This chapter, which focuses on King Lear, begins the conversation between Shakespeare and modern political theory that makes up the rest of the book. In the Introduction I cited Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision, which interpreted modern political theory as a web of attempts to adapt politics to two consecutive eruptions existing structures could not contain: first, Reformation religious passions; second, social upheavals caused by the dawning of capitalism. The minimal precondition for agile response to such crises was a state unshackled from medieval societies’ traditional ‘two swords, three estates’ ideology. In practice, of course, Western nation states modernised over hundreds of years, and in markedly different ways depending on local circumstances. Here I focus, theoretically, on one of the process’ major legitimating concepts: the ‘social contract’ authorised by escape from a ‘state of nature’.

A ‘two swords, three estates’ conception prizing, at least officially, religious uniformity and social stasis, is ill-equipped to deal with modernisation pressures rendering creedal pluralism and commercial-technological growth increasingly non-refusable. The social contract idea claims credibility through better accommodating those facts. If government's main purpose is not to perfect us but protect us from each other's worst depredations – lawless violence – then different confessions should ideally have no more difficulty coexisting than people of different eye colour. (The difficult question, taken up in Chapter 5, is how much religions themselves must change to facilitate this project.) And a political order whose foundational purpose is to protect individuals from anarchic violence moves naturally, once this is accomplished, to foregrounding the goods such protection enables and/or relies upon: property accumulation, technological innovation, trade.