working for low wages under severe captains for the complete economic
and political equality of life on a pirate ship.

Government on Captain Misson's ship, the _Victoire_, and in the colony
of Libertalia is partially an idealization of the pirate's creed. But
two other elements which must be considered are, first, the concept of
government in the state of nature, and secondly, the ideal of the
socialist utopia. Most political theorists of Defoe's time postulated a
state of nature in which man lived either entirely free from government
or under loose patriarchal control, from which he was removed either by
the invention of money, the discovery of agriculture or by some crime.
To a certain extent, Misson's pirate government may be regarded as a
stage in the evolution of government. In _The Farther Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe_, Defoe showed how government evolved from the anarchy
of the state of nature. Both Crusoe's colony and Libertalia are
eventually forced to establish government, private property and criminal
laws, but Libertalia, which retains its egalitarian and democratic
character, is overthrown by its failure to account for human evil and
crime.

A second influence on Captain Misson's ideology is Plutarch's
description of the laws of Sparta and Rome. Even during the "Anti-
Communist Period" which followed the Glorious Revolution, the well-
regulated state of the Lacedemonians remained the norm for Utopias. The
influence of Plutarch pervades the biographies in the _General History
of the Pyrates._ Lycurgus' laws echo throughout Misson's attacks on
luxury and the unequal distribution of wealth, while Plutarch's study of
Spartacus, which is mentioned in Defoe's preface, may well have been the
model for his hero.