LAUSR

Abstract:Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe was long hailed as the founding myth of "Economic Man," with critics until the mid-twentieth century tending to portray the shipwrecked narrator as the exemplar of utilitarian individualism. The novel's reception among economists from David Ricardo to Karl Marx was largely determined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's revisionary reading, which excluded large parts of the narrative from considera tion. In revisiting the parts that Rousseau thought extraneous, this essay finds that the character of Crusoe is an eminently social being who relies on the charity of several generous benefactors. Their relationships are notably amicable, constituted by mutual trust and goodwill. As an intimate society, they share gifts and ex change favours without apparent regard for profit-making. In representing them selves as generous friends, they belie the economic realities that support their accumulation of wealth. The Crusoe that emerges from an examination of his symbolic activity is one whose prac tices of gift-giving are governed less by reason or notions of utility than by powerful symbols and the relations that inhere in them.