An Essay upon Projects
1697
Before he shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, Daniel Defoe shipwrecked himself into the mind of a reformer. Written in the early 1690s when Defoe was just thirty, An Essay Upon Projects is a whirlwind of bold, often bizarre proposals to fix a nation at war with itself and its finances. Here Defoe argues for national insurance decades before Bismarck, advocates for women's education when it was considered radical, redesigns the tax code, reimagines banking, and diagnoses poverty not as moral failing but as a structural problem requiring structural solutions. The book crackles with Defoe's signature energy: practical detail laced with speculative flair, good humor deployed in service of serious ideas. He calls his age the "Projecting Age" and wears the label proudly, arguing that innovators and schemers, properly channeled, might save England from economic collapse. Some suggestions took two hundred years to be implemented. Others we're still catching up to. This is Defoe before the novel, revealing a mind already restless, brilliant, and deeply concerned with how society might be made better.
