WEBVTT NOTE Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 It's a great honor to be giving the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture. 2 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:05.500 I'm on a small lecture tour. 3 00:00:05.500 --> 00:00:09.500 I lectured at Smith College on Monday and at Harvard on Wednesday, 4 00:00:09.500 --> 00:00:12.000 and here I am at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 5 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:17.500 That's an ascending sequence if I've ever heard one. 6 00:00:17.500 --> 00:00:22.000 Now, as a result of human action, not of human design, 7 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.500 I'm going to take off where Professor Hammowy left off 8 00:00:25.500 --> 00:00:32.500 I often talk about the idea of spontaneous order as it's applicable to culture 9 00:00:32.500 --> 00:00:39.500 and I will in many ways vindicate Friedrich Hayek in this area. 10 00:00:39.500 --> 00:00:47.500 My full title is The Poetics of Spontaneous Order, Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism 11 00:00:47.500 --> 00:00:54.500 and I hope to use this opportunity to synthesize a theory of applying Austrian economics 12 00:00:54.500 --> 00:01:01.500 I'm going to do literature, something I've been working to at a number of these Austrian conferences over the years. 13 00:01:01.500 --> 00:01:08.500 As if Austrian economics and literary criticism were enough, I'm going to throw biology into the pot here, 14 00:01:08.500 --> 00:01:13.500 and indeed this is my effort at a unified field theory. 15 00:01:13.500 --> 00:01:19.500 This is more provisional than my material usually is, but we'll see what I can do. 16 00:01:19.500 --> 00:01:26.500 I want to show how Austrian economics and especially the ideas of Mises and Hayek can make a contribution to literary criticism. 17 00:01:26.500 --> 00:01:36.500 To be sure, the prestige of the Austrian School to strictly economic questions and whether it can come to the aid of literary critics may seem like a trivial matter. 18 00:01:36.500 --> 00:01:39.500 But the case of Marxism might give us pause. 19 00:01:39.500 --> 00:01:48.500 Some of the most famous Marxist thinkers, such as Georg Lukacs and Theodor Dornow, devoted themselves largely to cultural subjects. 20 00:01:48.500 --> 00:01:56.500 And Marxism has derived much of its intellectual cachet from its seeming success in illuminating a wide range of issues in the arts. 21 00:01:56.500 --> 00:02:05.500 One might even argue that whatever intellectual prestige Marxism retains today stems from its cultural and not its economic applications. 22 00:02:05.500 --> 00:02:12.500 Indeed, paradoxically, as Marxism has lost the economic debate, it seems to have won the cultural. 23 00:02:12.500 --> 00:02:20.500 And in various reincarnations, such as the New Historicism, it has come to dominate literary criticism and analysis of the arts in general. 24 00:02:20.500 --> 00:02:30.500 The triumph of Austrian economics will in some sense not be complete until we can show that it surpasses Marxism, even in its ability to contribute to the study of culture. 25 00:02:30.500 --> 00:02:38.500 And well it should, because in contrast to Marxism, Austrian economics adopts a humanistic perspective on the world. 26 00:02:38.500 --> 00:02:52.500 Marxism is fundamentally reductive in its understanding of human action, displacing the human subject from the center of its concerns and turning instead to vast impersonal forces to explain historical and social patterns. 27 00:02:52.500 --> 00:02:57.500 In particular, Marxist thinkers tend to view culture as an epiphenomenon. 28 00:02:57.500 --> 00:03:01.660 Economic forces provide the bedrock of explanation in Marxist theories 29 00:03:01.660 --> 00:03:07.420 and culture constitutes a mere byproduct, a superstructure reflecting supposedly 30 00:03:07.420 --> 00:03:10.700 more basic developments in material modes of production. 31 00:03:10.700 --> 00:03:15.340 Much of Marxist literary criticism has been devoted to attacking the romantic idea 32 00:03:15.340 --> 00:03:20.300 of genius, calling to question the very notion of artistic creativity. 33 00:03:20.300 --> 00:03:25.180 Indeed, where traditional critics spoke of artistic creation, Marxists speak of 34 00:03:25.180 --> 00:03:28.180 and Cultural Work or Cultural Production. 35 00:03:28.180 --> 00:03:35.180 While traditional critics analyze the way the great artist creates an individual world out of his private imagination, 36 00:03:35.180 --> 00:03:38.180 Marxists stress the social dimension of art, 37 00:03:38.180 --> 00:03:42.180 viewing literary works as mirroring a particular historical moment 38 00:03:42.180 --> 00:03:45.180 or the consciousness of a distinct social class. 39 00:03:45.180 --> 00:03:47.180 With its collectivist impulses, 40 00:03:47.180 --> 00:03:52.180 Marxism downplays the role of the individual in artistic creation, 41 00:03:52.180 --> 00:03:57.180 However possible, treating the work of art as the product of a collaborative effort 42 00:03:57.180 --> 00:04:02.180 in which the individuality of the artist dissolves in a web of social relations. 43 00:04:02.180 --> 00:04:07.180 Moreover, as a form of historical determinism, Marxism undercuts the idea 44 00:04:07.180 --> 00:04:10.180 that the artist is free as a creator. 45 00:04:10.180 --> 00:04:13.180 For Marxists, economics is the realm of harsh necessity, 46 00:04:13.180 --> 00:04:16.180 at least until the coming of the communist revolution. 47 00:04:16.180 --> 00:04:20.180 Thus for a Marxist to show an artist involved in economic relations, 48 00:04:20.180 --> 00:04:26.180 and especially in any form of marketplace activity is ipso facto to expose his lack of freedom. 49 00:04:26.180 --> 00:04:35.180 In classic Marxist literary criticism authors operating in a market system are routinely portrayed as captives of capitalist ideology. 50 00:04:35.180 --> 00:04:43.180 One might well wonder why such an anti-humanistic view of the world has proved attractive to scholars of the humanities. 51 00:04:43.180 --> 00:04:47.180 As a doctrine that undermines the idea of individual human agency, 52 00:04:47.180 --> 00:04:57.180 As you can see, Marxism seems singularly inappropriate to the study of art, a realm often taken to be the highest form of human self-expression, creativity and freedom. 53 00:04:57.180 --> 00:05:04.180 Moreover, Marxism is especially inappropriate because it is a species of what Hayek calls scientism. 54 00:05:04.180 --> 00:05:12.180 Captivated by the success of the natural sciences in the 19th century, especially their ability to predict events in the physical world, 55 00:05:12.180 --> 00:05:18.180 Marx sought to create a science of economic and social phenomena modeled on Newtonian physics 56 00:05:18.180 --> 00:05:25.180 one that could discover historical laws that would operate with scientific regularity and hence strict predictability 57 00:05:25.180 --> 00:05:29.180 Marxism thus involves a fundamental category mistake 58 00:05:29.180 --> 00:05:35.180 it tries to understand economic and social phenomena on the model of events in the physical world 59 00:05:35.180 --> 00:05:39.180 that is to say human events on the model of non-human events 60 00:05:39.180 --> 00:05:52.180 Hence, Marxism is reductionist in trying to understand higher or more complex phenomena in terms of lower or less complex phenomena, it loses sight of what is fundamentally distinctive about human action. 61 00:05:52.180 --> 00:06:01.180 In particular, it oversimplifies human history in order to make it seem predictable and above all to make the triumph of communism seem inevitable. 62 00:06:01.180 --> 00:06:05.780 Having sought to understand economic phenomena in terms of material forces, 63 00:06:05.780 --> 00:06:11.540 Marxism compounds the error by trying to understand cultural phenomena in terms of economic, 64 00:06:11.540 --> 00:06:15.420 and thus it becomes doubly reductionist in its treatment of art. 65 00:06:15.420 --> 00:06:20.260 In short, in the long-standing conflict between the natural sciences and the humanities, 66 00:06:20.260 --> 00:06:24.660 Marxism seems to lean towards the natural sciences, 67 00:06:24.660 --> 00:06:28.020 making us wonder even more why scholars of the humanities 68 00:06:28.020 --> 00:06:31.760 never embraced Marxism as a form of analysis. 69 00:06:31.760 --> 00:06:34.600 In seeking to understand the behavior of academics, 70 00:06:34.600 --> 00:06:39.080 one should never underestimate the power of envy. 71 00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:41.400 The modern research university was largely 72 00:06:41.400 --> 00:06:44.280 shaped by the needs of the natural sciences. 73 00:06:44.280 --> 00:06:46.800 And scholars of the humanities have never felt completely 74 00:06:46.800 --> 00:06:48.880 at home in its precincts. 75 00:06:48.880 --> 00:06:51.800 Envying their colleagues in the large laboratories 76 00:06:51.800 --> 00:06:54.320 with generous research grants and staffs, 77 00:06:54.320 --> 00:06:56.400 those of the humanities have sought ways 78 00:06:56.400 --> 00:07:02.120 to achieve parity with natural scientists in terms of both salary and prestige. 79 00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:07.600 Hence, it is no accident that some humanities scholars have been attracted to pseudosciences 80 00:07:07.600 --> 00:07:09.400 such as Marxism. 81 00:07:09.400 --> 00:07:14.320 By adopting Marxist forms of analysis, they could give a scientific aura to their work 82 00:07:14.320 --> 00:07:20.040 without having to learn a hard science. 83 00:07:20.040 --> 00:07:25.840 Similar factors may explain why Freudianism proved to be attractive to many literary critics 84 00:07:25.840 --> 00:07:27.280 in the 20th Century. 85 00:07:27.280 --> 00:07:34.840 But I do not wish to present Marxist literary critics as merely opportunists. 86 00:07:34.840 --> 00:07:39.820 Many of them have been sincerely convinced of the truth of Marxism and genuinely attracted 87 00:07:39.820 --> 00:07:42.800 precisely to its reductionism. 88 00:07:42.800 --> 00:07:47.880 After generations of the romantic celebration of artistic genius, many critics were happy 89 00:07:47.880 --> 00:07:51.300 to see authors taken down a peg or two. 90 00:07:51.300 --> 00:07:55.760 Marxist analysis works to efface the distinction between the great author and the ordinary 91 00:07:55.760 --> 00:08:01.920 run of humanity, thus lessening the critic sense of subordination to the figures he studies. 92 00:08:01.920 --> 00:08:06.640 Marxist analysis, in fact, gives the critic power over the author. Knowing the truth of 93 00:08:06.640 --> 00:08:12.560 Marxism, the critic can, for example, expose the fallacies of capitalist ideology in the 94 00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:17.660 writers he discusses. The reductionism of Marxist analysis of art provides a way of 95 00:08:17.660 --> 00:08:22.700 elevating the critic over his subject matter. Since Marxist analysis has hinted to seem 96 00:08:22.700 --> 00:08:26.700 seem to be the only form of applying economic theories to literature. 97 00:08:26.700 --> 00:08:31.700 The very notion of the enterprise has come to be suspected in many quarters. 98 00:08:31.700 --> 00:08:37.700 In its various Marxist forms, literary criticism seems hostile to the literary imagination, 99 00:08:37.700 --> 00:08:44.700 or at least primarily interested in debunking it, exposing its limitations and above all its biases. 100 00:08:44.700 --> 00:08:50.700 Here is where the Austrian School can come to the aid of critics who are interested in the relation of literature and economics, 101 00:08:50.700 --> 00:09:07.700 In its epistemological foundations, laid by Menger and elaborated by Mises and Hayek, the Austrian School explicitly rejects the idea that the natural sciences provide the proper model for economic analysis. 102 00:09:07.700 --> 00:09:19.700 In its concern to establish the autonomy of economics as an intellectual discipline, the Austrian School respects the heterogeneity of phenomena and hence of a variety of methods of studying them. 103 00:09:19.700 --> 00:09:27.700 The Austrians do not accept the idea of a master science, one method of knowing that provides the key to understanding all phenomena. 104 00:09:27.700 --> 00:09:34.700 Far from being reductionists then, Austrian economics refuses to study the human in terms of the non-human. 105 00:09:34.700 --> 00:09:41.700 As the title of Mises's Magnum Opus indicates, the focus of Austrian economics is on human action, 106 00:09:41.700 --> 00:09:46.700 and it places the acting human subject squarely at the center of its concerns. 107 00:09:46.700 --> 00:09:52.200 Indeed, the Austrian School distinguishes itself from most other forms of economic thought 108 00:09:52.200 --> 00:09:57.200 by the fact that it views economic matters from the perspective of the acting individual. 109 00:09:57.200 --> 00:10:03.700 In epistemological terms, this is what is known as the methodological individualism of the Austrian School, 110 00:10:03.700 --> 00:10:10.200 an approach that one would think would be more attractive than the collectivism of Marxism to scholars who analyze art. 111 00:10:10.200 --> 00:10:18.200 Moreover, the way the Austrian School conceives economic activity ought to make it more congenial than Marxism to literary critics. 112 00:10:18.200 --> 00:10:29.200 The Austrian School views economics as the realm of freedom. Indeed, it regards economic behavior and above all the central act of choice as the defining manifestation of human freedom. 113 00:10:29.200 --> 00:10:37.200 Austrian economics is the very opposite of a deterministic doctrine. In addition to resting on the axiom of human freedom of choice, 114 00:10:37.200 --> 00:10:42.200 and the freedom of choice, it stresses the role of champs and contingency in human affairs. 115 00:10:42.200 --> 00:10:48.200 Indeed, it champions the free market as the best way of responding to the unpredictability of the world. 116 00:10:48.200 --> 00:10:57.200 Unlike most forms of mainstream economics, the Austrian School rejects the possibility of mathematical modeling of economic phenomena 117 00:10:57.200 --> 00:11:04.200 and refuses to make the kind of economic forecasts that are the stock and trade of many professionals in the field. 118 00:11:04.200 --> 00:11:16.200 Instead of drawing graphs and charts of so-called perfect competition, Austrian economists concentrate on the messiness of the real world in which human beings in fact act. 119 00:11:16.200 --> 00:11:25.200 The fact that at any given moment supply and demand are out of balance instead of meeting perfectly at an imaginary point on some professor's blackboard. 120 00:11:25.200 --> 00:11:36.200 In particular, the Austrian School focuses on entrepreneurial behavior, the unceasing efforts of businessmen to adjust to the never-ending changes in the economic world. 121 00:11:36.200 --> 00:11:42.200 More than any other school, the Austrians insist on the importance of uncertainty and risk as economic factors. 122 00:11:42.200 --> 00:11:53.200 They view the entrepreneur as someone who is constantly anticipating an uncertain future, trying to predict changes in demand and to figure out economies of production for satisfying it. 123 00:11:53.200 --> 00:11:58.200 Thus, for the Austrian School, the entrepreneur becomes a kind of artist. 124 00:11:58.200 --> 00:12:02.200 Indeed, the Austrians stress the creativity of the entrepreneur. 125 00:12:02.200 --> 00:12:07.200 Like a romantic artist, he is a visionary, a risk-taker and a pioneer. 126 00:12:07.200 --> 00:12:12.200 And if he is to be successful, he will generally be found running counter to the crowd 127 00:12:12.200 --> 00:12:15.200 or at least anticipating its movements. 128 00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:21.200 Thus, with Austrian economics, one need not worry that linking artistic activity with economic 129 00:12:21.200 --> 00:12:34.200 The Austrian School views economic activity as creative in the first place, for it to show an artist somehow implicated in the world of business is compatible with asserting his freedom. 130 00:12:34.200 --> 00:12:48.200 The focus on individual human action in Austrian economics makes it seem more relevant than Marxism to study the humanities, but I want to concentrate on a more specific contribution that Mises and Hayek can make to literary criticism. 131 00:12:48.200 --> 00:12:54.200 Austrian economics offers a model of order that I believe can help us understand literature 132 00:12:54.200 --> 00:12:58.200 what Hayek liked to refer to as spontaneous order 133 00:12:58.200 --> 00:13:04.200 and that's what I'm going to be trying to do here is show basically how the idea of spontaneous order works in literature 134 00:13:04.200 --> 00:13:10.200 This concept serves to highlight the place of Austrian economics in broader intellectual history 135 00:13:10.200 --> 00:13:16.200 The Austrians are in many respects the culmination and by far the most cogent exponents 136 00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:24.200 of a large-scale shift in thinking that I will describe as the movement from top-down to bottom-up models of order. 137 00:13:24.200 --> 00:13:27.200 Let me explain what I mean by that. 138 00:13:27.200 --> 00:13:33.200 For much of history, the only way of conceiving an order was to imagine it organized by a single person, 139 00:13:33.200 --> 00:13:38.200 some kind of central power imposing its will throughout a domain. 140 00:13:38.200 --> 00:13:44.200 The model for this kind of centralized order was in political terms, a king ruling his kingdom, 141 00:13:44.200 --> 00:13:48.800 or in religious terms, God creating and directing the whole universe. 142 00:13:48.800 --> 00:13:55.080 In this kind of model, order has to be imposed from above or there is no order at all. 143 00:13:55.080 --> 00:13:59.880 One might debate when and where this sharp dichotomy between order and disorder began 144 00:13:59.880 --> 00:14:04.800 to be challenged, but one of the key moments came in the 18th century with such thinkers 145 00:14:04.800 --> 00:14:06.760 as Mandeville and Smith. 146 00:14:06.760 --> 00:14:12.120 Indeed, the great contribution of economics to thought in general has been a way of conceiving 147 00:14:12.120 --> 00:14:19.120 an order that need not be imposed from above on phenomena but can grow up out of them 148 00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:22.120 an order generated by the phenomena themselves 149 00:14:22.120 --> 00:14:27.120 what I am calling a bottom-up order or what Hayek calls a spontaneous order 150 00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:31.120 what Adam Smith demonstrated with his famous notion of the invisible hand 151 00:14:31.120 --> 00:14:36.120 is that government does not have to regulate or plan centrally the activities of businessmen 152 00:14:36.120 --> 00:14:39.120 in order to promote the public good 153 00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:43.240 to themselves to pursue what appear to be their merely private interests, businessmen 154 00:14:43.240 --> 00:14:48.000 will in fact serve the public because the market provides an impersonal mechanism for 155 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:49.800 coordinating their activities. 156 00:14:49.800 --> 00:14:54.760 In particular, the pricing mechanism works to bring supply in line with demand without 157 00:14:54.760 --> 00:14:58.900 anyone needing to oversee the process from a central position. 158 00:14:58.900 --> 00:15:04.460 From the perspective of traditional thinking, the market presents a paradox, an order without 159 00:15:04.460 --> 00:15:07.480 an individual ordering it. 160 00:15:07.480 --> 00:15:12.920 Many of the advances in 19th century thinking resulted from extending the concept of spontaneous 161 00:15:12.920 --> 00:15:16.000 order from economics to new areas. 162 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:18.920 A good example is Darwin's theory of evolution. 163 00:15:18.920 --> 00:15:24.920 That shows another way of seeing the shift from top-down to bottom-up models of order. 164 00:15:24.920 --> 00:15:29.720 In the traditional view, the complex order of biological form could be explained only 165 00:15:29.720 --> 00:15:35.120 by the notion of divine creation, of a god who consciously designed the intimate interplay 166 00:15:35.120 --> 00:15:38.120 Between Form and Function in Bodily Organs. 167 00:15:38.120 --> 00:15:41.120 Whatever one may think of Darwin's specific version 168 00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:44.120 of the theory of evolution, he did at least provide a way 169 00:15:44.120 --> 00:15:48.120 of reconceiving the problem of biological form. 170 00:15:48.120 --> 00:15:51.120 He showed the theoretical possibility of a process 171 00:15:51.120 --> 00:15:54.120 of natural selection, accounting for the orders. 172 00:15:54.120 --> 00:15:57.120 To the extent the idea of spontaneous order has ended 173 00:15:57.120 --> 00:16:02.120 literary criticism, it has largely been via Darwin's thinking. 174 00:16:02.120 --> 00:16:10.120 I happen to have many doubts about his specific theory of myself but I'm using it as a point of intellectual history here. 175 00:16:10.120 --> 00:16:18.120 For Darwin, the struggle for existence provides an impersonal mechanism that can explain the way, over time, organs become suited to their functions 176 00:16:18.120 --> 00:16:26.120 without our having to invoke the idea of some personal force designing and shaping those organs at a single moment of creation. 177 00:16:26.120 --> 00:16:40.120 The fact that competition among members of the same species plays such an important role in Darwin's thinking is one indication that his version of spontaneous order thinking was in fact deeply influenced by the work of the classical economists. 178 00:16:40.120 --> 00:16:47.120 Darwin himself acknowledged the importance of Thomas Malthus to his development of his concept of natural selection. 179 00:16:47.120 --> 00:16:56.120 Thus, it is no accident that classical economics and Darwinian evolutionary theory converge precisely on the issue of spontaneous order. 180 00:16:56.120 --> 00:17:03.120 And indeed, they represent the two most significant examples of this new kind of thinking in the 19th century. 181 00:17:03.120 --> 00:17:07.120 But the idea of spontaneous order is even more widespread in the period. 182 00:17:07.120 --> 00:17:16.120 Evolution, broadly conceived, was in many ways the leading idea of the age and appears in fields as diverse as linguistics and legal history. 183 00:17:16.120 --> 00:17:20.220 and we actually got a good example of that in Professor Hamowy's speech 184 00:17:20.220 --> 00:17:23.220 and especially his remarks on language towards the end. 185 00:17:23.220 --> 00:17:28.020 As fruitful as the idea of spontaneous order proved to be in the 19th century 186 00:17:28.020 --> 00:17:34.220 in several areas, at first sight it does not seem to be applicable to the study of literary phenomena. 187 00:17:34.220 --> 00:17:41.020 The concept of bottom-up orders provided an alternative to the traditional concept of top-down orders, 188 00:17:41.020 --> 00:17:43.520 not an outright replacement for it. 189 00:17:43.520 --> 00:17:52.520 The fact that spontaneous orders are possible in some realms does not mean that centrally planned orders do not exist at all. 190 00:17:52.520 --> 00:17:58.520 As we can see here, bricks do not spontaneously order themselves into buildings. 191 00:17:58.520 --> 00:18:02.520 It took several years for this great building to come into existence. 192 00:18:02.520 --> 00:18:12.520 Despite anything that Smith, Mises or Hayek proved, an architect is still necessary to plan a building and an engineer has to direct its construction. 193 00:18:12.520 --> 00:18:18.520 At first glance, a poem would seem to be more like a building than a stock market 194 00:18:18.520 --> 00:18:24.520 Indeed, a well-crafted poem seems to be a perfect example of a non-spontaneous order 195 00:18:24.520 --> 00:18:27.520 In the common understanding, poems have authors 196 00:18:27.520 --> 00:18:30.520 The authors plan them out carefully ahead of time 197 00:18:30.520 --> 00:18:35.520 They are in control of every detail of their poems down to the last word 198 00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:40.520 Their aim is to create a perfect whole in each poem, a work of art 199 00:18:40.520 --> 00:18:43.960 in which every part contributes to the unity of the whole. 200 00:18:43.960 --> 00:18:47.840 If there ever were a legitimate example of central planning, 201 00:18:47.840 --> 00:18:50.960 the art of poetry would appear to provide it. 202 00:18:50.960 --> 00:18:55.160 I've argued elsewhere that one reason many authors have been predisposed 203 00:18:55.160 --> 00:18:58.880 towards socialism is that they are used to central planning 204 00:18:58.880 --> 00:19:02.520 in their own line of work and they have a hard time conceiving 205 00:19:02.520 --> 00:19:06.120 how any form of order can be produced without it. 206 00:19:06.120 --> 00:19:08.920 Indeed, much of 20th century literary criticism 207 00:19:08.920 --> 00:19:14.820 was dominated by a movement guided by a model of order as non-spontaneous. 208 00:19:14.820 --> 00:19:20.000 The New Criticism held up the ideal of the perfectly crafted poem. 209 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:25.600 A New Critic typically concerned himself with showing how a literary work holds together, 210 00:19:25.600 --> 00:19:28.640 how each detail fits into the pattern of the whole. 211 00:19:28.640 --> 00:19:33.620 And I'm sure this is the way many of you were educated about literature in college. 212 00:19:33.620 --> 00:19:41.620 The most characteristic claim of the New Criticism is that to change just one word in a poem is to alter its meaning as a whole. 213 00:19:41.620 --> 00:19:48.620 Now there can be no question that the New Criticism made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of literature. 214 00:19:48.620 --> 00:19:56.620 Guided by their idea of literary unity, the New Critics learned to scrutinize literature with a newfound care and attention to detail. 215 00:19:56.620 --> 00:20:03.620 Precisely because the New Critics believe that every detail in a work of literature has to have a well-designed function, 216 00:20:03.620 --> 00:20:11.620 whenever some facet seemed extraneous or purposeless, they searched and searched until they found a reason for it. 217 00:20:11.620 --> 00:20:17.620 A New Critical reading of a literary work typically begins with some seemingly extraneous detail 218 00:20:17.620 --> 00:20:25.620 and goes on to explain how what at first appears to be an anomaly in the work really is part of its larger and deeper design. 219 00:20:25.620 --> 00:20:36.620 In the heyday of the New Critics, it was hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity in finding evidence of design and order, where accent and contingency seemed at first to prevail. 220 00:20:36.620 --> 00:20:48.620 But the problem with the New Criticism is that its readings came to seem over ingenious, as its followers vied with each other to find a purpose in every last detail of every last literary work. 221 00:20:48.620 --> 00:20:57.620 Literary Work. Though useful as a heuristic device, the postulate of literary unity began to seem extreme in its relentless application. 222 00:20:57.620 --> 00:21:03.620 As often happens in the academy, the new criticism eventually gave birth to its opposite. 223 00:21:03.620 --> 00:21:10.620 The movement known as deconstruction is best understood as a reaction against the extremism of the new criticism. 224 00:21:10.620 --> 00:21:15.620 Fed up with the obsession with perfection of literary form and the new criticism, 225 00:21:15.620 --> 00:21:20.620 the deconstructive critics conjured up a kind of contrary model of imperfection 226 00:21:20.620 --> 00:21:24.620 where the new critics had labored to show how works of literature hang together 227 00:21:24.620 --> 00:21:28.620 the deconstructionists spared no pains in showing how they fall apart 228 00:21:28.620 --> 00:21:33.620 the typical deconstructive reading reverses the movement of the new criticism 229 00:21:33.620 --> 00:21:37.620 starting with the common understanding of a literary work as unified 230 00:21:37.620 --> 00:21:41.620 the deconstructive critic seeks to uncover some genuinely anomalous detail 231 00:21:41.620 --> 00:21:46.820 This detail, a part that stubbornly refuses to fit into the pattern of the whole, something 232 00:21:46.820 --> 00:21:48.780 that cuts against the grain. 233 00:21:48.780 --> 00:21:53.700 The deconstructionists stress the recalcitrance of the means authors use to reach their ends 234 00:21:53.700 --> 00:21:57.500 above all the recalcitrance of language itself. 235 00:21:57.500 --> 00:22:02.220 Deconstructive critics delight in uncovering secondary or tertiary meanings and words authors 236 00:22:02.220 --> 00:22:07.020 use, meanings that run counter to the primary meaning the author intended to express. 237 00:22:07.020 --> 00:22:12.020 In a deconstructive reading, the literary work never quite measures up to the author's design 238 00:22:12.020 --> 00:22:18.020 Indeed, it usually is presented as on some level saying the opposite of what the author intended 239 00:22:18.020 --> 00:22:22.020 Where new critical readings evoke the idea of perfect artistic design 240 00:22:22.020 --> 00:22:28.020 deconstructive readings typically point in the direction of contingency and failure of design 241 00:22:28.020 --> 00:22:34.020 In many ways, the battle between the new criticism and deconstruction emerged as the most significant critical debate 242 00:22:34.020 --> 00:22:39.660 debate of the second half of the 20th century, and seemed to leave us with a difficult choice 243 00:22:39.660 --> 00:22:43.900 between an idea of perfect order and an idea of perfect disorder. 244 00:22:43.900 --> 00:22:48.140 On reflection, it is clear that the one idea bred the other. 245 00:22:48.140 --> 00:22:53.340 The insistence on complete perfection of literary form and the new criticism provoked the deconstructive 246 00:22:53.340 --> 00:22:57.700 critics into denying that any consistency of form can be found in literature. 247 00:22:57.700 --> 00:23:02.540 In effect, the deconstructions argued that if literature is not perfectly ordered, it 248 00:23:02.540 --> 00:23:05.040 is not meaningfully ordered at all. 249 00:23:05.040 --> 00:23:07.380 When stated this way, this situation 250 00:23:07.380 --> 00:23:10.140 begins to sound like a false dichotomy, 251 00:23:10.140 --> 00:23:12.260 just the kind of intellectual impasse 252 00:23:12.260 --> 00:23:16.340 in which the idea of spontaneous order might come to our aid. 253 00:23:16.340 --> 00:23:19.140 We saw that in traditional thought, 254 00:23:19.140 --> 00:23:22.340 the stark alternatives were a centrally designed order 255 00:23:22.340 --> 00:23:23.980 or no order at all. 256 00:23:23.980 --> 00:23:26.940 18th century economic thought and related movements 257 00:23:26.940 --> 00:23:29.780 showed how one might overcome this simple opposition 258 00:23:29.780 --> 00:23:35.780 and conceive an order that was not centrally planned and yet achieves a form of coherence. 259 00:23:35.780 --> 00:23:41.780 If we are to avoid having to choose between pure perfection and pure imperfection in literature, 260 00:23:41.780 --> 00:23:48.780 perhaps we have to find a way of admitting some element of contingency into our conception of literary form 261 00:23:48.780 --> 00:23:52.780 without having to abandon the idea of any order whatsoever. 262 00:23:52.780 --> 00:23:57.780 And there's where I'm saying the idea of spontaneous order can come to our aid. 263 00:23:57.780 --> 00:24:03.440 But we have to consider for a minute what exactly the idea of spontaneous order entails. 264 00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:09.640 Discussions of spontaneous versus non-spontaneous orders tend to get caught up in the issue of origins. 265 00:24:09.640 --> 00:24:14.040 Spontaneous orders are those that come into being spontaneously. 266 00:24:14.040 --> 00:24:18.840 If I leave you with no other insight, I hope you will take that home with you. 267 00:24:18.840 --> 00:24:24.040 That is, come into being without the intervention of an external force. 268 00:24:24.040 --> 00:24:31.040 Non-spontaneous orders are distinguished precisely by the presence of such an external force at their origin. 269 00:24:31.040 --> 00:24:36.040 The often heated debate over evolution centers on precisely this question, 270 00:24:36.040 --> 00:24:42.040 whether some kind of intelligence was necessary to plan the complex biological order we see before us, 271 00:24:42.040 --> 00:24:47.040 or whether it could have come into being on its own initiative as it were. 272 00:24:47.040 --> 00:24:53.040 What tends to get lost in such controversies is the question of the nature of the order, not just its origin. 273 00:24:53.040 --> 00:25:01.040 Most people assume that spontaneous orders have essentially the same nature as non-spontaneous orders, they just come into being differently. 274 00:25:01.040 --> 00:25:06.040 The debate over the theory of evolution illustrates this potential confusion. 275 00:25:06.040 --> 00:25:17.040 Even people well versed in the evolutionary controversy sometimes think that Darwin was operating with basically the same conception of biological form as earlier thinkers such as Aristotle. 276 00:25:17.040 --> 00:25:20.800 Aristotle. Darwin indeed at first appears to have a 277 00:25:20.800 --> 00:25:25.920 teleological conception of the organism. He talks about the remarkable ways in which the 278 00:25:25.920 --> 00:25:31.560 organs of an animal are suited to their biological functions. According to this view, Darwin simply 279 00:25:31.560 --> 00:25:36.040 gave a different account of how these organs become suited to their functions. Instead 280 00:25:36.040 --> 00:25:40.320 of attributing their functionality to divine planning and creation, he explains it is the 281 00:25:40.320 --> 00:25:45.480 product of a wholly natural process, natural selection. The way Darwin himself and many 282 00:25:45.480 --> 00:25:52.280 The theory of evolution only serves to reinforce this understandable but I think false impression. 283 00:25:52.280 --> 00:25:58.980 Darwin's own writings and biology and textbooks to this day are saturated with the traditional language of teleology. 284 00:25:58.980 --> 00:26:07.980 They speak of organs having purposes, indeed they speak of evolution as if it were a conscious process with animals striving to adapt to their environment. 285 00:26:07.980 --> 00:26:12.980 Darwin often uses the language of perfection in the origin of species, 286 00:26:12.980 --> 00:26:17.980 Dorfingen's evidence of his theory, the way organs are perfectly adapted to their functions. 287 00:26:17.980 --> 00:26:23.980 But as many commentators have pointed out, the real evidence for Darwin's distinctive account of evolution 288 00:26:23.980 --> 00:26:29.980 is to be found in the phenomenon of imperfection rather than perfection of biological form. 289 00:26:29.980 --> 00:26:35.980 If an organ is perfectly suited to its function, then it could just as well have been the product of conscious planning 290 00:26:35.980 --> 00:26:39.980 as of an impersonal process such as natural selection. 291 00:26:39.980 --> 00:26:46.980 Only when one finds imperfection in an organism is one tempted to rule out design and its formation 292 00:26:46.980 --> 00:26:49.980 and attribute its origins to some kind of history 293 00:26:49.980 --> 00:26:53.980 to see an element of historical contingency in the form the organ is taken 294 00:26:53.980 --> 00:27:00.980 Hence the issue of vestigial organs becomes central to Darwin's theory and far more so than he himself realized 295 00:27:00.980 --> 00:27:04.980 When we see an organ in an animal that apparently has no function 296 00:27:04.980 --> 00:27:09.980 It becomes difficult to ascribe its presence to the plans of a benevolent deity 297 00:27:09.980 --> 00:27:13.980 who presumably would be able to achieve perfection in his creations 298 00:27:13.980 --> 00:27:17.980 and would not allow anything wasteful into his designs. 299 00:27:17.980 --> 00:27:21.980 As Darwin has posed the question, what did God have in mind 300 00:27:21.980 --> 00:27:24.980 when he gave man a useless organ like an appendix? 301 00:27:24.980 --> 00:27:29.980 Vestigial organs seem to be comprehensible only if species have histories. 302 00:27:29.980 --> 00:27:33.980 If Homo sapiens has a tailbone but no tail 303 00:27:33.980 --> 00:27:39.980 The reason, Darwinists argue, is that human beings have evolved from monkey-like creatures that did have tails. 304 00:27:39.980 --> 00:27:43.980 Thus, Darwin, for all his own occasional confusion on this issue, 305 00:27:43.980 --> 00:27:48.980 does operate with a different conception of biological form than Aristotle had. 306 00:27:48.980 --> 00:27:54.980 For Darwin, biological form is generally a combination of perfection and imperfection. 307 00:27:54.980 --> 00:27:59.980 The organism must be sufficiently well-formed and suited to its environment to survive. 308 00:27:59.980 --> 00:28:04.980 To that extent, one can still speak of perfection of biological form in Darwin. 309 00:28:04.980 --> 00:28:11.980 But for Darwin, no organism can be perfectly perfect, for that might suggest a divine hand in its creation. 310 00:28:11.980 --> 00:28:18.980 Darwin requires organisms to be just imperfect enough to call into question their having been perfectly designed, 311 00:28:18.980 --> 00:28:26.980 and hence to force us to invoke historical contingency to explain what otherwise appears to be something anomalous of the species. 312 00:28:26.980 --> 00:28:31.980 Now, I'm not arguing here for Darwin's particular theory of evolution. 313 00:28:31.980 --> 00:28:37.980 I'm aware, for example, that the issue of vestigial organs remains controversial, 314 00:28:37.980 --> 00:28:41.980 with some of Darwin's critics insisting that organs appear to be useless 315 00:28:41.980 --> 00:28:44.980 only because we have not searched hard enough to find their use. 316 00:28:44.980 --> 00:28:49.980 For the moment, I'm merely using Darwin to illustrate the nature of a spontaneous order 317 00:28:49.980 --> 00:28:53.980 and to suggest how it may differ from a non-spontaneous order. 318 00:28:53.980 --> 00:28:54.980 Spontaneous Order 319 00:28:54.980 --> 00:29:00.860 My key point is that a spontaneous order will not look just like an order that has been 320 00:29:00.860 --> 00:29:02.620 consciously designed. 321 00:29:02.620 --> 00:29:08.460 Because of the way they come into being, spontaneous orders always embody an element of temporality 322 00:29:08.460 --> 00:29:12.100 or what might be called historical contingency. 323 00:29:12.100 --> 00:29:16.180 Consciously designed orders, because they come into being at a single moment and in 324 00:29:16.180 --> 00:29:20.520 one stroke, can at least aspire to eliminate contingency. 325 00:29:20.520 --> 00:29:25.440 But spontaneous orders always betray the history of their coming to being and hence display 326 00:29:25.440 --> 00:29:29.800 a certain messiness by comparison with consciously designed orders. 327 00:29:29.800 --> 00:29:35.280 That is why consciously designed orders can often be described in mathematical terms and 328 00:29:35.280 --> 00:29:40.680 indeed can aspire to the symmetry of geometric form, whereas spontaneous orders can never 329 00:29:40.680 --> 00:29:46.040 be formulated in mathematical equations or diagrammed geometrically without distorting 330 00:29:46.040 --> 00:29:47.940 their very nature. 331 00:29:47.940 --> 00:29:52.740 No one understands this point about spontaneous orders better than the Austrians, which is 332 00:29:52.740 --> 00:29:59.140 why they stress the elements of temporality and contingency in economic affairs. 333 00:29:59.140 --> 00:30:04.540 That is one reason why Austrian economics marks an advance beyond earlier economic thinking, 334 00:30:04.540 --> 00:30:06.900 including classical economics. 335 00:30:06.900 --> 00:30:11.500 The idea of spontaneous order was so novel when thinkers first began to explore it that 336 00:30:11.500 --> 00:30:16.340 people took a long time to realize how truly revolutionary it was. 337 00:30:16.340 --> 00:30:21.340 These ideas were subject to the same kind of misunderstanding that later dogged Darwin's 338 00:30:21.340 --> 00:30:26.340 and like Darwin, Smith did not fully comprehend what was distinctive in his own thinking. 339 00:30:26.340 --> 00:30:33.340 That his people thought Smith with his invisible hand idea had merely ascribed a different origin to economic order 340 00:30:33.340 --> 00:30:36.340 but was still describing essentially the same kind of order. 341 00:30:36.340 --> 00:30:42.340 Supply would come perfectly into line with demand as if it had been consciously ordered to do so 342 00:30:42.340 --> 00:30:45.340 even if no one was really directing the economy. 343 00:30:45.340 --> 00:30:51.340 The classical economists themselves were prone to this kind of misinterpretation of their own insights 344 00:30:51.340 --> 00:30:58.340 as witnessed the way both Smith and Ricardo insisted on distinguishing between market prices and natural prices. 345 00:30:58.340 --> 00:31:04.340 The neoclassical economists with their obsession with equilibrium theory and the idea of perfect competition 346 00:31:04.340 --> 00:31:07.340 perpetuated this kind of error. 347 00:31:07.340 --> 00:31:13.340 Their fundamental mistake is that they try to defend capitalism as a way of achieving economic perfection 348 00:31:13.340 --> 00:31:22.340 With their equations and diagrams they pictured the market economy as if it had been planned by a single giant intellect 349 00:31:22.340 --> 00:31:28.340 and as if all market phenomena could be surveyed and taken in from the perspective of a single planner 350 00:31:28.340 --> 00:31:33.340 This approach only tempted socialists to think that by tinkering with these equations and diagrams 351 00:31:33.340 --> 00:31:37.340 they could use this system of central planning to improve upon the market 352 00:31:37.340 --> 00:31:42.340 Only the Austrian economists fully realized that the market economy is a form of spontaneous order 353 00:31:42.340 --> 00:31:47.340 and hence characterized as much by its imperfection as its perfection. 354 00:31:47.340 --> 00:31:51.340 The Austrians never claimed that the market economy can achieve perfection. 355 00:31:51.340 --> 00:31:58.340 What they do argue is that of all economic systems, it is the only one able to correct its imperfections 356 00:31:58.340 --> 00:32:01.340 in a systematic and rational manner. 357 00:32:01.340 --> 00:32:05.340 In an imperfect and ever-changing world, the market will never achieve equilibrium, 358 00:32:05.340 --> 00:32:09.340 but it has a way of working out disequilibria over time. 359 00:32:09.340 --> 00:32:17.340 This is what distinguishes spontaneous orders in general. Over time, they are self-correcting and hence self-regulating systems. 360 00:32:17.340 --> 00:32:23.340 One might say that they are always perfecting themselves, but they never achieve perfection. 361 00:32:23.340 --> 00:32:31.340 Now, using that idea of spontaneous order as combining perfection and imperfection, 362 00:32:31.340 --> 00:32:37.640 let me approach literature finally and say that this insight might help us 363 00:32:37.640 --> 00:32:42.100 mediate between what we saw as the extreme positions of the new criticism 364 00:32:42.100 --> 00:32:46.340 and deconstruction that literature is either wholly ordered or wholly 365 00:32:46.340 --> 00:32:51.060 disordered. Now again to be sure literature will always offer us examples 366 00:32:51.060 --> 00:32:55.920 of consciously designed order. When a great poet sits down to write he may 367 00:32:55.920 --> 00:33:00.700 create a masterpiece in which every element falls perfectly into place. A 368 00:33:00.700 --> 00:33:06.100 A great lyric poem comes as close to perfection of order as the human mind can produce. 369 00:33:06.100 --> 00:33:10.200 But does the lyric poem provide the proper model for all literature? 370 00:33:10.200 --> 00:33:13.700 In a way, that was the chief claim of the New Critics. 371 00:33:13.700 --> 00:33:19.700 But it is difficult to apply their conception of literary order to a 1,000 page novel. 372 00:33:19.700 --> 00:33:27.700 Is it really true that if we changed a single word in War and Peace, it would become a different work? 373 00:33:27.700 --> 00:33:38.700 Die-hard new critics might insist that it would, but they themselves would be hard-pressed even to notice the change in an empirical test of their claims. 374 00:33:38.700 --> 00:33:47.700 We know for a fact that some novelists themselves have failed to notice when editors or publishers or even simple misprints have altered words in their text. 375 00:33:47.700 --> 00:34:01.700 Such observations suggest that large-scale literary works such as the novel may allow for a different kind of order than the lyric poem, one that can admit more messiness, the kind of imperfections that characterizes spontaneous order. 376 00:34:01.700 --> 00:34:08.700 The simple fact is that under normal circumstances, a thousand-page novel will take longer to write than a 20-line lyric poem. 377 00:34:08.700 --> 00:34:14.700 In theory, this difference in time of composition need not have any effect on the form of the finished product. 378 00:34:14.700 --> 00:34:21.700 There is no reason in the abstract why a novelist cannot maintain a lyric poet's strict control over his materials. 379 00:34:21.700 --> 00:34:27.700 And some novels do at least approach the kind of perfection of form we associate with the best lyric poetry. 380 00:34:27.700 --> 00:34:29.700 Flaubert certainly hoped so. 381 00:34:29.700 --> 00:34:37.700 But in practice, the fact that novels generally take years rather than days to write tends to introduce a certain looseness into their form. 382 00:34:37.700 --> 00:34:44.180 under their form. Working on page 750 of his manuscript, a novelist will sometimes forget 383 00:34:44.180 --> 00:34:49.420 what he wrote 18 months earlier on page 150 and allow minor inconsistencies to slip into 384 00:34:49.420 --> 00:34:54.660 his narrative. Even when he goes back to revise his manuscript, a novelist may fail to notice 385 00:34:54.660 --> 00:35:00.020 such errors and allow them to survive in the published version. This tendency towards lucidness 386 00:35:00.020 --> 00:35:06.140 of form was compounded by the way novels often were published in the heyday of the genre 387 00:35:06.140 --> 00:35:09.700 in the 19th century. Many were initially serialized 388 00:35:09.700 --> 00:35:12.700 in popular periodicals, appearing installments 389 00:35:12.700 --> 00:35:15.700 of a few chapters at a time, usually on a weekly 390 00:35:15.700 --> 00:35:20.220 or monthly basis. This method of publication put a premium on length. 391 00:35:20.220 --> 00:35:24.740 Novelists were sometimes literally paid by the word, and since they had to commit in advance 392 00:35:24.740 --> 00:35:29.900 to a certain number of installments, say 20, they had an incentive to fill out a story 393 00:35:29.900 --> 00:35:33.980 to reach the set length rather than to economize in their narratives 394 00:35:33.980 --> 00:35:37.500 and make them go on only as long as the subject matter dictated. 395 00:35:37.500 --> 00:35:40.900 This premium on length in itself promoted a certain looseness 396 00:35:40.900 --> 00:35:44.260 of form in 19th century novels, but more importantly, 397 00:35:44.260 --> 00:35:46.380 serial publication forced novelists 398 00:35:46.380 --> 00:35:49.500 to commit their ideas to print as they were composing, 399 00:35:49.500 --> 00:35:52.660 and hence before their novels were finished. 400 00:35:52.660 --> 00:35:56.300 Evidence from novelist notes, diaries, and communications 401 00:35:56.300 --> 00:35:58.460 show that they generally did plan out 402 00:35:58.460 --> 00:35:59.740 their works in advance. 403 00:35:59.740 --> 00:36:01.140 They usually had a good idea of what 404 00:36:01.140 --> 00:36:03.760 the overall shape of their novels was going to be, 405 00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:07.480 and they often have sketches for the chapters that we're going to write later. 406 00:36:07.480 --> 00:36:11.080 But precisely from looking at such sketches, we know that novels frequently 407 00:36:11.080 --> 00:36:15.000 altered their plans in the course of composition, introducing new characters 408 00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:17.920 and plot turns as they worked up their material. 409 00:36:17.920 --> 00:36:21.520 Later installments could revise the direction in which the novel was going, 410 00:36:21.520 --> 00:36:25.360 but they could not unwrite the installments already published, 411 00:36:25.360 --> 00:36:29.320 and in some cases widely read and fixed in the public's imagination. 412 00:36:29.320 --> 00:36:34.680 Thus, later chapters in serialized novels sometimes ended up inconsistent with chapters 413 00:36:34.680 --> 00:36:35.680 published earlier. 414 00:36:35.680 --> 00:36:40.920 Of course, the serialized form of novel was not always its final form. 415 00:36:40.920 --> 00:36:46.040 Novels successful in serialization were frequently repackaged in book form, and at that stage 416 00:36:46.040 --> 00:36:49.520 novelists often had a chance to revise their work. 417 00:36:49.520 --> 00:36:54.040 Many availed themselves of the opportunity to change the text, sometimes eliminating 418 00:36:54.040 --> 00:36:58.960 inconsistencies that had crept into their plots, sometimes tightening up the narratives, 419 00:36:58.960 --> 00:37:01.560 Sometimes writing new scenes, even new endings. 420 00:37:01.560 --> 00:37:06.480 But given the way we romanticize the author's ceaseless quest for form and perfection, 421 00:37:06.480 --> 00:37:12.500 we may be surprised to learn that 19th century novelists often did not take full advantage 422 00:37:12.500 --> 00:37:16.920 of this chance to revise their work for book publication. 423 00:37:16.920 --> 00:37:21.100 Sometimes an author was too engrossed in new work to take pains with the old. 424 00:37:21.100 --> 00:37:25.060 Sometimes the way the public had become attached to particular scenes during the process of 425 00:37:25.060 --> 00:37:28.900 of Civilization prevented an author from tampering with his work. 426 00:37:28.900 --> 00:37:31.900 Whatever the reasons, many book versions of novels 427 00:37:31.900 --> 00:37:36.460 do not depart substantially from the original serial installments. 428 00:37:36.460 --> 00:37:39.940 In cases like this, the form of a novel becomes the product 429 00:37:39.940 --> 00:37:43.100 not of a single moment of centrally planned creation, 430 00:37:43.100 --> 00:37:47.180 but of a certain history of composition and publication. 431 00:37:47.180 --> 00:37:50.260 Thus, the novel's form comes to incorporate an element 432 00:37:50.260 --> 00:37:52.020 of historical contingency. 433 00:37:52.020 --> 00:37:59.020 Serial publication could thus result in the presence of the equivalent of vestigial organs in some novels. 434 00:37:59.020 --> 00:38:08.020 A novelist might introduce a character in an early chapter, thinking at the time that he would later develop that character into a major figure in the story. 435 00:38:08.020 --> 00:38:15.020 He might start a subplot in motion that looked as if it were going to propel the character to prominence later in the action. 436 00:38:15.020 --> 00:38:26.020 But in the course of the months of serial publication, the author might for one reason or another lose interest in that character and demote him to minor status or perhaps drop him from the narrative entirely. 437 00:38:26.020 --> 00:38:38.020 In the course of hundreds of pages in the novel, a character who originally seemed promising might end up more or less extraneous to the narrative and all but forgotten by the closing chapter. 438 00:38:38.020 --> 00:38:43.820 But such a character would probably not be removed from the final book version of the novel 439 00:38:43.820 --> 00:38:47.020 perhaps because the author had a lingering affection for him 440 00:38:47.020 --> 00:38:52.020 or more likely just because cutting him out of the narrative would see more trouble than it was worth 441 00:38:52.020 --> 00:38:59.020 The character would in effect remain as a monument to an earlier stage of the evolution of that novel 442 00:38:59.020 --> 00:39:04.020 much as a vestigial organ points to earlier stages of the species evolution 443 00:39:04.020 --> 00:39:17.020 A scholar with a new critical bent looking for perfection in the literary form of the book version of such a novel would be puzzled by the presence of a character in the early chapters who seems to have no role to play in the later chapters. 444 00:39:17.020 --> 00:39:25.020 Of course, the new critics were nothing if not ingenious, and they made their reputations turning the seemingly extraneous into the absolutely essential. 445 00:39:25.020 --> 00:39:32.020 I have no doubt that no matter how forgotten the character might be by the end of a novel, 446 00:39:32.020 --> 00:39:39.020 any new critic worth his salt would be able to demonstrate that the novel would not be the same without him. 447 00:39:39.020 --> 00:39:44.020 But this seems to be a case where we better serve by invoking the concept of history 448 00:39:44.020 --> 00:39:49.020 and turning to the novel's process of composition to explain its anomalies. 449 00:39:49.020 --> 00:39:53.020 Instead of trying to find the place of the character in the central plan for the novel 450 00:39:53.020 --> 00:40:01.020 In a novel that was carried out successfully, we should look to a plan that was in fact revised and perhaps even abandoned in the course of composition. 451 00:40:01.020 --> 00:40:10.020 Such a departure from the original conception would explain the presence of a character in the novel who no longer seems to have a genuine function in the final version. 452 00:40:10.020 --> 00:40:20.020 But the presence of an element of the novel that is extraneous in what amounts to its final plan does not necessarily impugn its overall integrity as a work of art. 453 00:40:20.020 --> 00:40:25.620 of Art, suggests that the novel is not entirely perfect according to a new critical conception 454 00:40:25.620 --> 00:40:30.780 of literary form, but it also points to the fact that the author was working on perfecting 455 00:40:30.780 --> 00:40:36.780 his novel over time, revising an original conception, presumably to improve upon it. 456 00:40:36.780 --> 00:40:40.900 One might wish that the author had revised the character completely out of the book when 457 00:40:40.900 --> 00:40:45.640 assembling it for the installments, but some remnants of imperfection in the final version 458 00:40:45.640 --> 00:40:49.320 do not mean that the book completely lacks unity and order. 459 00:40:49.320 --> 00:40:52.840 In fact, only because such a novel is generally well ordered 460 00:40:52.840 --> 00:40:56.440 are we able to note a few elements in it that are extraneous. 461 00:40:56.440 --> 00:41:01.320 If the book lacked all coherence, we would never notice that some elements are out of place. 462 00:41:01.320 --> 00:41:07.000 Now, finally, let me offer a concrete example here of contingency of form in the novel, 463 00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:11.800 and especially of how imperfection and perfection are compatible. 464 00:41:11.800 --> 00:41:16.680 Elizabeth Gaskell is not as well known or as celebrated as Charles Dickens or George 465 00:41:16.680 --> 00:41:22.080 Eliot but she was a star in the galaxy of great Victorian novelists and even gave Dickens 466 00:41:22.080 --> 00:41:27.920 a run for his money in terms of popularity in their day. Gaskell's last novel is called 467 00:41:27.920 --> 00:41:33.960 Wives and Daughters and it's widely considered to be her artistic masterpiece as some of 468 00:41:33.960 --> 00:41:38.400 you may know was recently made into a version for television in England. The novel is not 469 00:41:38.400 --> 00:41:45.400 It's not quite as long as one of Dickens' Monsters, but it does come to about 650 pages in the Penguin edition. 470 00:41:45.400 --> 00:41:56.400 As the Penguin editor explains, Wives and Daughters was first published in 18 monthly parts in the Cornhill Magazine from August 1864 to January 1866. 471 00:41:56.400 --> 00:42:03.400 The novel shows how skillfully a talented and experienced Victorian novelist could work within the serial format. 472 00:42:03.400 --> 00:42:11.400 It is well planned overall. Gaskell artfully juggles a number of plot lines as her characters fall in and out of love with each other. 473 00:42:11.400 --> 00:42:20.400 As in one of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, Gaskell's young lovers are originally mismatched and must realign their affections for a happy ending to become possible. 474 00:42:20.400 --> 00:42:30.400 As evidence of Gaskell's careful advance planning, the opening scene from Herod's Childhood clearly foreshadows many of the central motifs of the novel. 475 00:42:30.400 --> 00:42:38.900 Nevertheless, for a book that is generally well planned and well executed, wives and daughters have some surprising and striking inconsistencies. 476 00:42:38.900 --> 00:42:45.400 In chapter 9, Gaskell writes of one of her main characters, the troublesome stepmother of her heroine. 477 00:42:45.400 --> 00:42:50.400 She could no longer blush, and at 18 she had been very proud of her blushes. 478 00:42:50.400 --> 00:42:55.900 Yet in the very next chapter, Gaskell writes of the same woman she felt herself blush. 479 00:42:55.900 --> 00:43:01.900 Compounding the Error, Gaskell later in the same chapter has Mrs. Kirkpatrick blush again 480 00:43:01.900 --> 00:43:09.900 This is a very trivial matter, but it seems strange that as accomplished a writer as Gaskell could make such a glaring error 481 00:43:09.900 --> 00:43:21.900 As another example of her occasional forgetfulness as to detail, the Penguin Editor points out that Gaskell is inconsistent about the allowances the sons of the country squire in the novel get 482 00:43:21.900 --> 00:43:31.900 While they're in college, at one point they are said to receive 250 pounds a year, and 200 pounds respectively, later the figures are said at 300 pounds and 200 pounds. 483 00:43:31.900 --> 00:43:50.900 Right at the beginning of the novel, the chief aristocratic family in the story is presented as Tory in their allegiances, but later in the novel, many hundreds of pages later, Gasco makes a great deal of the Whig sympathies of the same family, which he pointedly contrasts with the Tory sympathies of the country squire. 484 00:43:50.900 --> 00:43:52.900 and the Country Squire. 485 00:43:52.900 --> 00:43:58.900 One might well wonder why Gaskell failed to eliminate such glaring inconsistencies in the serial version 486 00:43:58.900 --> 00:44:01.900 when the novel came out in book form. 487 00:44:01.900 --> 00:44:05.900 Smith and Elder published it in two volumes in 1866. 488 00:44:05.900 --> 00:44:09.900 Here is where an element of historical contingency enters our story. 489 00:44:09.900 --> 00:44:13.900 Unfortunately, Gaskell died just before finishing the novel. 490 00:44:13.900 --> 00:44:19.900 Well, that's it. There, a laugh about some sweet Mrs. Gaskell died. 491 00:44:19.900 --> 00:44:28.900 What kind of audience is this? I can't believe this. I don't even want questions from a crowd like this. 492 00:44:28.900 --> 00:44:42.900 Now let's behave ourselves. Unfortunately, Gaskell died before finishing the novel and thus never had a chance to revise her work for book publication. 493 00:44:42.900 --> 00:45:12.900 Indeed, she did not even live to write the final chapters, and the editor of Cornhill magazine, Frederick Greenwood, had the melancholy task, he at least took it properly, of writing a concluding note in which he undertakes to tie up all the loose threads in the novel based on internal evidence and remarks Gaskell had made about how she intended to bring the story to an end. Gaskell's untimely death explains why she left inconsistencies in her narrative, but it raises a more fundamental question. 494 00:45:12.900 --> 00:45:18.900 How can we regard Wives and Daughters as an artistic whole if Gaskell did not live to finish it? 495 00:45:18.900 --> 00:45:23.900 According to Aristotle, a well-made plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end. 496 00:45:23.900 --> 00:45:26.900 But strictly speaking, Wives and Daughters has no end. 497 00:45:26.900 --> 00:45:30.900 Despite the Cornhill editor's efforts, we are left with some loose threads. 498 00:45:30.900 --> 00:45:35.900 For example, we never find out what happened to one important character in the novel, Mr. Preston. 499 00:45:35.900 --> 00:45:41.900 And since he is in many respects the villain of the piece, creating serious problems for not one but two young women, 500 00:45:41.900 --> 00:45:54.900 More importantly, as Gaskell's story breaks off, the hero and heroine are not yet married. 501 00:45:54.900 --> 00:45:59.900 They're engaged, but the hero's going off to Africa. 502 00:45:59.900 --> 00:46:04.900 Thus, we're denied the proper closure to the story we'd expect in a Victorian novel. 503 00:46:04.900 --> 00:46:10.900 Even the Cornhill editor was moved to write of Gaskell's death and what it did to the novel a few days longer, 504 00:46:10.900 --> 00:46:15.900 And it would have been a triumphal column, crowned with the capital of festal leaves and flowers. 505 00:46:15.900 --> 00:46:22.900 Now it is another sort of column. One of those sad white pillars would stand broken in the churchyard. 506 00:46:22.900 --> 00:46:29.900 Katie, don't laugh. This is very Victorian. 507 00:46:29.900 --> 00:46:37.900 Instead of picturing wives and daughters as the crowning masterpiece of Gaskell's career, Greenwood implies that her death turned it into a ruin. 508 00:46:37.900 --> 00:46:41.900 But is Wives and Daughters truly a ruin? 509 00:46:41.900 --> 00:46:46.900 This view seems to be the product of another one of these false dichotomies. 510 00:46:46.900 --> 00:46:51.900 A novel must either be triumphantly complete or remains hopelessly fragmentary. 511 00:46:51.900 --> 00:46:56.900 But this way of talking about this book does not seem true to the average reader's impression. 512 00:46:56.900 --> 00:47:01.900 A critic might insist on theoretical grounds that without its final chapters, 513 00:47:01.900 --> 00:47:04.900 wives and daughters must be regarded as incomplete. 514 00:47:04.900 --> 00:47:10.900 But the fact is that readers tend to put down the novel with a feeling of satisfaction at the end. 515 00:47:10.900 --> 00:47:16.900 Gaskell composed enough of the story for us to see clearly how it was going to come out. 516 00:47:16.900 --> 00:47:20.900 We have no doubt that the hero and heroine were going to be married. 517 00:47:20.900 --> 00:47:26.900 Dickens died in the middle of writing his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drude, but it was literally in the middle. 518 00:47:26.900 --> 00:47:32.900 He had composed only about one half of the book when he was felled by a fatal stroke. 519 00:47:32.900 --> 00:47:36.500 Thus, Edwin Drew does really feel like an unfinished work. 520 00:47:36.500 --> 00:47:42.500 Indeed, readers have debated ever since what the solution to Dickens' mystery was going to be. 521 00:47:42.500 --> 00:47:45.700 But no such mystery surrounds the ending of Wives and Daughters. 522 00:47:45.700 --> 00:47:48.700 If one had to formulate the situation mathematically, 523 00:47:48.700 --> 00:47:53.500 one would be tempted to say that Gaskell's novel is about 90% complete, 524 00:47:53.500 --> 00:47:56.300 and that is very different from 50% complete. 525 00:47:56.300 --> 00:48:01.100 Indeed, one feels like saying that Gaskell's novel is complete enough, 526 00:48:01.100 --> 00:48:05.600 complete enough for us to appreciate it as an artistic whole. 527 00:48:05.600 --> 00:48:10.600 Thus, Wives and Daughters is more like one of Darwin's animals than one of Aristotle's. 528 00:48:10.600 --> 00:48:16.600 Its parts do not form a perfectly perfect whole, various inconsistencies remain in the plot, 529 00:48:16.600 --> 00:48:21.100 and above all, it does lack a proper ending. Still, its form suffices. 530 00:48:21.100 --> 00:48:28.100 The novel has enough narrative consistency and closure to function as a satisfying reading experience. 531 00:48:28.100 --> 00:48:36.100 Wives and Daughters is an excellent example of how elements of temporality and historical contingency can have a place in literary form. 532 00:48:36.100 --> 00:48:42.100 The fact that the novel was composed over a long period of time no doubt led to the inconsistencies in the narrative 533 00:48:42.100 --> 00:48:50.100 and the fact that Gasparov happened to die before completing the story left it without the full closure we would normally expect. 534 00:48:50.100 --> 00:48:56.100 In its final published form, Wives and Daughters thus combines a kind of imperfection with a kind of perfection. 535 00:48:56.100 --> 00:49:02.020 Perfection. But one can still talk about the novel as a coherent literary experience in 536 00:49:02.020 --> 00:49:07.220 the face of its manifest imperfections. Ever since Aristotle, critics have been speaking 537 00:49:07.220 --> 00:49:13.180 of literary form as organic and have used biological analogies in talking about literature. 538 00:49:13.180 --> 00:49:18.100 But that means that if Darwin really did revise our notion of biological form, we need to 539 00:49:18.100 --> 00:49:23.940 consider revising our notion of literary form as well. Darwin's looser conception of biological 540 00:49:23.940 --> 00:49:29.940 may prove more useful in comprehending the form of the novel than the Aristotelian conception 541 00:49:29.940 --> 00:49:34.940 that provided the foundation for the new criticism and its analysis of poetry. 542 00:49:34.940 --> 00:49:39.940 Now, Wives and Daughters is, of course, only one novel, and in many ways it constitutes a special case. 543 00:49:39.940 --> 00:49:47.940 Fortunately, authors do not routinely die just before finishing their novels, though this audience seems to really appreciate that idea. 544 00:49:47.940 --> 00:50:00.940 Nevertheless, the imperfections of Gaskell's last novel are more typical of the genre than one might expect. 545 00:50:00.940 --> 00:50:09.940 For example, in an earlier novel, North and South, Gaskell did have a chance to revise the serialized version before publication, 546 00:50:09.940 --> 00:50:15.940 but in the first edition of North and South as a book, she actually introduced some new errors into the text, 547 00:50:15.940 --> 00:50:27.940 Contingencies, other than the author's death, have again and again led to anomalies in the texts of serialized novels and thus introduced an element of temporality into their form. 548 00:50:27.940 --> 00:50:34.940 And more generally, the serialized novel may be only one example of how spontaneous orders operate in literature. 549 00:50:34.940 --> 00:50:40.940 We have time to discuss only one way in which the concept of spontaneous order is applicable to literature. 550 00:50:40.940 --> 00:50:45.980 Literature. Several critics, notably Franco Moretti and Gary Saul Morrison, have been 551 00:50:45.980 --> 00:50:51.780 working in innovative ways to introduce Darwinian concepts into literary studies. The result 552 00:50:51.780 --> 00:50:56.940 of this reconception of literary form, allowing for a greater open-endedness of form in certain 553 00:50:56.940 --> 00:51:02.420 genres, has been to show a way out of the dead end in which the conflict between the 554 00:51:02.420 --> 00:51:07.080 new criticism and deconstruction threaten to leave us. What we've learned from economics 555 00:51:07.080 --> 00:51:17.080 The lesson in biology is that in certain kinds of order, some imperfections are compatible with an overall coherence, especially in the case of orders that develop or evolve over time. 556 00:51:17.080 --> 00:51:28.080 The New Critics took the Lyric as their basic model of literary order and wanted even long novels to manifest the same kind of tight coherence one can find in a 14-line sonnet. 557 00:51:28.080 --> 00:51:34.080 The deconstructionists thought they had refuted the new critics and overturned any notion of coherence in literature 558 00:51:34.080 --> 00:51:39.080 when they were able to show that some literary works do not fit the model of perfect literary form. 559 00:51:39.080 --> 00:51:44.080 It is revealing that much of the early deconstructive criticism dealt with novels 560 00:51:44.080 --> 00:51:49.080 where it is indeed easier to find loose threads and imperfection of form. 561 00:51:49.080 --> 00:51:54.080 But the deconstructive critics ended up overgeneralizing just the way the new critics had done. 562 00:51:54.080 --> 00:52:02.080 The fact that a thousand-page novel has some loose threads does not mean that a perfectly crafted 14-line sonnet does, too. 563 00:52:02.080 --> 00:52:07.080 The New Critics aired by taking the brief lyric masterpiece as their model of all literature, 564 00:52:07.080 --> 00:52:12.080 and the Deconstructive Critics aired by taking the loose-bagging novel as their model of all literature. 565 00:52:12.080 --> 00:52:17.080 As we have learned from Austrian economics, we need to respect the heterogeneity of phenomena, 566 00:52:17.080 --> 00:52:21.080 and a one-size-fits-all approach to every kind of literature is unlikely to work, 567 00:52:21.080 --> 00:52:31.080 While recognizing that some literary works may achieve perfection of form, we must allow for other works incorporating some formal imperfections without losing all coherence. 568 00:52:31.080 --> 00:52:36.080 Only then can we be true to the genuine diversity of phenomena in the literary realm, 569 00:52:36.080 --> 00:52:44.080 acknowledging the perfect artifice of the lyric masterpiece while at the same time making room for the open-endedness of the novel, 570 00:52:44.080 --> 00:52:52.080 is a novel which, as a form of spontaneous order, is in many respects truer to the spontaneity of life itself. 571 00:52:52.080 --> 00:53:21.080 Thank you for a very interesting talk on something I know nothing about. 572 00:53:22.080 --> 00:53:37.080 And in the case of these literary critics, I think the case where there is inconsistency is with interpretation and the authors and so forth. 573 00:53:37.080 --> 00:53:48.080 And I'm curious as to the literary criticism of works of living authors, do the authors ever come back and respond or comment to these critics? 574 00:53:48.080 --> 00:53:57.080 Yes, they do, and they usually make a point of denying what the critics have said. 575 00:53:57.080 --> 00:54:03.080 And very often they'll say, I didn't mean anything, authors are very protective. 576 00:54:03.080 --> 00:54:08.080 Now, I just wrote this book on, among other things, Gilligan's Island. 577 00:54:08.080 --> 00:54:14.080 The producer of Gilligan's Island did contact me to say I got it exactly right. 578 00:54:14.080 --> 00:54:16.080 That's exactly what he meant. 579 00:54:16.080 --> 00:54:25.080 And I actually wrote to him. I said, you're a great guy. I wrote three books on Shakespeare, never got so much as a note from him. 580 00:54:25.080 --> 00:54:33.080 And, you know, Mr. Suck Up Elizabethan Playwright here, big Hollywood producer, Sherwood Shor. 581 00:54:33.080 --> 00:54:44.080 But that's a rare event. Generally, it's very rare that authors will acknowledge a critic has gotten them right, though occasionally it will happen. 582 00:54:44.080 --> 00:54:51.080 Thomas Mann, for example, read an essay by the young Howard Nemerov about Magic Mountain 583 00:54:51.080 --> 00:54:56.080 and he loved it and he wrote him a note and said, yeah, and in fact the odd thing is 584 00:54:56.080 --> 00:55:01.080 Nemerov had said something about the unconscious use of the Dr. Faust legend 585 00:55:01.080 --> 00:55:09.080 and Mann went on to write Dr. Faustus and some people thought that essay influenced him in that direction 586 00:55:09.080 --> 00:55:16.080 Direction. So sometimes critics do get it right, and even rarer, sometimes authors acknowledge it. 587 00:55:39.080 --> 00:55:47.080 In the process of writing, and then secondly, after the process is done, and that's in its product, especially with respect to the poem, 588 00:55:47.080 --> 00:55:56.080 what personalizes that poem is one's own, what one brings to oneself, to that poem, and changes even slightly, which would not be in the intent of the author. 589 00:55:56.080 --> 00:56:07.080 And then, I guess, certainly, Donald McCloskey, who's written the novel, I think, changes his thinking between narratives and metaphors, 590 00:56:07.080 --> 00:56:20.440 I think it's relevant to this issue, because on the one hand, poems tend to be metaphorical in that they're different kinds of created life. 591 00:56:20.440 --> 00:56:26.920 Whereas narratives is a form that stories take, stories come and go through time. 592 00:56:26.920 --> 00:56:33.240 So you're trying to make a distinction between, on the one hand, evolutionary economics and mathematical economics. 593 00:56:33.240 --> 00:56:39.240 and Mathematical Analysis, functional case, a medical level, Austrian analysis, which makes up a phenomenon, 594 00:56:39.240 --> 00:56:41.240 and you know, there's three. 595 00:56:41.240 --> 00:56:45.240 Yeah. All those things are perfectly valid and I intend to take them up. 596 00:56:45.240 --> 00:56:50.240 Part of my problem is it took so long to set up the framework that I can only give one little example. 597 00:56:50.240 --> 00:56:54.240 The first phenomenon we were talking about, spontaneity and composition, 598 00:56:54.240 --> 00:56:59.240 Gary Saul Morrison has studied brilliantly in his book, Narrative and Freedom, and I highly recommend that. 599 00:56:59.240 --> 00:57:05.240 I highly recommend that. He takes the chief cases of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and shows, for example, the case of Dostoevsky. 600 00:57:05.240 --> 00:57:14.240 He deliberately did not plan out his novels. He let events in the real world change the course of his novels. 601 00:57:14.240 --> 00:57:22.240 His characters sometimes respond to things they've read about in the newspapers that hadn't even happened when Dostoevsky started writing the novels. 602 00:57:22.240 --> 00:57:30.240 The best study of that is Morrison and is absolutely brilliant on the subject and when I expand this essay I hope to bring that in. 603 00:57:30.240 --> 00:57:39.240 All your other points were valid as well. I just wanted to take one example of spontaneous order in the limited time I had. 604 00:57:39.240 --> 00:57:42.240 But I was more interested in creating the framework. 605 00:57:42.240 --> 00:58:09.240 And the third time is literary criticism. 606 00:58:09.240 --> 00:58:23.240 My next point is, I just wondered how many miles you could get out of Austrian literary theories. 607 00:58:23.240 --> 00:58:30.240 You put it alongside Marxist theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. 608 00:58:30.240 --> 00:58:40.240 Where the problem with those is not just that Marxism is bad economics, but it's the very idea of reading a piece of literature through a distinct economic lens. 609 00:58:40.240 --> 00:58:49.240 The problem with feminist theory is not just that, you know, the point is, as a rural victim of the patriarchal hegemony, you know, it's silly, 610 00:58:49.240 --> 00:58:56.240 but that reading everything through, you know, the woman dies, why should that determine the whole world of literature? 611 00:58:56.240 --> 00:59:04.240 and so on for reading everything through the lens of suffering under heterosexist agendas. 612 00:59:04.240 --> 00:59:08.240 In other words, these are oversimplifications of the work of literature. 613 00:59:08.240 --> 00:59:13.240 And so it seems to me like even in the same public, it's different, Austrian reading. 614 00:59:13.240 --> 00:59:22.240 In other words, once you get past the general point that new critics are wrong to see things in terms of perfect design, 615 00:59:22.240 --> 00:59:31.240 I don't know how you go on to say much of interest about, you know, an Austrian reading of a Moby-Dip, you know, of the works of Austin or whatever. 616 00:59:31.240 --> 00:59:39.240 In other words, I don't know, beyond that insight that you mentioned, whether there's really any work for an Austrian theory to do. 617 00:59:39.240 --> 00:59:41.240 Thanks a lot. You just ruined my career. 618 00:59:47.240 --> 00:59:51.240 Fortunately, I have my Straussian analysis of Shakespeare to fall back on. 619 00:59:51.240 --> 01:00:04.240 You know, I know what you're saying, but in fact, one of my points is that Austrian economics is not dogmatic in the way Marxism is 620 01:00:04.240 --> 01:00:07.240 and can actually open up perspectives rather than closing them down. 621 01:00:07.240 --> 01:00:14.240 And I have done a number of essays, the one I did on Thomas Mann's disorderly sorrow 622 01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:19.240 to show how the Austrian theory of inflation helps us actually understand that story. 623 01:00:19.240 --> 01:00:31.240 So I think there really are things to be done. I just did a piece on Ben Johnson's play Bartholomew Fair, trying to show that it actually is the first literary defense of a free market. 624 01:00:31.240 --> 01:00:39.240 Again, I certainly would not say that all literary critics should now become Austrians. 625 01:00:39.240 --> 01:00:51.240 There's room for a couple literary critics to use Austrian economics for one thing, to end this Marxist domination of literary criticism and show why it's wrong. 626 01:00:51.240 --> 01:00:59.240 But also I think that, you know, I've written about five or six essays by now, which I think actually do show there are some concrete ways. 627 01:00:59.240 --> 01:01:07.240 You know, if you don't understand inflation, it's hard to understand Thomas Mann's story about the 1920s German inflation. 628 01:01:07.240 --> 01:01:18.240 and that's one thing I try to show. So again, I don't think Austrian economics is not the new key to unlock literature, but it can actually help us in some respects.