Daniel Defoe and Abandoned Life

Daniel Defoe’s exemplary status in cultural histories of the novel rests upon the premise that his fiction anticipates the rise of bourgeois civil society—a shift in social relations precipitated by the disarticulation of labor and exchange from sovereign control. This essay complicates the progressive (and often emancipatory) narrative of the civil society hermeneutic model by attending to the figure of “abandoned life” in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year, arguing that a more robust understanding of Defoe’s political imagination vis-à-vis sovereign power takes shape if we attend to the ways that a “Life not worth saving” structures his vision of the social. I situate the novel form as central to this vision. My readings establish a direct connection between the unique mode of referentiality that novels invented (an orientation toward what Henry Fielding called “not men but manners; not an individual but a species”) and the unique mode of governance that modern nation-states required (an orientation toward what Michel Foucault called “not man-as-body but…man-as-species”) to argue that Defoe’s novelistic imagination was biopolitical from the very start.