institutions that are supposed to inculcate hegemonic norms are so obviously defective in these stories of disobedient sons, petty criminals, and whores.
What, then, is the logic behind Defoe's vision of social organization? I argue that in Moll Flanders (1722) Defoe projects a rudimentary version of a rightsbased, non-economic, and non-ideological liberal citizenship. Such citizenship is intended to guarantee inalienable access to resources to anyone born under a state's jurisdiction and to do so solely on the basis of their deliberative capacities. And it imagines that the political bond is a strong one, not because citizens are disciplined to conform to hegemonic norms but because the benefits of citizenship make cooperation advantageous for people trying to pursue their interests in a reality of scarce resources. We might identify such citizenship as fundamentally resembling the model John Rawls has recently offered in his Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls's model stipulates rights on deliberative capacities-defining personhood through two fundamental moral characteristics: the reasonable and the rational-and specifies the content of rights as the state's obligation to secure access to primary goods for all citizens.
