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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
The Bourgeois
and the Savage
A Marxian Critique of the
Image of the Isolated Individual in
Defoe, Turgot and Smith
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
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tions of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come
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areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors
and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social move-
ments, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism
in the world.
The Bourgeois
and the Savage
A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated
Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith
Alfonso Maurizio Iacono
University of Pisa
Pisa, Italy
Translated by
Leigh-Anne Wendy Mazzoncini
Montuolo, Lucca, Italy
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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in memory
Titles Published
vii
viii TITLES PUBLISHED
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left
in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capi-
talism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba-
dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s
Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicente-
nary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Re-
thinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019.
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile:
The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019.
21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
Titles Forthcoming
Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contempo-
rary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction
Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism
in France
Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx
Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya
Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialec-
tics of Liberation
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Dimension
Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth
Century
Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century
Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space
Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a
De-alienated World
Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism
Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Borderline Socialism: Self-
organisation and Anti-capitalism
Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Cri-
tique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction
ix
x TITLES FORTHCOMING
xi
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Bibliography 14
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
Introduction
Contents
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
I have not limited myself to learning the characteristics of the Indian and
informing myself about their customs and practices, I have sought in these
practices and customs, vestiges of the most remote antiquity. I have read
carefully [the works] of the earliest writers who treated the customs, laws
and usages of the peoples of whom they had some knowledge. I have
made a comparison of these customs with each other. I confess that, if
1 INTRODUCTION 3
The people which were the first to acquire a little more knowledge quickly
became superior to its neighbours; and each step in its progress made the
next one easier. Thus the development of one nation accelerated from day to
day, while others stayed in their state of mediocrity, immobilized by particular
circumstances, and others remained in a state of barbarism. A glance over the
earth puts before our eyes, even today, the whole history of the human race,
showing us traces of all the steps and monuments of all the stages through
4 A. M. IACONO
which it has passed from the barbarism, still in existence, of the American
peoples to the civilization of the most enlightened nations of Europe. Alas! our
ancestors and the Pelasgians who pre- ceded the Greeks were like the savages
of America! 13
The theory that the ancient Greeks derive from the Pelasgians and that
they were savages like the American Indians, is taken from Lafitau’s argu-
mentations. Turgot is one of the philosophers who, in the eighteenth
century, used the so-called four-stages theory to explain the changes and
progress of populations and nations in an overview of the course of all
humanity. Adam Smith also uses this theory independently from Turgot.
Ronald Meek, in the book The Ignoble Savage, provided a detailed anal-
ysis of the history of this theory which asserted itself simultaneously in
France and Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century.14 The four stages
of universal history are: hunting, pastoralism, agriculture and commercial
society. Basically, the ages of change in nations and people are marked on
a progressive scale by their livelihood, that is, by the way in which men
organize their physical sustenance, socially and technologically.15 The the-
orists of the four stages perceive that the forms of relationships, cultures,
customs, religions must be explained starting from the livelihood of men,
but with the tendency of giving it all a very deterministic outline. Accord-
ing to both Turgot and Adam Smith the nations or populations necessarily
pass through the four stages of civilization, but they differ in the pace with
which the crossing occurs. Thus it may happen that some populations
are still at the hunting stage, while others are pastoralists, and some are
already at the commercial stage. Hence, therefore, the development and,
at the same time, the twist that the original comparative idea of Lafitau
receives. The theorists of the four stages can explain what has been called
the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaries. A great caesura, in the suc-
cession of the stages, is nevertheless constituted by the passage from pas-
toralism to agriculture. The latter in fact determines stability, therefore
favouring the affirmation of property, the development of the division of
labour, the construction of cities. Moreover, as Turgot says, it is after the
arrival of agriculture that a type division of labour and inequality develops
among men therefore creating free time for some, who instead of work-
ing for physical needs can dedicate their time to producing knowledge,
and developing culture.
It should be noted that behind this theoretical device of the four-stages
theory, an idea of universalization emerges. How can a general theory of
1 INTRODUCTION 5
was offered to the world as a gift of the powerful to the weak. Timeo
danaos et dona ferentes! The gift itself harboured racism, for it gave the
recipient two choices: accept the gift, thereby acknowledging that one
was low on the hierarchy of achieved wisdom; refuse the gift, thereby
denying oneself weapons that could reverse the unequal real power
situation.17
Such a contradiction can hardly be solved with the other gift from the
powerful, this time remorseful: relativism. In fact, how can the relativist
idea be made universal if it does not stand on the highest step of the
hierarchical scale between cultures and populations? And how can one, on
the contrary, disregard its universalization if it is considered a good and
necessary idea for all?18 Is it not a repetition of the old divide between
the good and the bad savage with which the Western observer recognized
the other, but simply in more general terms? Perhaps we should admit
that, from an epistemological point of view, it is necessary to maintain
the tension of the opposites and stop thinking again as prisoners who
are in a cage divided into two sections, that of monism and the other of
dualism. If we tried to acknowledge our duplicity not as a danger, but
as a modality of our being and of our knowledge, a modality made of
tensions and contradictions, perhaps we would at least be able to lessen
that epistemological anxiety that pervades us and makes us sway tirelessly.
The history of universalism and its modern assertion also influences the
observer and the ways in which the processes intended to be described
are interpreted. There is an implicit component that determines the point
of view, which, in turn, hides the partiality of what is seen. The histo-
riographical interpretation cannot fail to critically investigate the implicit
one.
The ‘false evolutionism’ described by Lévi-Strauss, or that process
described in his work as ‘the starting point of homogenization’19
and which is characterized, as already mentioned, by a universalizing
process of recognition of the other, but in a temporal hierarchy (the
non-contemporaneity of contemporary savages) that makes men and
populations unequal, has had an implicit function for models of interpre-
tation that claimed to describe social processes in a simple and clear way.
What is simple always refers to something complex; what is clear always
refers to the something hazy.
Every model that wants to represent certain social relationships in a
simple and transparent way is built on an ‘outline’ of reality that thus
1 INTRODUCTION 7