Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present)

by Max Horkheimer

The lone voyager armed with cunning is already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble: for this reason the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade. Both these prototypical shipwrecked sailors make their weakness—that of the individual who breaks away from the collective—their social strength. Abandoned to the vagaries of the waves, helplessly cut off, they are forced by their isolation into a ruthless pursuit of their atomistic interest. They embody the principle of the capitalist economy* even before they make use of any worker;* but the salvaged goods they bring with them to the new venture idealize the truth that the entrepreneur* has always entered the competition armed with more than the industry of his hands. Their powerlessness in face of nature already functions as an ideology for their social predominance. Odysseus’s defenselessness against the foaming sea sounds like a legitimation of the enrichment of the voyager at the expense of indigenous inhabitants. Bourgeois economics later enshrined this principle in the concept of risk: the possibility of foundering is seen as a moral justification for profit.*