Competing Models of Socially Constructed Economic Man: Differentiating Defoe's Crusoe from the Robinson of Neoclassical Economics

Abstract

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seldom been read as an explicitly political text. When it has, it appears that the central character was designed to warn the early eighteenth-century reader against political challenges to the existing economic order. Insofar as Defoe's Crusoe stands for ‘economic man’, he is a reflection of historically produced assumptions about the need for social conformity, not the embodiment of any genuinely essential economic characteristics. This insight is used to compare Defoe's conception of economic man with that of the neoclassical Robinson Crusoe economy. On the most important of the ostensibly generic principles espoused by neoclassical theorists, their ‘Robinson’ has no parallels with Defoe's Crusoe. Despite the shared name, two quite distinct social constructions serve two equally distinct pedagogical purposes. Defoe's Crusoe extols the virtues of passive middle-class sobriety for effective social organisation; the neoclassical Robinson champions the establishment of markets for the sake of productive efficiency.

Keywords:

• economic man
• Defoe's Crusoe
• neoclassical Robinson
• inter-temporality
• scarcity
• money

Notes

I am indebted to the referee who saw more in this aspect of my argument than I had initially done and who encouraged me to pursue this line of reasoning. More generally, I wish to thank the three anonymous referees and the editors of NPE for providing me with the means of ensuring that the published version of the article represents a significant improvement on my original submission.

Throughout, I restrict myself to analysing the time that Crusoe spends alone on the island. It might be said that this is an unfortunate restriction, because it eliminates from the study Friday, the cannibals, the mutineers and the captain whose ship eventually returns Crusoe to society. In all of these relationships Crusoe proves that he is a product of his society, and they could therefore be used to illustrate further my main claims. However, my priority is to keep the analysis focused on the same context as that occupied by the neoclassical Robinson.

All of the references to the text of Robinson Crusoe take this form and they relate to Defoe (1985 [1719]) listed in the bibliography.

Crusoe's father had prepared him for the legal profession (p. 27).

The voyage that shipwrecked Crusoe was slave-running (p. 59).