Comment On Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe’s “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”, just as his second and no less of a name amongst classic novels - “Moll Flanders”, was mounted borderline between journalism and fiction, being based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk – a shipwrecked seaman. With his (Defoe’s) childhood marked by two amongst the most tragic of occurrences of the seventeenth century: a recurrence of the plague, which at the time took about 70,000 lives, dubbed the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London – Defoe’s fascination with tragedy and survival is one of undoubted consequence. Wherein this consequence shaped the resonance between Defoe, or originally Daniel Foe, with the story of Selkirk, and/or the protagonist – Crusoe, is a matter of faith’s subtle ways – it should be noted that a few traits of the authors own respond vividly to those of the protagonist. Daniel Defoe was a third child in a family of Presbyterian Dissenters; he was strongly political and also very active in Dissenter affairs and wrote much that promoted that position. He was educated in a Dissenter-friendly school and his father hoped that he would become a priest, but he became a merchant instead, much like Robinson himself.
The sociological concept of Protestant Work Ethic is strongly visible along the lines of the novel. A German philosopher cited amongst Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx as the founders of sociology- Max Weber - develops that concept in 1904/05 suggesting that the Protestant way conjured a code of everyday practices that as a result put Protestant countries ahead of Catholic ones in the matter of gathering and making use of capital. Northern European countries, who stuck to Protestant beliefs, are considered to have obtained capital through hard work and made use of it by investment and thriftiness. Whereas Catholic countries accumulated great wealth through gold and silver, mainly taken from South America, but showed no hesitation to waste it all away on wars and other