ABSTRACT

Crown loyalists' argument that the democratic body was pornographic because it was 'many-headed,' fragmented and thus corrosive of all forms of public power and public conversation, like most political transformations, was uneven and ad hoc.1 The Restoration's first years had enabled crown partisans to elaborate the pornographic body as a description of the way radicalism fragmented individuals like Henry Marten or Mary Ward by making their intentions and actions disjunctive. But, as we saw earlier, by 1683, loyalists were including in their vision of the pornographic body a critique of collective action and class ambition. What was it that had brought these two accounts of individual and collective identity into conjunction? In 1668, the royalist antidemocratic polemic faltered badly as corporate identity suddenly had ceased to be a vague threat that lurked in the nation's past and had become a real menace that needed to be addressed.2