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Assume a Can Opener: Notes on the Making of an ‘Economic’

Michael White Monash University

I was born to be my own Destroyer. Robinson Crusoe

In the wake of the global financial crisis, particular criticism was directed at macroeconomic DSGE models that assume behaviour can be represented by a representative agent with rational expectations, as in a ‘Robinson Crusoe economy’ set out in real business cycle models from the 1980s.1 Thirty years ago, an analysis of how an ‘economic’ Crusoe came to be produced would draw its contemporary reference points from microeconomics.2 Today, with the dominance of dogmatic claims about the necessity of a ‘microfoundations’ for macroeconomics [King 2012], the reference points are much broader. One reason why the formation of a Crusoe economy can be thought of as a production is that, as has often been noted, the illustrative device or metaphor has no discursive relationship, other than in the invocation of a name or two and a geographical location, with its ostensible source, ’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). If Defoe’s Crusoe (and ) did not behave in the ways specified by the economic model, the latter could not have been the result of simply extracting elements from Defoe’s text.

The initial formulation of the economic Crusoe has been traced to a series of changes during the nineteenth century that can be summarised as follows.3 The figure of Crusoe had no place in Classical Political Economy as represented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. While they were criticised by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse for using ‘’ in their discussion of deer-beaver exchanges to illustrate value theory [Smith 1976, Introduction; 1, vi; Ricardo 1951, ch. 1], Marx was

1 For the criticisms, Lux and Westerhoff 2009; Colander et al. 2009. For Crusoe real business cycle models, Long and Plosser 1983; Plosser 1989. 2 See, for example, Ruffin 1972, where Crusoe is awarded a “split personality” so as to be both a producer and a consumer. 3 See White 1982; idem. 1987; Kern 2011; Watson 2011; Winter 2013. Grapard and Hewitson 2011 also considers a broader range of issues than those discussed here. 2 referring to a strand of an eighteenth–century literature that depicted the stadial development of society. Smith’s and Ricardo’s analysis of exchange in ‘that early and rude state of society’ could be read as a remnant of that literature, reworked, in Smith’s case, as the four-stage theory of economy and society.4 Instead, the first direct references to Crusoe by English-speaking political economists appeared in the early nineteenth century, although these were rather brief. The more detailed references to, or formulations of, Crusoe as an economic actor only appeared after the mid-nineteenth century with Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies (1850), followed by Henry Carey’s Principles of Social Science (1858) and, ironically, Marx’s Capital (1867). The trope was then appropriated and reworked by the early marginalists. This economic Crusoe was not constructed solely within the domain of political economy as it depended, in part, on rewritings of Defoe’s text and was also consistent with a particular reading of that text by British literati after the mid- nineteenth century. Just as importantly, Crusoe provided a defence against criticisms of the marginalists’ depiction of actors with autonomous preferences and hence, more generally, their use of ‘methodological individualism’ which also marks the Crusoe economies of today.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify three issues in the summary regarding the formation of the Crusoe economy in the nineteenth century. The first is why references to Crusoe had such a limited role early in the century. The discussion in that period was dominated by a question that can be summarised as: given a particular definition of value, can a figure such as Crusoe have any role in the analysis? Posed in that way, the possibility of using Crusoe as an illustrative device was limited. W. Stanley Jevons used that frame of reference in his Theory of Political Economy (TPE), which can help explain why Crusoe played such a fleeting role in that first detailed exposition of British marginalism (Section 1).

Although Jevons probably referred to, but made no substantive use of, the new economic Crusoe produced by the mid-nineteenth century, Section 2 provides new

4 It was also common in the physiocratic literature to distinguish between production by an ‘isolated man’ as compared with a social division of labour [van den Berg and Salvat 2001, pp.163-5]. In that context, Richard van den Berg has found a reference to Crusoe, used to distinguish between use and exchange value, in a manuscript by the Abbe Andre Morellet, which possibly dates from the 1760s. See his message on the SHOE email list, 28 September 2012: https://listserv.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1209d&L=shoe&T=0&P=1192. 3 information to show why that construction had no stable basis in Defoe’s text. Read in terms of the categories of ‘race’ and ‘civilisation’, Robinson Crusoe was rejected as a misleading, if not dangerous, narrative. Bastiat’s prevarications on that score illustrate how the solution to the perceived defects in Defoe’s text was to construct a new fictional Crusoe. It was the rewritten Crusoe, produced in part by drawing on the example of previous rewritings of Defoe’s text, which was to dominate in economics. By the end of the nineteenth century, for those deploying the now stabilised figure of Crusoe, the previous questions of whether it was possible to use the device or whether its verisimilitude was problematic had been erased. Finally, Jevons’ references to Crusoe have a broader significance in that they enable consideration of the common characterisation of early marginalist economics utilising methodological individualism as part of a shift in the analytical focus of political economy from production and distribution to exchange and consumption (Section 3).

1. A `Science of Exchanges’?

In the opening paragraph of his chapter on the theory of capital in the first edition of TPE, Jevons referred to a Crusoe figure, albeit in the form of on whose story Defoe had probably drawn when writing Robinson Crusoe: In considering the nature and principles of Capital, we enter a distinct branch of our subject. There is no close or necessary connexion between the employment of capital and the processes of exchange. Both by the use of capital and by exchange we are enabled vastly to increase the sum of utility which we enjoy; but it is conceivable that we might have the advantages of capital without those of exchange. An isolated man like Alexander Selkirk, or an isolated family, might feel the benefit of a stock of provisions, tools and other means of facilitating industry, although cut off from traffic with any others of the race. Political Economy, then, is not solely the science of Exchange or Value: it is also the science of Capital" [Jevons 1871, pp.212-3].5

5 For Selkirk, see Selcraig 2005. Jevons altered the paragraph in the second edition, changing “science of Capital” to “science of capitalization”, substituting "other men" for “race”, and omitting the "isolated family", which was presumably a reference to The Swiss Family Robinson by J. D. Wyss (1812) [Jevons 1879, p.241]. In 1857, near the end of his Antipodean interlude, Jevons wrote that he now took “quite a romantic view of wild primeval forests and cannibal blacks. Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Masterman Ready I used to think amusing but childish fiction, yet the true incidents which happen in 4

Here, the figures of Selkirk and the isolated family were used to illustrate the argument that the analyses of exchange and capital were separate topics in that a stock of produced goods could be used to maximise utility, independently of exchange. Hence, political economy could not be characterised as ‘the science of exchange or value’. Jevons clearly regarded that point as important because he had previously twice referred to it in TPE. In the chapter on the theory of utility, when analysing the “distribution of commodity in different uses”, he remarked that Barley may be used either to make beer, spirits, bread, or to feed cattle … Imagine, then, a community in the possession of a certain stock of barley; what principles will regulate their mode of consuming it? Or, as we have not yet reached the subject of exchange, imagine an isolated family, or even an individual, possessing an adequate stock, and using some in one way and some in another. The theory of utility gives, theoretically speaking, a complete solution of the question.

The ‘complete solution’ of equalising the final degree of utility in different uses was then discussed in some detail [Jevons 1871, pp.68-71]. The argument was reiterated in the next chapter on exchange, where Jevons noted that "some economists have regarded their science as treating of this operation alone". While agreeing that "high importance" should be "attributed to exchange", Jevons added that trade "is not indeed the only method of Economy: a single individual may gain in utility by a proper consumption of the stock in his possession. The best employment of labour and capital by a single person is also a question disconnected from that of exchange, and which must yet be treated in the science" [Jevons 1871, pp.79-80].

Jevons’ statements indicate his broad agreement with John Stuart Mill in a long- running debate as to whether the theoretical object of political economy should be designated as `the science of exchanges’. In the opening paragraph of the analysis of value in his Principles of Political Economy, Mill noted that some "thinkers" had reduced political economy to an analysis of exchange and that one "eminent writer has proposed as a name for Political Economy, `Catallactics,' or the science of exchanges" [Mill 1871, p.535]. The eminent writer was clearly Archbishop Richard Whately, who claimed in his Introductory Lectures on Political Economy that,

Australia or … Polynesia … are quite as singular and interesting, minus a little of the coleur de rose” [Black 1973-81, 2, pp.332-33]. 5 because political economy was "concerned, universally, and exclusively, about exchanges”, Alexander Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe "is in a situation of which Political Economy takes no cognizance" [Whately 1831, pp.6-9].6 That rhetorical device was not new in British political economy as Nassau Senior, Whately’s predecessor in the Drummond chair at Oxford University, had produced a more erudite version in one of his lectures: To suppose an attempt by Robinson Crusoe to regulate the distribution of commodities according to the laws of Political Economy would resemble the celebrated soliloquy of an Amphisbaena, or the cabinet council held Julio et Caesare consulibus … Political economy considers men in that more advanced state … in which each individual relies on his companions for the greater part, in many cases for the whole of what he consumes, and supplies his own wants principally or wholly by the exchanges in which he contributes to theirs [cited Levy 1918, pp.519-20].7

Mill was also not the first to reject Whately’s argument. In 1834, William Forster Lloyd, Whately’s successor in the Drummond chair of Political Economy at Oxford University, insisted that value should instead be defined “to mean the esteem in which any object is held". To illustrate how value could be identified in a society “such as exists in England” and in the behaviour of an “isolated individual”, Lloyd included two pages of quotations from Robinson Crusoe, although he acknowledged that the text did not contain “any thing so much to the point as I could have wished” [Lloyd 1834, pp.11, 22-23, 21].8

Five years later, the American economist Henry Carey used the device of an “individual of mature age, thrown upon and sole occupant of an island, or an extensive body of land of average fertility”, to show that “labour is the sole source of value”. The individual would gather food where the cost was the amount of labour required, construct a dwelling (without “implements”) and then procure a further

6 All emphases in quotations appear in the original sources. 7 Thomas Hodgskin made the analogous point that, if there was “only one person in existence, he would be obliged, like Robinson Crusoe, to provide for all his wants himself, and there could be no division of labour” [Hodgskin 1827, p.117]. John Gray also argued that, in “a state of society … [to] be able to exchange is … as important, as it was to Robinson Crusoe to produce” [Gray 1831, pp.20-21]. 8 For the context of the disagreement between Whately and Lloyd over value theory, see Moore and White 2010, pp.231-33. 6 source of food for the winter. These were different types of property “to which he attaches the idea of ‘value’”, which was “regulated by the cost of production – by the quantity of labour he has been obliged to give in exchange for them”. The same rule would govern any exchange with “another individual … a few miles from him” [Carey 1837, pp.7,8,19]. This relation between value and cost of production was diametrically opposed to that of Whately and Carey’s citation of the latter’s Lectures [ibid. viii] might suggest that, while it does not actually refer to Crusoe, his analysis was designed to counter the Archbishop’s position. Nevertheless, the terms of Carey’s argument indicate that he was reworking the deer-beaver illustrations used by Adam Smith and Ricardo, albeit with the introduction of the allocation of labour time by a single actor.

Whately, however, was not without supporters. In 1845 Charles Knight cited his Lectures, referring to Crusoe and arguing that it was exchange “which makes man the lord of the world” [Knight 1845, pp.16,18]. In 1862, Henry Dunning Macleod delivered a paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Cambridge (the same meeting at which Jevons' ‘Brief Account’ of his marginalist analysis was read [Jevons 1866]), citing both Whately and Frederic Bastiat in support of his declaration that political economy was the science of exchanges, the definition “to which the majority of Modern Economists are now gravitating” [Macleod 1862, p.3]. While other economists were often hostile to Macleod’s work, Jevons avoided any direct public criticism although, as indicated above, he made clear in TPE that he rejected the argument that the domain of political economy could be characterised as the science of exchanges, a point that was reiterated in his unfinished Principles of Economics [Jevons 1905, p.49]. More privately, he was exasperated by Whately’s position, as he recorded in a manuscript note: “Whately … holds that taxation is an exchange!”9 Jevons might have been reminded of that matter in early 1870, shortly before he began writing up TPE for publication, when, in one of a series of public lectures to which Jevons contributed, his former teacher, W.B. Hodgson, restated Whately's general position [Hodgson 1870, p.59]. Jevons’ discussion in TPE with its mention of Alexander Selkirk was thus a reference to the continuing debate within British political economy, which had followed Whately’s glib statement that Crusoe or

9 Undated note in the Jevons Archive, John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, JA 6/22/43. If Jevons was referring here to Whately’s Lectures, he must have been using the second edition because the relevant note on taxation did not appear in the first [Whately 1832, pp.10n-11n; cf. idem. 1831, pp.10-11]. See also Whately 1853, pp.69–70. 7

Selkirk ‘is in a situation of which Political Economy takes no cognizance’. At the same time, the terms of Jevons’ discussion suggest that he was also referring to Bastiat.

In 1873, Jevons reviewed J.E. Cairnes' Essays on Political Economy which contained a trenchant critique of the value theory in Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies [Cairnes 1873, pp.312–44]. As Bastiat had based his theory on the claim that “Exchange is Political Economy” [Bastiat 1860, p.70], it is perhaps not surprising that Jevons acknowledged Cairnes had shown the “inadequacy” of Bastiat’s value theory“.10 Nevertheless, he argued that the critique had paid only partial justice to the talent with which Bastiat expounded and illustrated the truths of political economy … Mr. Cairnes might have discovered more merit in Bastiat and far less in Comte. He remarks that the most recent and important works in political economy, those, for example, of M. Courcelle- Seneuil, make little reference to Bastiat so that he has no following; but we are much mistaken if the general disposition of the subject by Seneuil, followed since by Professor Hearn, of Melbourne in his `Plutology', is not derived from Bastiat ... Mr. Mill has most erroneously denied that consumption of wealth is a branch of political economy ... It is probable that when the true logical order of the treatment of the doctrines of the science comes to be carefully reconsidered, the order adopted by Mr. Mill will be rejected and that of Bastiat more clearly followed [Jevons 1873].11

Much the same point had been made in TPE, where Mill was criticised for arguing that there were no known "laws of the consumption of wealth" [Mill 1844, p.132n], while Bastiat (among others) was praised for arguing that “human wants are the ultimate object of Economy”. In that regard, Jevons approvingly cited Bastiat’s aphorism from the Harmonies that “wants, efforts, satisfaction … is the circle of Political Economy” [Bastiat 1860, p.65; Jevons 1871, p.48]. Bastiat referred to that aphorism at the beginning of his chapter on capital in the Harmonies when he claimed that the same "economic laws" prevailed whether the analysis was

10 Jevons was also critical of Bastiat's treatment of land and rent, as indicated in a July 1882 letter: “I do not think you need to trouble yourself much about Bastiat’s opinions in regard to land. They are not, in my opinion, well founded” [Black 1973-81, V, pp.196-97]. 11 A decade before, Jevons had also been effusive in his praise for Jean Gustave Courcelle- Seneuil’s Traité Théorique et Pratique d'Economie Politique (1858) and William Hearn’s Plutology (1863) [Jevons 1864]. 8 concerned with "a numerous agglomeration of men or of only two individuals, or even a single individual condemned by circumstances to live in isolation". Robinson Crusoe thus represented the “whole economic evolution of … want, effort, satisfaction ... [H]e would be enabled to form an idea of the entire mechanism, even when thus reduced to its greatest simplicity”. Crusoe illustrated, for example, how time could be allocated to produce capital instruments with tools, materials and provisions. In making tools, Crusoe would calculate how much work was required to produce "an equal satisfaction at a smaller expense of effort, or a greater amount of satisfaction with the same effort" [Bastiat 1860, pp.166,167].

The use of Selkirk/Crusoe at the beginning of the chapters on capital in both the Harmonies and TPE suggests that Jevons’ comments were, in part, a reference to Bastiat. However, although the calculating Crusoe of Bastiat might well have appealed to Jevons, the respective roles of that device were quite different in that Jevons’ Selkirk did not construct productive capacity and hence was not used to illustrate the principles of his capital theory. Instead, Selkirk was depicted as working with a given stock of provisions and tools so as to refer to the allocation of that stock between different uses. That was consistent with Jevons’ analytical focus on the older question of whether the domain of political economy should be characterised as the science of exchanges and hence whether value should be understood to mean exchange value. Posed in that way, references to the relevance of Crusoe had a limited role as they were largely restricted to agreeing with or countering Whately’s statement. In the preceding literature, Carey’s more detailed discussion was the exception that proves the rule, as it owed a good deal to the reworked ‘Robinsonades’ of Smith and Ricardo.

That analytical context was also consistent with a further reference to Crusoe added in the second edition of TPE. In a new section discussing different “popular” meanings of the word `value’, Jevons noted that it had been used to mean either an exchange ratio or the “intensity of desire or esteem for a thing”. The latter was “identical” with his concept of the final degree of utility of a commodity, which he illustrated by remarking that “Robinson Crusoe must have looked upon each of his possessions with varying esteem and desire for more, although he was incapable of exchanging with any other person” [Jevons 1879, p.87]. Once again, the point was to show that exchange should not be regarded as the defining characteristic of the domain of political economy. While Jevons rejected that characterisation by Macleod and Bastiat, however, he made no explicit mention of them in that regard. Indeed, he 9 praised both in TPE for other aspects of their work. That was consistent with his rhetorical strategy regarding a number of critics of the current orthodoxy, which was to praise those aspects of their work with which he agreed, while either refusing to criticise other aspects or not naming them when indicating his dissent from their position.12 Jevons’ limited references to Selkirk/Crusoe can thus be understood as both an intervention in the debate as to whether political economy should be designated as the science of exchanges and as part of a rhetorical strategy to support critics of the prevailing orthodoxy.

2. Crusoe, Race and Civilisation

The new mid-nineteenth century figure of Crusoe was produced in the context of readings of Robinson Crusoe which problematised its verisimilitude and rewritings of that text to address the perceived deficiencies in its narrative. Two of the categories used to evaluate Robinson Crusoe in that regard were ‘race’ and ‘civilization’. Whately, for example, did not simply dismiss the figure of Crusoe as irrelevant for political economy because it was inconsistent with his definition of value. He also made clear that he objected to the verisimilitude of Defoe’s text. The basis for that criticism was outlined in a discussion of how the social division of labour ("the distribution of employments") led to "the progress of society" in his Introductory Lectures. This was designed to show that political economy was part of a "Natural Theology", so that the division of labour and progress demonstrated providential design [Whately 1831, pp.152, 111, 113]. To illustrate this, Whately criticised an argument, “apparently” assumed “by several writers on Political-Economy”, who had “described the case of a supposed race of savages, subsisting on the spontaneous productions of the earth, and the precarious supplies of hunting and fishing; and have then traced the steps by which the various arts of life would gradually have arisen, and advanced more and more towards perfection”, via the division of labour [ibid. p.119]. Although no references were given, Whately regarded the assumption as nonsense because there was no evidence “of a tribe of savages, properly so styled, rising into a civilized state, without instruction and assistance from people already civilized”. Indeed, “civilized Man has not emerged from the savage state … [and] the progress of any community in civilization, by its own internal means, must always

12 For the contemporary hostility towards Macleod and the ways in which Jevons attempted to negotiate around both Macleod and his critics, see White 2004; 2010. 10 have begun from a condition removed from that of complete barbarism” [ibid. pp. 122, 119]. That was consistent with the Book of Genesis which describes Man as not having been, like the brutes, created, and then left to provide for himself by his innate bodily and mental faculties, but as having received, in the first instance, immediate divine instructions and communications: and so early, according to this account, was the division of labour, that of the first two men who were born of woman, the one was a keeper of cattle, and the other a tiller of the ground [ibid. pp.122- 23].

As Genesis was “an historical record of acknowledged antiquity”, it followed from the “impossibility of men's emerging unaided from a completely savage state” that “all savages must originally have degenerated from a more civilized state of existence” [ibid. pp.123, 129].13 Moreover, there was “no good reason for calling the condition of the rudest savages ‘a state of nature’”: the natural state of man must … be reckoned not that in which his intellectual and moral growth are as it were stunted, and permanently repressed, but one in which his original endowments are … enabled to exercise themselves, and to expand … and, especially, in which that characteristic of our species, the tendency towards progressive improvement, is permitted to come into play [ibid. pp. 137,138].

It was on the basis of these claims about degeneracy and misuse of the term ‘natural state’ that, in his Elements of Rhetoric, Whately remarked that Robinson Crusoe would have appeared less apparently natural if Friday and the other savages had been represented with the indocility and other qualities which really belong to such beings as the Brazilian cannibals; and if the hero himself had been represented with that half-brutish apathetic despondency, and carelessness about all comforts

13 Having read Whately’s Introductory Lectures in 1857 while in Australia, Jevons approved of much of the analysis but he objected to this attempt to establish "the truth of Genesis … The gift of reason was necessary in the first place to make man, but unassisted reason is I believe always capable of raising itself and has produced all the various conditions of the human race from the Australian aboriginal to the most refined & energetic Anglo Saxon, the ultimate limit of the advancement of the latter being as yet completely out of sight” [Black and Konekamp 1972, p.159]. 11

demanding steady exertion, which are the really natural results of a life of utter solitude [Whately 1846, p.50].

The reference to the ‘indocility’ of ‘savages’ was clarified in a posthumously published essay where Whately insisted that Robinson Crusoe was implausible because, while “savages … are represented as ferocious … and ignorant” (a point with which he agreed), they also appeared as “intelligent, and docile, and easily susceptible of civilisation”. That was grossly misleading. A “missionary” might be able to make some “progress … in civilizing … the second or third generation of savages”, but Defoe’s text failed to give the unwary reader a “full … estimate [of] the brutish stupidity, the childish silliness, and the perverse indocility, of the savage character”. Indeed, by careful examination of “all the accounts that are given of savages, by those who have had actual intercourse with them, we shall inevitably come to the conclusion that the representation of savages, as given by Defoe, involves a complete moral impossibility” [Whately 1865, p.340-42].14

Bastiat would have none of this so far as ‘savages’ were concerned. In “Something Else”, an essay first published in 1847, he presented a dialogue between Crusoe and Friday on the benefits of trade. Here, it was Friday who understood a (crude) version of based on labour time, while Crusoe was both ignorant and illogical, basing his discussion on the premise that “labour is wealth”. There was one element in the story that reflected an aspect of Robinson Crusoe. Although Friday was presented as having the better of the argument, with “Robinson possessing a greater ascendant over Friday, his opinion prevailed”. Bastiat did not explain what ‘a greater ascendant’ meant or entailed [Bastiat 1873, pp.210-11, 212-15], and it was Stephen Hymer who subsequently examined the power relationship between Crusoe and Friday [Hymer 1971]. For the rest, however, the dialogue was clearly Bastiat’s invention, as it has no parallel in Defoe’s text.15 That was consistent with the figure of

14 It has been suggested that the holders of the Trinity College Dublin chair in political economy, which had been endowed by Whately, were engaged in a “struggle against racism” [Peart and Levy 2010]. If so, the struggle could have started close to home. 15 It might also be noted that, in The Past, the Present, and the Future (1848), Henry Carey altered his 1837 argument (see above) with a potted account of cultivation and the development of an economy over time, which begins “The first cultivator, the Robinson Crusoe of his day, provided however with a wife” [Carey 1848, p.1]. Passages from this text were repeated and expanded in the first volume of his Principles of Social Science with 12

Crusoe in the capital chapter in the Harmonies, as Bastiat indicated when he referred to his “supposed Robinson Crusoe”. Indeed, he undermined the verisimilitude of the illustrative device by prefacing his discussion with the qualification, “if … [Crusoe] could exist for some time in an isolated state” [Bastiat 1860, pp.166, 167]. The basis for the proviso had been discussed previously in the Harmonies when Bastiat provided a general rationale for his claim that ‘exchange is political economy’. He defended this, in part, by criticising J.J. Rousseau who, Bastiat argued, had claimed that “isolation was man’s natural state, and, consequently, that society was a human invention”, which depended on “convention” and hence the importance of the “legislator”. For Bastiat, however, the “state of nature” or “absolute isolation, the absence of all relations among men, is only an idle fancy coined in the brain of Rousseau”. Instead, “society is our state of nature” and “man in an isolated state of nature cannot exist” [Bastiat 1860, pp.28, 67, 71]. To illustrate the point, he referred to Robinson Crusoe which has shown us man surmounting by his energy, his activity, his intelligence, the difficulties of absolute solitude … [having been] accidentally cut off from civilisation. It was part of Defoe’s plan to throw Robinson Crusoe into the island of Juan Fernandez alone, naked, deprived of all that the union of efforts, the division of employments, exchange, society, add to the human powers. And yet … Defoe would have taken away from his tale even the shadow of probability if … he had not made forced concessions to the social state, by admitting that his hero had saved from the shipwreck some indispensable things, such as provisions, gunpowder, a gun, hatchet, a knife, cords, planks, iron, &c; a decisive proof that society is the necessary medium in which man lives … And, observe that Robinson Crusoe carried with him into solitude another social treasure, a thousand times more precious than all these … his ideas, his recollections, his experience, above all, his language without which he would not have been able to hold converse with himself, that is to say, to think [Bastiat 1860, pp.74-75].16

extensive references to Crusoe and Friday (see, for example, Carey 1858, pp.96-99, 147-51, 181-2, 198). 16 As indicated by Stephen Hymer (1971), the items taken from the shipwreck were more extensive than Bastiat suggested. 13

Putting the fiction about ‘Defoe’s plan’ to one side,17 Bastiat’s references to Crusoe in the Harmonies are analytically incoherent. On the one hand, a person like Crusoe “in a state of isolation would infallibly perish in a few hours” [Bastiat 1860, p.75], where that state precluded the use of commodities from the shipwreck. On the other hand, the Crusoe of the capital chapter has no shipwreck items to use while constructing capital goods. Bastiat signalled the contradiction with the proviso in the capital chapter that it was doubtful whether such a person could survive.

If the argument is peculiar, the discussion does suggest one resource on which Bastiat might have drawn in constructing the ‘supposed’ Crusoe of the capital chapter and the ‘Something Else’ essay. Although the Harmonies only cited Rousseau’s Social Contract, the juxtaposition of Crusoe and Rousseau suggests that Bastiat was also referring to Emile (1762), where Rousseau argued that Robinson Crusoe was the only book to be read by Emile as it was “the best treatise on an education according to nature”. That, however, required a particular reading of the text so that it was “stripped of irrelevant matter” by focussing on the shipwreck and the island sojurn. The story could then be clearly understood as Crusoe on his island, deprived of the help of his fellow-men, without the means of carrying on the various arts, yet finding food, preserving his life, and procuring a certain amount of comfort … The condition … is not that of a social being … [but Emile] should use it as a standard of comparison for all other conditions. The surest way to raise him above prejudice and to base his judgements on the true relations of things, is to put him in the place of a solitary man, and to judge all things as they would be judged by such a man in relation to their own utility [Rousseau 1974, p.147].

A further point of reference for Bastiat could have been Robinson der Jungere (1779), a rewriting of Defoe’s text by Johann Heinrich Campe. That link was suggested by Ian Watt, who noted that Campe, “the headmaster of the Philanthropium at Dessau … acted on Rousseau’s suggestion that only the island episode was improving, and produced a Nouveau Robinson for the young which superseded Defoe’s original version both in France and Germany. In it, the stock of

17 Bastiat was not a particularly close reader of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was shipwrecked off the mouth of the Orinoco river, which drains into the Atlantic ocean. It was Alexander Selkirk who was marooned on one of the islands in the Juan Fernandez archipelago in the South Pacific. 14 tools [from the shipwreck] was omitted” [Watt 1951, p.108].18 Two other features of that text suggest Bastiat could have followed Campe’s lead in his comments about Crusoe and political economy. The first was Campe’s stress on the role of language. His Crusoe speaks to animals, particularly a parrot which can mimic some sounds. The point was that the “mere sound of a supposedly human voice reinstates Robinson as a civilized human being; the power of language (re)affirms his identity as a member of the cultured European community” [von Merveldt 2013, p.3]. The second feature, which is notable in the context of Bastiat’s ‘Something Else’ essay where Friday understood the ‘correct’ argument on trade, is that Campe had Friday learning German from Crusoe. This not only facilitated communication with Crusoe but, more generally, “linguistic progress … allows the former savage and cannibal to eventually become Robinson’s civilized equal and finally to lead a new and fulfilling life as a cultured and fully integrated member of the German middle class” [von Merveldt 2013, p.3].

It need not be surprising if Bastiat drew, in part, on the example of Robinson der Jungere as, in his Entwickelung of 1854, Hermann Gossen directly referred to that text to illustrate his discussion of work in terms of pleasure and pain [Gossen 1983 [1854], p. 54].19 The economic Crusoe produced after the mid-nineteenth century was thus not simply a fiction, in that it bore no relation to Defoe’s text other than in the invocation of a name or two and a geographical location, but also drew on a rewriting of Defoe’s text. What is striking about Bastiat’s Harmonies in that regard is the way it presented the isolated actor on the island and ‘deconstructed’ the verisimilitude of that device. It might be thought that the two different Crusoes in the Harmonies could be reconciled via Bastiat’s comment, made in the same text but without reference to Crusoe, that “Economical science labours under a disadvantage in being obliged to have recourse to hypothetical cases” [Bastiat 1860, p.204]. That is, any doubts about the verisimilitude of the illustrative device could be dismissed on the basis that it was simply a ‘hypothetical’ case which was an ‘abstraction’ from ‘actual’ behaviour. It might not fully represent all the components of that behaviour but was sufficiently accurate to represent some of its basic features in a particular

18 First translated into English in 1788, Campe’s text was also popular in North America [Brigham 1957, pp.141– 43]. 19 The English translation of Gossen is unhelpful on this point in claiming that Campe translated Defoe’s text into German [Gossen 1983 (1854), pp. 302, 307]. Cf. White 1982, p. 135. 15 domain. This would, however, miss the point of the different stories in the Harmonies. On the one hand, there was the construction of a Crusoe figure whose behaviour had no textual referent in Defoe but could, at the same time, claim, in effect, a hypothetical feasibility from that text by invoking the name of Crusoe and an island location. (If feasibility was irrelevant why not refer to, say, Green Man and Blue Man, rather than Crusoe and Friday?). On the other hand, the critique of Rosseau entailed that Crusoe in a ‘natural’ state on the island, a state which precluded items taken from the shipwreck, was not a hypothetical case that was merely an abstraction from the complexity of events and was feasible in that sense. Rather the natural state was not feasible as the actor could not exist for more than a few hours. For the economists who followed Bastiat,20 however, any question of the verisimilitude of the device was erased so that an economic Robinson Crusoe was now free of any potentially troublesome contact with the text from which it obtained its ostensible veracity.

3. Some Questions of Domain

Although Jevons’ references to Selkirk/Crusoe were brief, they enable consideration of a common argument that, when compared with the Classical political economists, the work of the early marginalists such as Jevons can be characterised as a shift in ‘attention’ or ‘focus’ of the analytical domain away from production and distribution to exchange and consumption, coupled with the use of ‘methodological individualism’ to designate behaviour.

While the shift to exchange reading can be presented in different ways, so far as TPE is concerned, it usually depends on privileging chapter IV (“Theory of Exchange”) as compared with chapter V (“Theory of Labour”) and the following chapters on land rent and interest on capital as well as the comments on the distribution of income in the final chapter (“Concluding Remarks”). A clear line is thus drawn between the analysis of consumption and exchange in chapter IV and that of production and distribution in the following chapters. It is assumed that the purpose of Jevons’ project is consistent with and hence can be read off the ordering of chapters in TPE. Quite apart from the

20 For example, Carl Menger who cited Bastiat’s Harmonies and Carey’s Principles of Social Science [Menger (1871) 1950, pp.134-5,156n,166n]. For the limitations that Vilfredo Pareto and Eugen Böhm von Bawerk identified with the Crusoe economy, see Boianovsky 2013. 16 problem that this was not how Jevons first organised his analysis,21 this reading erases the links in TPE between the analysis of -period trading and prices in chapter IV and of long-period equilibrium outcomes in terms of prices and cost of production in the following chapter, where labour was the only variable input. This obscures how Jevons followed his predecessors in distinguishing between market- period and long-period prices and how that analysis was reflected in the organisation of TPE.

One result of privileging chapter IV which is relevant for this paper was indicated by John Hicks when he rejected the use of ‘marginalism’ as “a bad term”, preferring catallactics as “an appropriate designation for neoclassical theory” because it was based “primarily” on exchange, rather than production and distribution [Hicks 1983, pp.9-10]. Amplifying that point, Klaus Hennings argued that chapter IV constituted the “analytical core” of TPE so that "[t]rading is conceived as the archetypal economic activity, and economics as a science of markets, or (to use Whately's term) `catallactics'". To support the argument that "exchange was … transformed … into a cornerstone of the … to be discussed before production and distribution" [Hennings 1986, pp.220,222,224], Hennings cited the following passage from TPE: "Both by the use of capital and by exchange we are enabled to vastly increase the sum of utility which we enjoy" [Jevons 1871, p.212]. For Hennings, "note the juxtaposition: Jevons clearly considered exchange and production as alternative means to increase the satisfaction of wants" [Hennings 1986, p.224]. The quotation is taken from the opening paragraph of the chapter on capital in TPE cited in Section 1 above. However, as was also explained above, in that paragraph Jevons was making precisely the opposite point to that claimed by Hicks and Hennings: political economy could not be reduced to catallactics (see also Steedman 1997, p.57). Far from privileging exchange over production, the opening paragraph in the capital chapter reiterated a quite different point that Jevons had analysed prior to his treatment of exchange. This is not to suggest that TPE did not make a series of substantive analytical and epistemological breaks with preceding work in British political economy. Indeed, I think it is possible to argue that a principal objective of Jevons’ marginalist project was to demonstrate that market transactions were, in general but not exclusively, exchanges of equivalents at the margin. This

21 In the 1862 summary of his marginalist project, Jevons discussed the analysis of labour and rent before he discussed exchange [Jevons 1866]. If the ordering of the analysis explains intentions, what was Jevons doing in 1862? 17 characterisation would, however, apply throughout TPE, including the analysis of the distribution of output between labour and capital. It would not depend on privileging Chapter IV, a procedure that obscures Jevons’ arguments.

Turning to Jevons’ depiction of behaviour with regard to the figure of Crusoe, the key lies in his reference to an “isolated man like Alexander Selkirk, or an isolated family... cut off from traffic with any others of the race” [Jevons 1871, pp.212-3], where ‘race’ needs to considered in terms of his marginal utilty theory. In 1876 Jevons argued that the theory depicted laws of behaviour that were "universally true as regards human nature” and “would apply, more or less completely, to all human beings of whom we have any knowledge" [Jevons 1905, pp.196,197]. However, his analysis was not principally concerned with individuals per se because, as he explained in TPE, the laws of behaviour were only “capable of exact investigation and solution in regard to great masses and wide averages" [Jevons 1871, pp.21-23,90]. In part, those averages identified behaviour in terms of race and class, where different behaviours would correspond to different shapes of utility and disutility functions, which were characterized and evaluated by the yardstick of `civilised' actions [White 1994a]. Even the fundamental exchange equations assumed "the facility of exchange prevailing in a civilized country” [Jevons 1871, p.132]. The principal component of civilised behaviour turned on the ability to ‘anticipate the future’, the clearest manifestation of which concerned the foresight necessary for the accumulation of wealth through work and saving. Behaviour would therefore differ according to the circumstances, according to the intellectual standing of the race, or the character of the individual ... That class or race of men who have the most foresight will work most for the future. The untutored savage is wholly occupied with the troubles of the moment; the morrow is dimly felt; the limit of his horizon is but a few days off. The wants of a future year, or of a lifetime, are wholly unforseen. But, in a state of civilisation, a vague though powerful feeling of the future is the main incentive to industry and saving [ibid. pp.41-42].

It was the same ‘feeling of the future’ that explained differences in working hours: It is evident that questions of this kind will depend greatly upon the character of the race. Persons of an energetic disposition feel labour less painful than they otherwise would, and, if they happen to be endowed with various and acute

18

sensibilities, their desire of further acquisition never ceases. A man of lower race, a negro for instance, enjoys possession less, and loathes labour more; his exertions, therefore, soon stop. A poor savage would be content to gather the almost gratuitous fruits of nature, if they were sufficient to give sustenance; it is only physical want that drives him to exertion [ibid. pp.177-78].

To a significant extent, though to a lesser degree, it was a similar behavioural characteristic of English labourers, artisans, and white-collar employees which explained the "general tendency to reduce the hours of labour at the present day", as compared with the "learned professions" or the "rich man in modern society [who] is supplied apparently with all he can desire, and yet he labours unceasingly for more" [ibid. pp.176-78]. Elsewhere, Jevons claimed that the excessive mortality rates of large British cities could be explained in large part by their high proportion of Irish inhabitants in an analysis that neatly combined the categories of class and race [White 1994b].

Jevons’ reference to ‘race’ in the discussion of Selkirk or the isolated family was thus consistent with his depiction of behaviour in TPE. While the marginal utility theory explained the general principles of economic behaviour, it could not explain precisely how that behaviour became manifest in that it differed on average between identifiable groups. The geographically isolated Selkirk or family were thus representative of the race that exhibited the type of civilised behaviour referred to elsewhere in TPE. References to race and class were an integral part of Jevons’ domain of a scientific analysis.

In his critique of the notion of methodological individualism, Geoff Hodgson has argued that the term has not been defined with sufficient precision, that it has not been possible to produce an account of social behaviour which rests on individuals alone and that the term has often been used to refer to individuals and the interactions of individuals which entails references to institutions, including language understood as a set of rules [Hodgson 2007; see also King 2012, pp.52-62]. While I concur that these points indicate the impossibility of a coherent methodological individualism framework,22 Hodgson also remarks that Some economists have been enamoured by the example of Robinson Crusoe (before the arrival of Friday) allocating his scarce resources between competing ends, but the social characteristics of such a situation are limited.

22 See also Ian Steedman’s (1989) analysis of the impossibility of autonomous preferences. 19

We are concerned with social phenomena, which necessarily involve more than one individual [Hodgson 2007, p.217].

Allowing for the focus on explaining social behaviour, this would seem to leave open the possibility that Jevons’ references to Crusoe constitute one, albeit limited, type of explanation which could be understood in terms of a methodological individualism. This would, however, be an unnecessary concession. For as Hodgson also notes, proponents of methodological individualism regard fundamental explanations of behaviour couched in terms of ‘collectives’ such as races (and, presumably, classes) as invalid [Hodgson 2007, p.216]. For Jevons, however, Selkirk/Crusoe was the representative of behaviour explained by reference to race and civilisation so that it would be inaccurate to characterise his approach as one of methodological individualism. ***** In 1948, during the final drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was to be adopted by the United Nations in December of that year, the Australian delegate Alan Watt suggesting amending the proposed opening clause of article 29, which dealt with human duties.23 The original phrasing read: "Everyone has duties to the community which enables him freely to develop his personality". Watt proposed that it be changed to read: "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible". There was vigorous dissent to the amendment, with a Belgian delegate objecting that it could be taken to assert that “that the individual could only develop his personality within the framework of society; it was, however, only necessary to recall the famous book by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, to find proof of the contrary." After Watt withdrew his amendment, it was taken up by the delegation from the USSR, for whom it "rightly stressed the fact that the individual could not fully develop his personality outside society. The example of Robinson Crusoe, far from being convincing, had, on the contrary, shown that man could not live and develop his personality without the aid of society. Robinson had … at his disposal the products of human industry and culture, namely, the tools and books he had found on the wreck of his ship." It was this reading of Robinson Crusoe that was accepted, if only by default, in that Watt‘s wording ultimately became part of Article 29.

23 This paragraph, including all quotations, draws on the account in Slaughter 2007, pp.45-8. 20

The claim that a gesture toward Robinson Crusoe was sufficient to resolve the question of the relations between ‘the development of human personality and society’, appears bizarre, even given its Cold War context. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy how those references to Defoe’s text replicated some of the terms in which political economists had discussed its veracity by the mid-nineteenth century. Although it was Bastiat as a representative of the French ‘exchange’ school who was to produce the first economic Crusoe, the Crusoe of Defoe was a problematic figure even for those who might have agreed with that specification of the discourse. While Whately was particularly exercised by the ‘moral impossibility’ of Defoe’s depiction of ‘savages’, both he and Bastiat also rejected the feasibility of Crusoe on the basis that his personality (or, better perhaps, ‘character’) could not be developed or maintained ‘outside’ the framework of a society. For Whately, Robinson Crusoe was a logical impossibility because a Crusoe in a state of ‘utter solitude’ would lapse into a ‘half-brutish apathetic despondency and carelessness about all comforts demanding steady exertion’. For Bastiat, death would follow isolation from ‘the division of employments, exchange, society’. Defoe had only avoided that outcome by making ‘forced concessions to the social state’ in that Crusoe had been endowed and imbued with the instruments and institutions of a society. If Bastiat’s economic Crusoe contradicted his reading of Defoe, it was still the case that his geographically isolated illustrative device was understood as a socially constituted figure. Nor was that social constitution erased by Jevons in his marginalist reference to Crusoe which turned on the categories of race and civilisation. If the economic Crusoe was produced because of the perceived deficiencies in Defoe’s text, the story had to be subsequently rewritten again with the depiction of that economic metaphor in terms of autonomous preferences under the more general label of methodological individualism.24

24 In that regard, it has been noted that there is a marked difference between the representative agent metaphor of today’s DSGE models and TPE in that Jevons’ use of averages entails heterogeneity rather than homogeneity in behaviour [Boianovsky 2013].

21

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