Gar Lipow wrote:
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> I'm pretty sure Robinson Crusoe was not an ultra-individualist story.
This is a fine reading of the book.
And this concern with Rand (and with the contemprary ultra-right) gives an extremely partial, even dead wrong, sense of the nature of capitalism and capitalist ideology -- for capitalist ideologies (the plural is important) are intensely social, but ground the social in the existence of isolated, abstract individuals. In addition to Crusoe (as read by GAr) _all_ the major tects of capitalist culture emphasize either the 'comic' success of forming social relations where none existed before or the 'tragic' failure to do so. Capitalist ideologies build an anti-individualist _moral_ 'code' on the basis of a metaphysical individualism.
Carrdol