Thomas Hobbes

• Triangle of Sadness follows the familiar plot of a castaway story.
• The castaway story has helped promulgate a view about human nature as eternal and unchanging.
• However, the castaway story reflects on the relationship between individuals and society.
• Triangle of Sadness and other modern castaway stories, reach back to one of the first English-language novels, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
• More than a survival tale of a man shipwrecked on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe is also a fascinating moral fable of individualism.

Work and enslavement

• Robinson remains true to this spirit once he is shipwrecked, claiming the island to have “no society” and declaring the land as his personal kingdom.
• Robinson becomes a farmer (using seeds from the shipwreck), raises cattle in accordance with European agriculture, hunts with muskets and hoards gold.
• In one of the most shocking parts of the novel, he captures and enslaves a man, who he calls “Friday”, converting him to Christianity.
• Much of the novel is about work.
• Defoe was highly influenced by Hobbes and Locke, who provide the model individual for Robinson’s colonial adventure story.

Beyond individualism

• Rousseau envisaged a kind of democracy which allows for individuals to be free in their collective decision-making.
• In Rousseau’s educational treatise, Émile (1762), initially Robinson Crusoe is the only book the young boy is allowed to read.
• Hierarchies of birth and privilege were overthrown and liberty was proclaimed for all based on the equality of human beings.
• (Although as many critics, including Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out this idea of equality was limited, and excluded women.)
• The depiction of slavery in Robinson Crusoe and the politics of individualism were called into question by G.W.F.
• In Hegel’s philosophy, individuals were always part of social relationships and needed to be thought of in relation to communities.