Defoe's Politics Parliament, Power, Kingship and 'Robinson Crusoe' [Hardcover]

This study restores Defoe's writings and ideas to their seventeenth-century context.This study challenges the critical demand to see Defoe as a 'modern' and counters misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full contextual examination of Defoe's years as a political journalist (16891715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and the monarchy.This study challenges the critical demand to see Defoe as a 'modern' and counters misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full contextual examination of Defoe's years as a political journalist (16891715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and the monarchy.This study of Defoe's politics aims to challenge the critical demand to see Defoe as a modern and to counter misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full examination of Defoe's years as a political reporter and journalist (1689-1715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on contemporary issues: the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and how monarchies are created and maintained as the means of achieving a beneficent political order. At the heart of Defoe's political imagination, Manuel Schonhorn finds the vision of a warrior-king, derived from sources in the Bible, and in ancient and English history. The model illuminates his original reading of Robinson Crusoe, which emerges less in terms of a family romance, a tract for the rising bourgeoisie or a Lockean parable of government, than as a dramatic re-enactment of Defoe's life-long political preoccupations concernlS+