Seventeenth-century financial volatility drove the modern legal concept of the self.

Evidence

Thus it has been argued that because the massive growth of public debt in the seventeenth century increased the precariousness and volatility of property—especially the newer financial forms of property, distinct from the older, landed, “real” property—this development contributed to an intensified sense of the self’s contingency among the middle and upper classes. If this argument is correct, then Locke’s famous emphasis on natural right as a limit to arbitrary government may also be closely linked to the desire to stabilize the contingent character of the self through a legal concept of the person. The essence of the human comes to be circumscribed by legal discourse: The human being is a sovereign, self-owning agent—essentially suspicious of others—and not merely a subject conscious of his or her own identity. It is on this basis that the secularist principle of the right to freedom of belief and expression was crafted. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to C.B. Macpherson’s possessive individualism thesis and to contemporary writing on paper money and the modern self.
• SEED: An essay angle: the legal ‘self-owning agent’ as a financial-hedge invention rather than a philosophical discovery.
• DEFINE: Defines the modern secular self as a legal construct born from material contingency.