Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Discourses of Law)

Book Details

• Publisher: Routledge

• Author: Anat Rosenberg

• Language: English

• Edition: 1

• ISBN: 9780367150839

• Pages: 264

• Cover: Paperback

• Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches

About The Book

Liberalizing Contracts by Anat Rosenberg presents a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study that reexamines the evolution of liberal thought in 19th-century England through the legal and cultural lens of contract law. At the heart of the book is a compelling dialogue between canonical realist novels and the legal history of Victorian contracts, revealing how deeply literature and law intertwined in shaping liberal ideologies.

Rosenberg critically revisits Henry Maine’s aphorism on historical progress “from status to contract,” and argues that prevailing interpretations of liberalism in legal scholarship have missed the nuanced forms of relationality embedded in Victorian contractual thought. She uncovers how contracts were not simply legal mechanisms of individual autonomy but also deeply entangled with gender and class structures, offering a richer, more complex picture of liberalism's social vision.

Rather than portraying liberalism as a force that entirely dismantled traditional hierarchies, the book proposes that it redefined them—particularly in terms of status, gender, and class—maintaining yet transforming social hierarchies through legal and cultural reinterpretations.

This insightful work is essential reading for scholars of legal history, political theory, Victorian studies, and feminist theory, offering a fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the evolution of liberalism and the role of contract law in shaping modern societal values.