In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe uses the tale of a shipwrecked soldier to criticize society. Mainly, the story of Robinson Crusoe is based on a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk who lived alone of the island of Juan Fernandez for over four years until he was rescued (Sutherland 7). In the island setting, Defoe was able to show what is necessary for the formation of a utopian society.

This depiction, however, differentiated from later writers such as Huxley who’s vision is “regarded as a classic examination of modern values and utopian thinking” (Bloom 232). “(Crusoe) takes a piece of paradise and makes it a sovereign state. He is king of vale, lord of the country, squire of the manor” (Seidel 10). While politicians argue about the best way to create a “perfect” society, Defoe says that the only way that it happens in the presence of everything except people, creating “Catch-22” irony. This was a very controversial topic in England at the time. Many citizens and people of certain religions were being persecuted because of their political beliefs

Defoe, however, believed that religious freedom and political freedom was a right that every member of society should have, so “his entry into the world of politics was perhaps inevitable. Defoe was never content to remain for long in the realm of impersonal thought; he had a dangerous way of applying his mind to persons and parties” . In his isolation from the rest of the world, Crusoe is able to create a utopian society that not only he depends on for survival, but it is also dependent on him .

This “Marx-like” economic system which was created proved that a utopian environment is possible to create, though easier having only one “citizen”. There are no other people to corrupt or destroy the harmony in which Crusoe is living in with nature. “It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days”. As Defoe depicts it, the narrator’s solitary confinement, even though it was an event that Crusoe viewed as being a punishment from God for his sins in the beginning, has really caused the narrator to become “enlightened” and has also made him realize that his new life was by far better than that in England. “The state of nature which Crusoe has lived, a solitary life on the island, possessed a purity that cannot be duplicated” , even making Crusoe say, “I cared not if I was never to remove from the place where I lived” and “I lived there..perfectly and completely happy, if any such thing as complete happiness can be formed in a sublunary state” .