The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith

ISBN-13: 9783030395100 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 147 str.

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono; Leigh-Anne Wendy Mazzoncini

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Robinson Crusoe's Adventure on the Island: from the Isolated Economy to Political Supremacy 

2.1 The problem concerning Robinson's survival on the island

2.2. Robinson's Encounter with Friday

Chapter 3: An Attempt to Explain the Theory of Value: Turgot's simplification

3.1. The determination of value and assessment of individual resources

3.2 The concept of progress: The problem of historical "circumstances"

Chapter 4: "The rude state of society" and the reason of abundance: Adam Smith's model 

4.1. The common stock as a differential concept

4.2. The rude state of society as an assembly of isolated people

4.3. The individuals and the structure of unintentional relationships

4.4. Conclusions

Chapter 5: Political Pihlosophy on "The Gift": Sahlin's Interpretation

5.1. Sahlin's Thesis

5.2. Mauss and Hobbes

5.3. Hobbes and Durkhein

5.4. Political Economy and Durkheim

5.5. Durkheim and Mauss

5.6. Final Comment 

O autorze

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono is Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Pisa, Italy. He is the author of numerous books including Le Fétichisme: Histoire d’un Concept (1992), Autonomia, Potere, Minorità (2000), Caminhos de Saida do Estado de Menoridade (2001), The History and Theory of Fetishism (2016), and Studi su Karl Marx (2018).

Blurb

This classic text in Italian history of political philosophy, translated into English for the first time, investigates the philosophical and ideological conceptions hidden beneath the modern image of the isolated individual. In The Bourgeois and the Savage, Alfonso Maurizio Iacono reveals that this apparently simple and transparent image is imbued with a profound complexity containing human and social relationships, which are intertwined with relationships of power, domination, inequality, colonisation and servitude. As Karl Marx argued, and as was later confirmed by twentieth-century anthropology, the isolated individual does not stand at the beginning of history; he can emerge only where social relationships are already very developed and where society appears as a tool used for private purposes. Considering the writings of Daniel Defoe, the great French Enlightenment philosopher Turgot, and the father of political economy Adam Smith, The Bourgeois and the Savage critically analyses the process which led to the naturalisation of the image of the isolated man and traces its development and transformation into a still dominant paradigm.

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono is Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Pisa, Italy.