Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vunerability

This is the first exploration of how early modern republican and contemporary radical thought connect with and complement each other. Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self’s ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner’s original new study of writings by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, “Open Subjects” questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be. It traces English republicanism from the late-16 century to the late-17th century.It analyses Renaissance literary texts against classical, early modern and contemporary political thought. It includes new readings of English Renaissance figures in histories of friendship, the public sphere and selfhood.

Reviews of Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vunerability

Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.–Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life