Symptoms of Neo-Imperialism in Economics: The Robinson Crusoe Narrative
The United States, since its foundation, has progressed and prospered through the exploitation of others and the encouragement of inequality. And while that is no closely guarded secret, the year 2020 has been pivotal to the revelation of the vast systemic racism it has thrived on. The strengthening of the Black Lives Matter movement has started conversations around anti-racism and decolonisation, some strands of which have even permeated into predominantly white disciplines and courses, such as Economics.
I have been a student of economics for almost five years now and yet somehow never encountered the Robinson-Crusoe rhetoric until now. For those unfamiliar with the book by Daniel Defoe (1719), the relevant gist is as follows – Robinson Crusoe is European shipwrecked on a deserted island where he meets Friday a Caribbean native, one of the "savages" as described in the book. Friday is taken as a prisoner by some cannibals who prepare to eat him on the island, but he manages to escape with Crusoe’s help. Friday then vows a lifetime of loyalty to Crusoe.
Crusoe represents the first colonial mind in fiction, then Friday represents not just a Caribbean tribesman, but all the natives of America, Asia, and Africa who would later be oppressed in the age of European imperialism. At the moment when Crusoe teaches Friday to call him “Master” Friday becomes an enduring political symbol of racial injustice in a modern world critical of imperialist expansion. In economics, the examples of Robinson Crusoe and Friday on a deserted island are used to illustrate the behaviour of homo economicus, without any consideration for the master narrative, that in my opinion cannot be separated from their relationship.
My first encounter with this rhetoric began with The Distribution of Income, by Milton Friedman. Upon coming across the example given in the text, I was slightly surprised but at first it did not strike me as a particularly odd example to make, given the fact that it was authored by Milton Friedman. I have read his work before in other courses, and I have found many implicit and some explicit racist notions present in it. As a result, I naively dismissed the problematic example and attributed it to the time and context it was written in. It was only when my professor assigned Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks, by Matthew Watson that I finally caught a glimpse of the bigger picture – that the Robinson-Crusoe rhetoric is actually commonplace in economics textbooks.
In his article, Watson describes the how the character of Robinson Crusoe “was animated by neither love nor honour, but by straightforward economic self-preferment,” according to him it was this instinct to act in self advancement that made Crusoe the model example for the early economists to employ a century and a half later. [1] While that might have seemed appropriate to the early marginalist economists at the time, to me the notion that such a character can exist in a vacuum independent of any identity, intersectionality or the implications of the two is bizarre because individuals in societies do not exist in vacuums. Then why should the economic models used to explain their roles and behaviours in society use out-of-world hypothetical examples? To begin with, the characteristic of self advancement as opposed to self preservation visible in the model example’s part clearly reflects the undertones of the colonial mindset. Using the Robinson Crusoe rhetoric to illustrate a world where racialised social standing makes no difference to one’s behaviour in the market makes no sense. Watson articulates the problem with this rhetoric rather aptly, “if a theory can only be illustrated through reference to a white colonist whose instinct is always to subjugate the ‘native’ population, must we conclude that the economics textbooks, even if only unwittingly, reproduce a raced market frame?” [2]
In my view, economists who rely on the Robinson Crusoe rhetoric (despite it being rewritten time and again) are symptomatic of a bigger issue that exists outside the realm of classrooms and textbooks – their unwavering belief that the invisible hand is an equaliser, that it has the power to strip participating individuals of their intersectionalities and the burdens that come with them. It is symptomatic of their dismissal and erasure of the stratifications and hierarchies created by race, class, gender and religion; these play a significant role in a person’s social standing and consequently their relationships with the free market such that they actually benefit from it from it rather than be exploited. The Robinson-Crusoe narrative protects the status quo, it protects the interests of those ‘elite’ who have already benefited from the system and the privileges their intersectional identities afford them and it inherently undermines the rights of those not already in the ‘elite.’
Watson aptly says, “the relationship between Crusoe and Friday is and always will be a relationship of racial oppression designed to illustrate the social acceptability to the early eighteenth-century mind of the imperial enterprise...No amount of postcolonial rewriting of the text will ever remove this element of the story.” To me the continued use of the Robinson Crusoe rhetoric in modern economics textbooks, especially the dismissal of Friday’s identity and its consequences, parallels the similar social acceptability of inequality. To put it lightly, in Watson’s words, “this makes economists’ unreflexive use of Crusoe and Friday to illustrate the essential features of market theory more than a little worrying.” [3]
Sources
Matthew Watson (2018) Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks, New Political Economy, 23:5, 544-559, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2017.1417367https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417367
Ibid
Ibid