ABSTRACT
In The Division of Labor in Society, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim theorized that the material harm resulting from crimes such as robbery is always secondary in importance to its symbolic value and its potential for ideological disruption. George Cusack the Great Sea-Robber may be taken as representative of 1676 recurrent aspect of pirate narratives. Giovanopoulos has studied pirate biographies as a narrative form singularly apt to dramatize the power of the state over the individual and to reaffirm the values of European civilization against the savage freedom of the barbarian outlaw. The nineteenth-century working-class fascination with the romantic outlaw and the pirate rebel went hand in hand with the growth of a profound discontent with the exploitative conditions of modern life. European Romantics saw the lawless world of piracy an alternative to the disciplined order of the modern city dominated by its rigid laws, its dramatic inequality and its 'dark Satanic Mills'.
