Part 2. A Theory of Liberty
Chapter 6. A Crusoe Social Philosophy
One of the most commonly derided constructions of classical economic theory is crusoeconomics,
the analysis of an isolated man face to face with nature.
And yet, this seemingly unrealistic model, as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere,
elsewhere, has highly important and even indispensable uses.
It serves to isolate man as against nature, thus gaining clarity by abstracting at the
beginning from interpersonal relations.
Later on, this man-nature analysis can be extended and applied to the real world.
The bringing in of Friday, or of one or more other persons, after analysis of strictly
of the Robinsonian Isolation then serves to show how the addition of other persons affects
the discussion.
These conclusions can then also be applied to the contemporary world.
Thus the abstraction of analyzing a few persons interacting on an island enables a clear perception
of the basic truths of interpersonal relations.
Truths which remain obscure, if we insist on looking first at the contemporary world
only whole and of a piece.
If Crusoe economics can and does supply the indispensable groundwork for the entire structure
of economics and praxeology, the broad formal analysis of human action, a similar procedure
should be able to do the same thing for social philosophy, for the analysis of the fundamental
truths of the nature of man vis-a-vis the nature of the world into which he is born,
as well as the world of other men.
Specifically, it can aid greatly in solving such problems of political philosophy as the
nature and role of liberty, property and violence.
Such 17th and 18th century constructs as the state of nature or the social contract were
not wholly successful attempts to construct such a logical analysis.
Such attempts were far more important than any actual historical assertions that may
have been made in the course of developing these concepts.
Let us consider Crusoe, who has landed on his island, and, to simplify matters, has
contracted amnesia.
What inescapable facts does Crusoe confront?
He finds, for one thing, himself, with the primordial fact of his own consciousness and
his own body.
He finds, second, the natural world around him, the nature-given habitat and resources
which economists sum up in the term land.
This economic land, including all nature-given resources, does not necessarily mean land
in the popular sense, as it may include parts of the sea, for example, fishing waters,
and excludes man-made improvements on the earth.
He finds also that in seeming contrast with animals, he does not possess any innate instinctual
knowledge impelling him into the proper paths for the satisfaction of his needs and desires.
In fact, he begins his life in this world by knowing literally nothing.
All knowledge must be learned by him.
He comes to learn that he has numerous ends, purposes which he desires to achieve, many
Many of which he must achieve to sustain his life, food, shelter, clothing, etc.
After the basic needs are satisfied, he finds more advanced wants for which to aim.
To satisfy any or all of these wants which he evaluates in accordance with their respective
importance to him, Crusoe must also learn how to achieve them.
He must, in short, acquire technological knowledge, or recipes.
Cruso then has manifold wants, which he tries to satisfy, ends that he strives to attain.
Some of these ends may be attained with minimal effort on his part.
If the island is so structured, he may be able to pick edible berries off nearby bushes.
In such cases, his consumption of a good or service may be obtained quickly and almost
instantaneously.
But for almost all of his wants, Crusoe finds that the natural world about him does not
satisfy them immediately and instantaneously.
He is not, in short, in a garden of Eden.
To achieve his ends, he must, as quickly and productively as he can, take the nature-given
In short, he must a, choose his goals, b, learn how to achieve them by using nature
given resources, and then c, exert his labor energy to transform these resources into more
for Useful Shapes and Places, that is, into capital goods, and finally into consumer goods
that he can directly consume. Thus Crusoe may build himself out of the given natural
raw materials an axe, capital good, with which to chop down trees, in order to construct
a cabin, consumer good. Or he may build a net, capital good, with which to catch fish,
Consumer Good. In each case, he employs his learned technological knowledge to exert his
labor effort in transforming land into capital goods, and eventually into consumer goods.
This process of transformation of land resources constitutes his production. In short, Cruso
Man also must produce before he can consume, and so that he may consume, and by this process
of production, of transformation, man shapes and alters his nature-given environment to
his own ends, instead of, animal-like, being simply determined by that environment.
And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper
for Ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn
them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought, in short, his reason.
Reason is man's instrument of knowledge and of his very survival.
The use and expansion of his mind, the acquisition of knowledge about what is best for him and
And how he can achieve it is the uniquely human method of existence and of achievement.
And this is uniquely man's nature.
Man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or, to be more precise, the rational
being.
Through his reason, the individual man observes both the facts and ways of the external world
and the facts of his own consciousness, including his emotions.
In short, he employs both extrospection and introspection.
Crusoe, as we have said, learns about his ends and how to attain them.
But what specifically does his learning faculty, his reason, do in the process of obtaining
such knowledge?
It learns about the way things work in the world, that is, the natures of the various
specific entities and classes of entities that the man finds in existence.
In short, he learns the natural laws of the way things behave in the world.
He learns that an arrow shot from a bow can bring down a deer, and that a net can catch
an abundance of fish.
Further, he learns about his own nature, about the sort of events and actions that will make
him happy or unhappy.
In short, he learns about the ends he needs to achieve and those he should seek to avoid.
This process, this method necessary to man's survival and prosperity upon the earth, has
often been derided as unduly or exclusively materialistic.
But it should be clear that what has happened in this activity proper to man's nature is
a fusion of spirit and matter.
Man's mind, using the ideas it has learned, directs his energy in transforming and reshaping
matter into ways to sustain and advance his wants and his life.
Behind every produced good, behind every man-made transformation of natural resources, is an
idea directing the effort, a manifestation of man's spirit.
The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the
primordial natural fact of his freedom, his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not
use his reason about any given subject, in short, the natural fact of his free will.
He also discovers the natural fact of his mind's command over his body and its actions,
that is, of his natural ownership over his self.
Cruso then owns his body, and his mind is free to adopt whatever ends it wishes, and
to exercise his reason in order to discover what ends he should choose, and to learn the
recipes for employing the means at hand to attain them.
Indeed, the very fact that the knowledge needed for man's survival and progress is not innately
be given to him or determined by external events.
The very fact that he must use his mind to learn this knowledge demonstrates that he
is by nature free to employ or not to employ that reason.
That is, that he has free will.
Surely there is nothing outre or mystical about the fact that men differ from stones,
and that the above are crucial differences between them.
The critical and unique facts about man and the ways in which he must live to survive,
his consciousness, his free will and free choice, his faculty of reason, his necessity
for learning the natural laws of the external world and of himself, his self-ownership,
These need to produce by transforming nature-given matter into consumable forms.
All these are wrapped up in what man's nature is and how man may survive and flourish.
Suppose now that Crusoe is confronted with a choice of either picking berries or picking
some mushrooms for food, and he decides upon the pleasantly tasting mushrooms, when suddenly
A previously shipwrecked inhabitant, coming upon Crusoe, shouts, don't do that, those
mushrooms are poisonous.
There is no mystery in Crusoe's subsequent shift to berries.
What has happened here?
Both men have operated on an assumption so strong that it remained tacit, an assumption
that poison is bad, bad for the health and even for the survival of the human organism.
In short, bad for the continuation and the quality of a man's life.
In this implicit agreement on the value of life and health for the person and on the
evils of pain and death, the two men have clearly arrived at the basis of an ethic grounded
on reality and on the natural laws of the human organism.
If Crusoe had eaten the mushrooms without learning of their poisonous effects, then
Then his decision would have been incorrect, a possibly tragic error, based on the fact
that man is scarcely automatically determined to make correct decisions at all times, hence
his lack of omniscience and his liability to error.
If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway,
perhaps for kicks or from a very high time preference, then his decision would have been
Objectively Immoral and Act Deliberately Set Against His Life and Health.
It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt
for life in duration and quality.
In reply we may note that a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies
it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation.
Now any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by
virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life.
For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion.
Indeed, he would have no business continuing to be alive.
Hence the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion,
and hence the preservation and furtherance of one's life takes on the stature of an
incontestable axiom.
We have seen that Crusoe, as in the case of any man, has freedom of will, freedom to
choose the course of his life and his actions.
Some critics have charged that this freedom is illusory because man is bound by natural
laws.
This, however, is a misrepresentation, one of the many examples of the persistent modern
confusion between freedom and power.
Man is free to adopt values and to choose his actions, but this does not at all mean
that he may violate natural laws with impunity, that he may, for example, leap oceans at a
single bound.
In short, when we say that man is not free to leap the ocean, we are really discussing
Cruceau's freedom to adopt ideas, to choose his ends, is inviolable and inalienable.
On the other hand, man, not being omnipotent as well as not being omniscient, always finds
his power limited for doing all the things that he would like to do.
In short, his power is necessarily limited by natural laws, but not his freedom of will.
To put the case another way, it is patently absurd to define the freedom of an entity
as its power to perform an act impossible for its nature.
If a man's free will to adopt ideas and values is inalienable, his freedom of action, his
Man's freedom to put these ideas into effect in the world is not in such a fortunate condition.
Again, we are not talking about the limitations on man's power inherent in the laws of his
own nature and of the natures of other entities.
What we are talking about now is interference with his sphere of action by other people.
But here we are getting a bit ahead of Robinson Crusoe and our discussion.
Suffice it to say now that in the sense of social freedom, of freedom as absence of molestation
by other persons, Crusoe is absolutely free, but that a world of more than one person requires
our further investigation.
Since in this book we are interested in social and political philosophy rather than in philosophy
Let us now return to our analysis of Crusoe's purposeful transformation of nature-given data
through the understanding of natural laws.
Crusoe finds virgin unused land on the island, land, in short, unused and uncontrolled by
by anyone, and hence, unowned.
By finding land resources, by learning how to use them, and, in particular, by actually
transforming them into a more useful shape, Crusoe has, in the memorable phrase of John
Locke, mixed his labor with the soil.
In doing so, in stamping the imprint of his personality and his energy on the land, he
has naturally converted the land and its fruits into his property.
Hence the isolated man owns what he uses and transforms.
Therefore, in his case, there is no problem of what should be A's property as against
B's.
Any man's property is, ipso facto, what he produces, that is, what he transforms into
use by his own effort.
His property in land and capital goods continues down the various stages of production until
Crusoe comes to own the consumer goods which he has produced, until they finally disappear
through his consumption of them.
As long as an individual remains isolated then, there is no problem whatever about how
far his property, his ownership, extends.
As a rational being with free will, it extends over his own body, and it extends further
over the material goods which he transforms with his labor.
Suppose that Crusoe had landed not on a small island, but on a new and virgin continent,
and that standing on the shore he had claimed ownership of the entire new continent by virtue
of his prior discovery.
This assertion would be sheer empty vainglory, so long as no one else came upon the continent.
For the natural fact is that his true property, his actual control over material goods, would
extend only so far as his actual labor brought them into production.
His true ownership could not extend beyond the power of his own reach.
Later on, when other people arrived on the continent, they too, in natural fact, would
own the lands which they transformed by their labor.
The first man could only obtain ownership of them by the use of invasive force against
their natural property, or by receiving them from the newcomers in voluntary gift or exchange.
Similarly, it would be empty and meaningless for Crusoe to trumpet that he does not really
Only own some or all of what he has produced.
Perhaps this crusoe happens to be a romantic opponent of the property concept, for in fact
the use and therefore the ownership has already been his.
Crusoe in natural fact owns his own self and the extension of his self into the material
and the World, neither more nor less.