ABSTRACT
That English republicanism's account of entrepreneurial individualism survived the Stuart restoration is more or less a matter of record. What has been less clear is that it survived, not in spite of, but because of Charles IPs regime. For Steven Pincus, the telling detail in this transformation is the displacement of civic virtue with a doctrine of entrepreneurial individualism, which, in turn, argued that the common weal depended upon the wealth and productivity of the individual. Crucially missing from Pincus's otherwise astute analysis, though, is an account of how that liberalism survived the Restoration to flourish under the Williamite regime of the 1690s. This chapter argues that Stuart partisans were well aware of the shift in republican ideology and used pornographic representations of bawds to appropriate the new entrepreneurial individualism for the Crown. For the Stuarts too had to acknowledge the importance of England's merchants to the nation's prosperity, though the crown was also ideologically bound to keep intact the homosocial hierarchies upon which its power theoretically depended. Partisans of the crown were willing to concede that property 'could be created by human endeavor and state endeavor,' but they were not willing to concede that all individuals should do so.1 The entrepreneurial individual's political survival depended upon his willingness to embrace the hierarchies between men that stabilized and fortified the society. To discourage all men who owned or might own property from going the way their republican forbears had gone, crown partisans offered a distopic vision of what the economic world might look like in the absence of homosocial hierarchies. It was a world governed by bawds.
