Of all the inventions put to metaphor in early political economy, none seems more appropriate than the clock.
It was a major technological accomplishment of the pre-industrial era.1 Once designed and set in motion, a clock operates in an orderly way under its own power, much as we would like societies to behave.
Its very purpose is social: to coordinate the activities of individuals seeking to find one another at the same place at the same time. One could describe the agreement to observe a common demarcation of time as one of the first and most important social contracts. The concept of a contract, a set of explicit rules more formal than the traditional covenant was as much a product of mercantile society as the clock itself. Like clocks, contracts are driven by a spring—the pursuit of mutual self-interest.When used to describe the origin of political governance, the word “contract” itself is a metaphor. No state was ever formed by individuals signing on a dotted line, but the concept of a social contract was an appealing one for critics of the patriarchal feudal order, because it evoked the role of rational negotiation. This role was initially restricted to adult men.2 Women had no natural rights, only natural obligations. Both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke bolstered this view by minimizing the importance of male relationships that might have fostered obligation, ‘‘as if a man were author of himself and knew no other kin.”3
Contention between pioneers of individualism and conservative defenders of feudal patriarchy was complicated by feminist critics who rejected both. Mary Astell in Britain and Poulain de la Barre in France eloquently insisted that women's care for children and family should be considered a form of social labor. Early proponents of political economy viewed the family as a unit of production and population growth as a source of wealth. William Petty, John Grant, and Gregory King were less concerned with women’s rights than with mothers' fertility. But their fascination with the rules of monogamy and threat of adultery revealed the sexual dimensions of their contractual logic. They believed that societies could and should control the springs of female desire.