Defoe's Politics

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 concerning society government and kingship.