| This question <330-44|182> overall <167|169> SF: <109|230>. |
| Question 134: Why does Marx call Ricardo's exchange between primitive fisherman and primitive hunter a “Robinson Crusoe story”? |
| [168] SF: Ricardo's ‘Robinson Crusoe story’ Marx calls Ricardo's story about an exchange between a primitive fisherman and a primitive hunter a ‘Robinson Crusoe story’ because it still reduces the economic process to an individual level and does not address it as the social issue that Marx defines it to be. Marx's criticism of this type of story is that, by building one's economic theories up from an isolated individual, you ignore the effect of society almost entirely. Many social relations simply cannot be expressed in a two person ‘society’. Ricardo treats the labor on an individual level and thus unknowingly includes the same assumptions as a classical economist. |
| Hans: You are answering the question on an epistemological level, how to approach societies, while the question was really a factual question, in what respect it was wrong to think that primitive fisherman and hunter engaged in exchange. This gives rise to a paradox which I tried to address in message [182]. I left out your last sentence: |
| Ricardo treats the labor on an individual level and thus unknowingly includes the same assumptions as a classical economist. |
| If there ever was a classical economist, it was Ricardo. Did you mean “neoclassical”? |
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