Epilogue: The Juan Fernández Islands and the Long-Distance Dispersal of Utopia

Abstract

As a kind of “path biographies” (cfr. Daniels and Nash 2004), ideas disperse over the globe linking concepts that seemed separate in space and time, promoting common pulses of human development. The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe was a milestone in the construction of the industrial society (Laborde 2007). The ideal of humanity dominating nature, and finally the possibility of a real cohabitation between both, was the central idea of Defoe’s novel and inspired the nineteenth century ideals of modernity, including Rousseau’s educational ideal. “Robinson Crusoe became a primer for practical education. It was the only book Rousseau would allow the child in his educational tract Emile. [“I want him to learn in detail not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want him to think he is Robinson himself”]” (Rousseau as quoted by Daniels and Nash 2004).