Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731)

DEFOE, Daniel (1660-1731)
Born Daniel Foe in London in late 1660; died London 26 April 1731. He adopted the name ‘de Foe’ in 1695, possibly for business purposes. He was educated by an ejected minister James Fisher in Dorking, then at Charles Morton’s dissenter academy, Newington Green (1674-79). Morton was later vice president of Harvard. Defoe was also a member of Samuel Annesley’s congregation in Bishopsgate. Instead of entering the Presbyterian ministry, however, Defoe became a merchant and commodity speculator and then, at various times and often simultaneously, a shipping insurer, civet cat breeder, civil servant, part owner of a brick-and-tile works, hack writer, convict, journalist, political agitator, government spy, poet, newspaper editor, pamphleteer and novelist. He was active in the opposition to James II, fighting with Monmouth’s cavalry at Sedgemoor. He opposed James’ Declaration of Indulgence and joined William’s army at Windsor in December 1688. He travelled widely and spoke several European languages. His fortunes were erratic. In mid-life, he claimed he had been rich and poor thirteen times. He was imprisoned seven times, pilloried three times and bankrupted at least twice. He confessed that both his business and political dealings were not always honest. He wrote for pay and was often deeply troubled when attempting to reconcile his deeds with his conscience and his writings with his principles. He frequently lived in hiding from his creditors, political enemies and the law. In 1684, he married Mary Tuffley, daughter of a wealthy dissenting cooper. They had eight children; six survived. In the spring of 1731, Defoe died as he had so often lived: weary, poor, frightened, in hiding from his creditors and enemies, but still writing. He had just finished The Compleat English Gentleman and he was well advanced with Of Royall Education.

Defoe was one of the most prolific writers in the English language. Until recently, he was credited with over 570 separate works, many of them running to several hundred pages and more. But P.N. Furbank, W.R. Owens and others have quite persuasively argued that the actual number that can genuinely be attributed to him is about half. Defoe was also a masterful manipulator of the print market. He wrote on every subject of significant public controversy between the late-1680s and 1731. He experimented with a vast array of forms in both poetry and prose. He published anonymously, pseudonymously and, very occasionally, under his own name. He adopted many different personae, imitating his enemies and friends as well as those of his paymasters (Whig, Tory and various commercial interests). He frequently argued on all sides of contemporary controversies and it is often difficult to determine what his own position was on many issues. Today, Defoe is most famous for his fictional narratives, like the first part of the three-part Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). But during his lifetime and for most of the eighteenth century, Defoe was primarily known as a journalist, pamphleteer, social and political critic and satirical poet. His economic and political writings, frequently in the form of journalism, compose the foundation upon which his eighteenth century reputation rested.

In many respects, his political ideas were more effective than his economic ideas. In the paper wars of the early eighteenth century, Defoe created two distinct public personae to propagate his political and economic views. "The Author of the True-born Englishman," named after a verse satire which was Defoe's most popular work during his lifetime, published mainly party political tracts and political theory. "Mr. Review," named after Defoe's amazing periodical which appeared thrice weekly for most of its life from 19 February 1704 to 11 June 1713, published many of his most important economic tracts. Quite appropriately, however, there were significant overlapping concerns.

Among the writings of "The Author of the True-born Englishman," three stand out as containing consistent and enduring expressions of Defoe's political ideas: The True-Born Englishman (1701), The Original Power of the Collective Body (1701) and Jure Divino (1706). All three extended arguments first deployed by Defoe in the controversies of the late-1690s about the possible threats to liberty posed by modern, professional standing armies. Defoe’s defence of a professional army that was currently being advocated by William III’s Whig government led him to reject the historical arguments of most of the earlier Whig justifications of the 1688 Revolution. The ancient contract constitution was a myth, the Normans had conquered England in 1066 and English liberty was modern, the outcome of a successful struggle between the people, the nobility and the monarch. In his three main works, Defoe generalized these arguments. Appeals to constitutional history and customary law were delegitimized. Reason and nature replaced them as the foundations of law and justice. James II’s actions had dissolved the English constitution and the 1688 Revolution was justified as a legitimate expression of the people’s right to resist, a right aided by a benevolent conqueror, William III. In short, Defoe replaced the highly questionable historical arguments of Old Whiggism by the rationalism of Modern Whiggism combined with Tory principles of a just conquest. In the broadest terms, Defoe had begun defending 'modern liberty' in commercial societies with parliamentary institutions against the 'ancient liberty' of slave-holding or agrarian societies. This distinction was only fully articulated more than a century later by Benjamin Constant in his The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (1819).

The impact of The True-Born Englishman was enormous. It far outsold even Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (1657). It established its own satirical subgenre of true-born Welshmen, Scotsmen, Huguenots and English women. And the theoretical perspectives that it contained were very frequently attacked, defended, quoted and reworked in both poetry and prose throughout the eighteenth-century, even by Thomas Paine in 1805. Defoe became an immediate celebrity and was attacked by leading Tory propagandists, like Charles Leslie, as the chief Whig ideologist. He was accused of resurrecting the rationalist theories of papists and regicides and, in Tory propaganda, his name was linked with a long list of supposedly disreputable writers from Robert Parsons to John Locke. Indeed, Defoe has often been interpreted as versifying Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) in both The True-Born Englishman and Jure Divino. But this is an error. His sources were much more eclectic, ranging from the Old Testament, Samuel Pufendorf, Algernon Sidney and James Tyrrell to the commonplaces of contemporary Whigs and pro-Revolutionary Tories. His theories were rationalistic and dispensed with the historical myths of the Old Whigs and hence they resembled Locke’s in precisely those ways that led the Old Whigs to reject Two Treatises as an adequate defence of the constitutional revolution of 1688. But Defoe remained in his rationalism much more authoritarian and elitist than Locke. Yet still, Defoe’s immensely popular, controversial and rationalistic theories, especially as presented in The True-Born Englishman and The Original Power, did much to clear the ideological ground for the acceptance of Locke as a Whig authority in the eighteenth-century. His contemporary fame assured him a place, in John Dunton’s words, as one of ‘the chief Wits of the Age’ well before he turned his pen to the novels upon which his enduring, literary reputation now rests.

Defoe's considerable volume of economic writings have fared less well in the eyes of historians of economic analysis than his political writings have in the eyes of historians of political thought. Schumpeter, for example, confines Defoe to a footnote and declares that 'even his most ambitious efforts in our field remained in the sphere of economic journalism' (p. 372, fn. 15). There is much to be said for this view. But in more recent years, a number of literary scholars and historians, including Maximilian Novak, Laura Curtis, Thomas Meier and J.G.A. Pocock have discovered much of interest in Defoe's economic writings. Practically all of these writings were addressed to practical issues of the day. Hardly any of them rise to any theoretical heights. They are the works of an enthusiastic promoter of trade and commerce. 'Trade', Defoe wrote in the final issue of the Review, 'was the Whore I doated on.' And he continued to do so to the end of his life. His first work of any economic interest, An Essay upon Projects (1697), expresses the spirit of much of his writing. It contains about a dozen projects for public and private investment to remedy perceived socio-economic problems. The projects range from establishing banks, fixing highways and establishing a pension office to erecting academies for women. They express an almost utopian entrepreneurial enthusiasm that Defoe believed to be characteristic of his age. One of his last works, Augusta Triumphans (1728), continues in the same vein. It proposes the foundation of a university and a musical academy in London, as well as various measures to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in order to make London 'the most Flourishing City in the Universe.' But such projecting had its down side. Defoe's own business failures led him to caution all aspiring tradesmen to beware of projectors' inflated claims (The Complete English Tradesman, I, chap. 4). The greatest danger, in these respects, came from the newly established traders in stocks. Defoe railed against the rumour mongering and corruption of Stockjobbers in many pamphlets and newspaper articles from The Free-Holders Plea (1701) and The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected (1701) to The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley (1719).

Although he was indisputably a proponent of commercial progress, there is much that is old-fashioned in Defoe's economic writing. He had no time for the emerging stock market. He was convinced that the woollen industry was the backbone of England's economic strength and supported every means possible to protect it. He was certainly no friend to innovations that streamlined production processes. The more hands a product passed through on its way from raw materials to retail shops, the better. For in this way, employment remained high. He could see no merit in John Law's banking proposals, insisting instead that all bills must be backed by specie. He was committed to common notions of a favourable balance of trade and he supported both colonization and the system of trade embodied in the Navigation Laws (1660-73). His moral, political and economic ideas were frequently at odds. Drunkenness and debauchery were the scourge of social life until it came to defending the distilling industry in an almost Mandevillian fashion in a Brief Case of the Distillers (1726). Luxury and fashion were follies, but they were good for trade. Commerce with Catholic France should be limited, until Harley required him to argue the opposite in 1713. Slaves should be treated with discipline but not cruelty, but only because cruelty impaired them as an economic asset (Review, 8, p. 730). He defended the commercial monopolies of the East India Company and the Africa Company but he opposed the provision of work for England's poor. There was, he claimed in Giving Alms no Charity (1704), sufficient work for the poor. They just had to go and find it.

But there were respects in which Defoe's economic ideas were unusual for his time. He was an (almost) consistent advocate of high wages, when most of his contemporaries advocated low wages to reduce production costs and increase sales. The one exception Defoe made was for servants. Their 'Exorbitent Wages', he argued in Every-Body's Business, is No-Body's Business (1725), had led to pride and insolence. But in manufacturing, Defoe was convinced that the high quality of English goods would always command a high price, hence care should be taken not to reduce the purchasing power of English workers. To Defoe, the inland trade was just as important as foreign trade in wealth creation. The circulation of goods was the barometer of economic well-being. Most of his economic writings display an intense patriotic pride in England's achievements and untapped potential as a 'trading nation,' both domestic and foreign. They also display a steady didactic hand. Two of his major works, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6) and The Complete English Tradesman (1725-7), are clearly two such patriotic, didactic works. The first has been called 'a Paean of Business' (Meier, chap. 3); the second was thought by Defoe's biographer William Chadwick (1859) to be not only Defoe's best book but also 'the best book that ever was written in the English language' (p. 454). But these same concerns to educate his readers about trade and business and to emphasize England's or Britain's advantages in these areas run through all of Defoe's lengthy works on trade from A General History of Trade in four parts (1713) to his contributions to the Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (1728).

All of these works by Defoe provide a wealth of information for economic and social historians interested in the state of the British economy and economic relationships in the early eighteenth century. They are, as Schumpeter concluded, works of perceptive, well-informed and frequently witty economic journalism. But in one sphere, more has been claimed for Defoe. In several Review articles beginning in 1706 and in his Essay Upon Publick Credit (1710), Defoe both identified and defended the core institutions and values of the emerging commercial economy with its 'interdependence of land, trade and credit' (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 449). The argument is persuasive. The context of Defoe's defence of public credit was party political. Against Tory attacks that all forms of property, save land, were 'transient or imaginary,' Whigs like Defoe and Addison set out to analyze and defend credit, and hence mobile property, as equally valuable and real as fixed. They did so in part by drawing upon the same idiom as Machiavelli had done to describe fortuna. Credit was an unpredictable lady who might be placated but never tamed. Credit was inevitably unstable. But treated honourably, fairly and with constant attention, some stability and predictability might follow. Public credit depended not upon the persons of office-holders or which party was in power but upon public confidence in the reliability, stability and honourable practices associated with the offices of state. For Defoe, as for Addison, in Queen Anne's reign, this meant defending the 1688 Revolution Settlement and the Protestant succession. It meant opposing the more radical Tories and Jacobites. Defoe's economic ideas here were still inextricably connected to his politics.

Once again, then, Defoe's analysis of public credit and of the care needed to breed the necessary public confidence are of more historical than analytical interest. But Defoe does have an enduring legacy in the history of economic analysis. That legacy does not derive from his economic writings, nor from his political writings. It stems rather from the writings of a third of his public characters or personae: "Robinson Crusoe." Perhaps through the medium of Rousseau's praise for Robinson Crusoe in Emile (1762) or perhaps simply because of the enormous popularity that the first volume of Robinson Crusoe eventually achieved, Marx could report in 1867 that 'Robinson Crusoe's experiences are a favourite theme with political economists' (Kapital, I, I., 4, p. 90). This was undoubtedly the case then and it is still the case today with frequent references in the economic literature to 'the Robinson Crusoe economy,' the 'Robinson Crusoe fallacy,' and so on. Defoe, it seems, unwittingly bequeathed to economists, as he did more wittingly to the authors of the many, literary Robinsonades, a literary model, a thought experiment, to make of what they will. When Defoe himself came to reflect on the meaning of the work, as he did in his third volume, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. With his Vision of the Angelic World (1720), the economic implications of his island economy were not in his mind. The work, he noted, was an allegorical presentation of the sufferings and successes of a real person, designed for the reader's moral and religious improvement. But as with all major works of fiction, subsequent readers of varying kinds with varied interests have found more in the book than the author knew was there.

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