Crusoe's Hands

April 22.—The next Morning I began to consider of Means to put this Resolve into Execution; but I was at a great loss about my Tools; I had three large Axes, and abundance of Hatchets (for we carried the Hatchets for Traffick with the Indians) but with much chopping and cutting knotty hard Wood, they were all full of Notches and dull, and tho' I had a Grindstone, I could not turn it and grind my Tools too, this cost me as much Thought as a Statesman would have bestow'd upon a grand Point of Politics, or a Judge upon the Life and Death of a Man. At length I contriv'd a Wheel with a String, to turn it with my Foot, that I might have both my Hands at Liberty. . . . This Machine cost me a full Week's Work to bring it to Perfection.¹

Robinson Crusoe is here, in what I see as a signature episode, trying to retrofit his habitation to make it earthquake ready. His declaration that he spent as much thought on his problem as a statesman on an important matter of politics or a judge on a life-and-death matter has an element of comic exaggeration—what we might call the petty sublime. It is comparable to his exclamation after firing his gun that it was the first time a gun had been fired on the island since the Creation. But his declaration also invokes and sets aside the hierarchy of head and hand. His hands are not the low partners to his mind: the manual event is the significant event. Furthermore, Crusoe's labor is very distant from the curse of Eden. It is productive rather than punitive. In this paper, I will suggest that in detaching the work of hands from the punitive idea of labor, and in rejecting the hierarchy of head to hand, Defoe is drawing on two important elements of his intellectual world: the new science and the georgic "revolution." And in attending to details of work, to process and method, Defoe creates possibilities not developed by the novelists who followed him.

The hierarchy of head and hand is part of a long tradition supported by authority from both Greek and Latin antiquity.² The tradition extends and reworks Aristotle's view that theoretical knowledge is superior to productive knowledge and that the manual laborer works without knowing why he works. Such labor is servile. This view is tempered in Aristotle (though not by everyone who calls on his authority) by the recognition that there are intellectual elements (calculation, necessity for planning) in many crafts, even though they involve physical work.³ There are some indications that manual labor was reevaluated in the medieval period in part owing to a recognition that scientific knowledge depended upon complex instruments but owing as well to new theological interpretations of labor. The manual labor of the farmer (or husbandman), both in antiquity and in the tradition as a whole, sometimes falls into a special category because of the farmer's independence, or his association with the simplicity and goodness of the country, and because his practices are linked to a knowledge of cycles and seasons. The bias against manual labor was never either simple or monolithic, but despite various kinds of modifications, it can be seen as a recurring cultural prejudice. It persisted throughout the eighteenth century and was of particular importance, as Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, have shown, in pedagogical writing from 1770 to 1850.⁴ And as Jonathan Glickstein has traced in elaborate detail in Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America, the head/hand hierarchy underlay much political and social writing of mid nineteenth-century America.⁵ It persists today in immigration debates.

In the eighteenth century, as earlier, the distinction between mental and manual labor constitutes almost as sharp a division as that between the gentleman and those below him in the English social system.⁶ In fact, the "gentility divide" and the mental/manual divide are often parts of the same system. As historians point out, the separation of the gentleman from the...