It's a great honor to be giving the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture.
I'm on a small lecture tour.
I lectured at Smith College on Monday and at Harvard on Wednesday,
and here I am at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's an ascending sequence if I've ever heard one.
Now, as a result of human action, not of human design,
I'm going to take off where Professor Hammowy left off
I often talk about the idea of spontaneous order as it's applicable to culture
and I will in many ways vindicate Friedrich Hayek in this area.
My full title is The Poetics of Spontaneous Order, Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism
and I hope to use this opportunity to synthesize a theory of applying Austrian economics
I'm going to do literature, something I've been working to at a number of these Austrian conferences over the years.
As if Austrian economics and literary criticism were enough, I'm going to throw biology into the pot here,
and indeed this is my effort at a unified field theory.
This is more provisional than my material usually is, but we'll see what I can do.
I want to show how Austrian economics and especially the ideas of Mises and Hayek can make a contribution to literary criticism.
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.
But the case of Marxism might give us pause.
Some of the most famous Marxist thinkers, such as Georg Lukacs and Theodor Dornow, devoted themselves largely to cultural subjects.
And Marxism has derived much of its intellectual cachet from its seeming success in illuminating a wide range of issues in the arts.
One might even argue that whatever intellectual prestige Marxism retains today stems from its cultural and not its economic applications.
Indeed, paradoxically, as Marxism has lost the economic debate, it seems to have won the cultural.
And in various reincarnations, such as the New Historicism, it has come to dominate literary criticism and analysis of the arts in general.
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.
And well it should, because in contrast to Marxism, Austrian economics adopts a humanistic perspective on the world.
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.
In particular, Marxist thinkers tend to view culture as an epiphenomenon.
Economic forces provide the bedrock of explanation in Marxist theories
and culture constitutes a mere byproduct, a superstructure reflecting supposedly
more basic developments in material modes of production.
Much of Marxist literary criticism has been devoted to attacking the romantic idea
of genius, calling to question the very notion of artistic creativity.
Indeed, where traditional critics spoke of artistic creation, Marxists speak of
and Cultural Work or Cultural Production.
While traditional critics analyze the way the great artist creates an individual world out of his private imagination,
Marxists stress the social dimension of art,
viewing literary works as mirroring a particular historical moment
or the consciousness of a distinct social class.
With its collectivist impulses,
Marxism downplays the role of the individual in artistic creation,
However possible, treating the work of art as the product of a collaborative effort
in which the individuality of the artist dissolves in a web of social relations.
Moreover, as a form of historical determinism, Marxism undercuts the idea
that the artist is free as a creator.
For Marxists, economics is the realm of harsh necessity,
at least until the coming of the communist revolution.
Thus for a Marxist to show an artist involved in economic relations,
and especially in any form of marketplace activity is ipso facto to expose his lack of freedom.
In classic Marxist literary criticism authors operating in a market system are routinely portrayed as captives of capitalist ideology.
One might well wonder why such an anti-humanistic view of the world has proved attractive to scholars of the humanities.
As a doctrine that undermines the idea of individual human agency,
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.
Moreover, Marxism is especially inappropriate because it is a species of what Hayek calls scientism.
Captivated by the success of the natural sciences in the 19th century, especially their ability to predict events in the physical world,
Marx sought to create a science of economic and social phenomena modeled on Newtonian physics
one that could discover historical laws that would operate with scientific regularity and hence strict predictability
Marxism thus involves a fundamental category mistake
it tries to understand economic and social phenomena on the model of events in the physical world
that is to say human events on the model of non-human events
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.
In particular, it oversimplifies human history in order to make it seem predictable and above all to make the triumph of communism seem inevitable.
Having sought to understand economic phenomena in terms of material forces,
Marxism compounds the error by trying to understand cultural phenomena in terms of economic,
and thus it becomes doubly reductionist in its treatment of art.
In short, in the long-standing conflict between the natural sciences and the humanities,
Marxism seems to lean towards the natural sciences,
making us wonder even more why scholars of the humanities
never embraced Marxism as a form of analysis.
In seeking to understand the behavior of academics,
one should never underestimate the power of envy.
The modern research university was largely
shaped by the needs of the natural sciences.
And scholars of the humanities have never felt completely
at home in its precincts.
Envying their colleagues in the large laboratories
with generous research grants and staffs,
those of the humanities have sought ways
to achieve parity with natural scientists in terms of both salary and prestige.
Hence, it is no accident that some humanities scholars have been attracted to pseudosciences
such as Marxism.
By adopting Marxist forms of analysis, they could give a scientific aura to their work
without having to learn a hard science.
Similar factors may explain why Freudianism proved to be attractive to many literary critics
in the 20th Century.
But I do not wish to present Marxist literary critics as merely opportunists.
Many of them have been sincerely convinced of the truth of Marxism and genuinely attracted
precisely to its reductionism.
After generations of the romantic celebration of artistic genius, many critics were happy
to see authors taken down a peg or two.
Marxist analysis works to efface the distinction between the great author and the ordinary
run of humanity, thus lessening the critic sense of subordination to the figures he studies.
Marxist analysis, in fact, gives the critic power over the author. Knowing the truth of
Marxism, the critic can, for example, expose the fallacies of capitalist ideology in the
writers he discusses. The reductionism of Marxist analysis of art provides a way of
elevating the critic over his subject matter. Since Marxist analysis has hinted to seem
seem to be the only form of applying economic theories to literature.
The very notion of the enterprise has come to be suspected in many quarters.
In its various Marxist forms, literary criticism seems hostile to the literary imagination,
or at least primarily interested in debunking it, exposing its limitations and above all its biases.
Here is where the Austrian School can come to the aid of critics who are interested in the relation of literature and economics,
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.
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.
The Austrians do not accept the idea of a master science, one method of knowing that provides the key to understanding all phenomena.
Far from being reductionists then, Austrian economics refuses to study the human in terms of the non-human.
As the title of Mises's Magnum Opus indicates, the focus of Austrian economics is on human action,
and it places the acting human subject squarely at the center of its concerns.
Indeed, the Austrian School distinguishes itself from most other forms of economic thought
by the fact that it views economic matters from the perspective of the acting individual.
In epistemological terms, this is what is known as the methodological individualism of the Austrian School,
an approach that one would think would be more attractive than the collectivism of Marxism to scholars who analyze art.
Moreover, the way the Austrian School conceives economic activity ought to make it more congenial than Marxism to literary critics.
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.
Austrian economics is the very opposite of a deterministic doctrine. In addition to resting on the axiom of human freedom of choice,
and the freedom of choice, it stresses the role of champs and contingency in human affairs.
Indeed, it champions the free market as the best way of responding to the unpredictability of the world.
Unlike most forms of mainstream economics, the Austrian School rejects the possibility of mathematical modeling of economic phenomena
and refuses to make the kind of economic forecasts that are the stock and trade of many professionals in the field.
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.
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.
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.
More than any other school, the Austrians insist on the importance of uncertainty and risk as economic factors.
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.
Thus, for the Austrian School, the entrepreneur becomes a kind of artist.
Indeed, the Austrians stress the creativity of the entrepreneur.
Like a romantic artist, he is a visionary, a risk-taker and a pioneer.
And if he is to be successful, he will generally be found running counter to the crowd
or at least anticipating its movements.
Thus, with Austrian economics, one need not worry that linking artistic activity with economic
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.
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.
Austrian economics offers a model of order that I believe can help us understand literature
what Hayek liked to refer to as spontaneous order
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
This concept serves to highlight the place of Austrian economics in broader intellectual history
The Austrians are in many respects the culmination and by far the most cogent exponents
of a large-scale shift in thinking that I will describe as the movement from top-down to bottom-up models of order.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
For much of history, the only way of conceiving an order was to imagine it organized by a single person,
some kind of central power imposing its will throughout a domain.
The model for this kind of centralized order was in political terms, a king ruling his kingdom,
or in religious terms, God creating and directing the whole universe.
In this kind of model, order has to be imposed from above or there is no order at all.
One might debate when and where this sharp dichotomy between order and disorder began
to be challenged, but one of the key moments came in the 18th century with such thinkers
as Mandeville and Smith.
Indeed, the great contribution of economics to thought in general has been a way of conceiving
an order that need not be imposed from above on phenomena but can grow up out of them
an order generated by the phenomena themselves
what I am calling a bottom-up order or what Hayek calls a spontaneous order
what Adam Smith demonstrated with his famous notion of the invisible hand
is that government does not have to regulate or plan centrally the activities of businessmen
in order to promote the public good
to themselves to pursue what appear to be their merely private interests, businessmen
will in fact serve the public because the market provides an impersonal mechanism for
coordinating their activities.
In particular, the pricing mechanism works to bring supply in line with demand without
anyone needing to oversee the process from a central position.
From the perspective of traditional thinking, the market presents a paradox, an order without
an individual ordering it.
Many of the advances in 19th century thinking resulted from extending the concept of spontaneous
order from economics to new areas.
A good example is Darwin's theory of evolution.
That shows another way of seeing the shift from top-down to bottom-up models of order.
In the traditional view, the complex order of biological form could be explained only
by the notion of divine creation, of a god who consciously designed the intimate interplay
Between Form and Function in Bodily Organs.
Whatever one may think of Darwin's specific version
of the theory of evolution, he did at least provide a way
of reconceiving the problem of biological form.
He showed the theoretical possibility of a process
of natural selection, accounting for the orders.
To the extent the idea of spontaneous order has ended
literary criticism, it has largely been via Darwin's thinking.
I happen to have many doubts about his specific theory of myself but I'm using it as a point of intellectual history here.
For Darwin, the struggle for existence provides an impersonal mechanism that can explain the way, over time, organs become suited to their functions
without our having to invoke the idea of some personal force designing and shaping those organs at a single moment of creation.
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.
Darwin himself acknowledged the importance of Thomas Malthus to his development of his concept of natural selection.
Thus, it is no accident that classical economics and Darwinian evolutionary theory converge precisely on the issue of spontaneous order.
And indeed, they represent the two most significant examples of this new kind of thinking in the 19th century.
But the idea of spontaneous order is even more widespread in the period.
Evolution, broadly conceived, was in many ways the leading idea of the age and appears in fields as diverse as linguistics and legal history.
and we actually got a good example of that in Professor Hamowy's speech
and especially his remarks on language towards the end.
As fruitful as the idea of spontaneous order proved to be in the 19th century
in several areas, at first sight it does not seem to be applicable to the study of literary phenomena.
The concept of bottom-up orders provided an alternative to the traditional concept of top-down orders,
not an outright replacement for it.
The fact that spontaneous orders are possible in some realms does not mean that centrally planned orders do not exist at all.
As we can see here, bricks do not spontaneously order themselves into buildings.
It took several years for this great building to come into existence.
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.
At first glance, a poem would seem to be more like a building than a stock market
Indeed, a well-crafted poem seems to be a perfect example of a non-spontaneous order
In the common understanding, poems have authors
The authors plan them out carefully ahead of time
They are in control of every detail of their poems down to the last word
Their aim is to create a perfect whole in each poem, a work of art
in which every part contributes to the unity of the whole.
If there ever were a legitimate example of central planning,
the art of poetry would appear to provide it.
I've argued elsewhere that one reason many authors have been predisposed
towards socialism is that they are used to central planning
in their own line of work and they have a hard time conceiving
how any form of order can be produced without it.
Indeed, much of 20th century literary criticism
was dominated by a movement guided by a model of order as non-spontaneous.
The New Criticism held up the ideal of the perfectly crafted poem.
A New Critic typically concerned himself with showing how a literary work holds together,
how each detail fits into the pattern of the whole.
And I'm sure this is the way many of you were educated about literature in college.
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.
Now there can be no question that the New Criticism made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of literature.
Guided by their idea of literary unity, the New Critics learned to scrutinize literature with a newfound care and attention to detail.
Precisely because the New Critics believe that every detail in a work of literature has to have a well-designed function,
whenever some facet seemed extraneous or purposeless, they searched and searched until they found a reason for it.
A New Critical reading of a literary work typically begins with some seemingly extraneous detail
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.
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.
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.
Literary Work. Though useful as a heuristic device, the postulate of literary unity began to seem extreme in its relentless application.
As often happens in the academy, the new criticism eventually gave birth to its opposite.
The movement known as deconstruction is best understood as a reaction against the extremism of the new criticism.
Fed up with the obsession with perfection of literary form and the new criticism,
the deconstructive critics conjured up a kind of contrary model of imperfection
where the new critics had labored to show how works of literature hang together
the deconstructionists spared no pains in showing how they fall apart
the typical deconstructive reading reverses the movement of the new criticism
starting with the common understanding of a literary work as unified
the deconstructive critic seeks to uncover some genuinely anomalous detail
This detail, a part that stubbornly refuses to fit into the pattern of the whole, something
that cuts against the grain.
The deconstructionists stress the recalcitrance of the means authors use to reach their ends
above all the recalcitrance of language itself.
Deconstructive critics delight in uncovering secondary or tertiary meanings and words authors
use, meanings that run counter to the primary meaning the author intended to express.
In a deconstructive reading, the literary work never quite measures up to the author's design
Indeed, it usually is presented as on some level saying the opposite of what the author intended
Where new critical readings evoke the idea of perfect artistic design
deconstructive readings typically point in the direction of contingency and failure of design
In many ways, the battle between the new criticism and deconstruction emerged as the most significant critical debate
debate of the second half of the 20th century, and seemed to leave us with a difficult choice
between an idea of perfect order and an idea of perfect disorder.
On reflection, it is clear that the one idea bred the other.
The insistence on complete perfection of literary form and the new criticism provoked the deconstructive
critics into denying that any consistency of form can be found in literature.
In effect, the deconstructions argued that if literature is not perfectly ordered, it
is not meaningfully ordered at all.
When stated this way, this situation
begins to sound like a false dichotomy,
just the kind of intellectual impasse
in which the idea of spontaneous order might come to our aid.
We saw that in traditional thought,
the stark alternatives were a centrally designed order
or no order at all.
18th century economic thought and related movements
showed how one might overcome this simple opposition
and conceive an order that was not centrally planned and yet achieves a form of coherence.
If we are to avoid having to choose between pure perfection and pure imperfection in literature,
perhaps we have to find a way of admitting some element of contingency into our conception of literary form
without having to abandon the idea of any order whatsoever.
And there's where I'm saying the idea of spontaneous order can come to our aid.
But we have to consider for a minute what exactly the idea of spontaneous order entails.
Discussions of spontaneous versus non-spontaneous orders tend to get caught up in the issue of origins.
Spontaneous orders are those that come into being spontaneously.
If I leave you with no other insight, I hope you will take that home with you.
That is, come into being without the intervention of an external force.
Non-spontaneous orders are distinguished precisely by the presence of such an external force at their origin.
The often heated debate over evolution centers on precisely this question,
whether some kind of intelligence was necessary to plan the complex biological order we see before us,
or whether it could have come into being on its own initiative as it were.
What tends to get lost in such controversies is the question of the nature of the order, not just its origin.
Most people assume that spontaneous orders have essentially the same nature as non-spontaneous orders, they just come into being differently.
The debate over the theory of evolution illustrates this potential confusion.
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.
Aristotle. Darwin indeed at first appears to have a
teleological conception of the organism. He talks about the remarkable ways in which the
organs of an animal are suited to their biological functions. According to this view, Darwin simply
gave a different account of how these organs become suited to their functions. Instead
of attributing their functionality to divine planning and creation, he explains it is the
product of a wholly natural process, natural selection. The way Darwin himself and many
The theory of evolution only serves to reinforce this understandable but I think false impression.
Darwin's own writings and biology and textbooks to this day are saturated with the traditional language of teleology.
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.
Darwin often uses the language of perfection in the origin of species,
Dorfingen's evidence of his theory, the way organs are perfectly adapted to their functions.
But as many commentators have pointed out, the real evidence for Darwin's distinctive account of evolution
is to be found in the phenomenon of imperfection rather than perfection of biological form.
If an organ is perfectly suited to its function, then it could just as well have been the product of conscious planning
as of an impersonal process such as natural selection.
Only when one finds imperfection in an organism is one tempted to rule out design and its formation
and attribute its origins to some kind of history
to see an element of historical contingency in the form the organ is taken
Hence the issue of vestigial organs becomes central to Darwin's theory and far more so than he himself realized
When we see an organ in an animal that apparently has no function
It becomes difficult to ascribe its presence to the plans of a benevolent deity
who presumably would be able to achieve perfection in his creations
and would not allow anything wasteful into his designs.
As Darwin has posed the question, what did God have in mind
when he gave man a useless organ like an appendix?
Vestigial organs seem to be comprehensible only if species have histories.
If Homo sapiens has a tailbone but no tail
The reason, Darwinists argue, is that human beings have evolved from monkey-like creatures that did have tails.
Thus, Darwin, for all his own occasional confusion on this issue,
does operate with a different conception of biological form than Aristotle had.
For Darwin, biological form is generally a combination of perfection and imperfection.
The organism must be sufficiently well-formed and suited to its environment to survive.
To that extent, one can still speak of perfection of biological form in Darwin.
But for Darwin, no organism can be perfectly perfect, for that might suggest a divine hand in its creation.
Darwin requires organisms to be just imperfect enough to call into question their having been perfectly designed,
and hence to force us to invoke historical contingency to explain what otherwise appears to be something anomalous of the species.
Now, I'm not arguing here for Darwin's particular theory of evolution.
I'm aware, for example, that the issue of vestigial organs remains controversial,
with some of Darwin's critics insisting that organs appear to be useless
only because we have not searched hard enough to find their use.
For the moment, I'm merely using Darwin to illustrate the nature of a spontaneous order
and to suggest how it may differ from a non-spontaneous order.
Spontaneous Order
My key point is that a spontaneous order will not look just like an order that has been
consciously designed.
Because of the way they come into being, spontaneous orders always embody an element of temporality
or what might be called historical contingency.
Consciously designed orders, because they come into being at a single moment and in
one stroke, can at least aspire to eliminate contingency.
But spontaneous orders always betray the history of their coming to being and hence display
a certain messiness by comparison with consciously designed orders.
That is why consciously designed orders can often be described in mathematical terms and
indeed can aspire to the symmetry of geometric form, whereas spontaneous orders can never
be formulated in mathematical equations or diagrammed geometrically without distorting
their very nature.
No one understands this point about spontaneous orders better than the Austrians, which is
why they stress the elements of temporality and contingency in economic affairs.
That is one reason why Austrian economics marks an advance beyond earlier economic thinking,
including classical economics.
The idea of spontaneous order was so novel when thinkers first began to explore it that
people took a long time to realize how truly revolutionary it was.
These ideas were subject to the same kind of misunderstanding that later dogged Darwin's
and like Darwin, Smith did not fully comprehend what was distinctive in his own thinking.
That his people thought Smith with his invisible hand idea had merely ascribed a different origin to economic order
but was still describing essentially the same kind of order.
Supply would come perfectly into line with demand as if it had been consciously ordered to do so
even if no one was really directing the economy.
The classical economists themselves were prone to this kind of misinterpretation of their own insights
as witnessed the way both Smith and Ricardo insisted on distinguishing between market prices and natural prices.
The neoclassical economists with their obsession with equilibrium theory and the idea of perfect competition
perpetuated this kind of error.
Their fundamental mistake is that they try to defend capitalism as a way of achieving economic perfection
With their equations and diagrams they pictured the market economy as if it had been planned by a single giant intellect
and as if all market phenomena could be surveyed and taken in from the perspective of a single planner
This approach only tempted socialists to think that by tinkering with these equations and diagrams
they could use this system of central planning to improve upon the market
Only the Austrian economists fully realized that the market economy is a form of spontaneous order
and hence characterized as much by its imperfection as its perfection.
The Austrians never claimed that the market economy can achieve perfection.
What they do argue is that of all economic systems, it is the only one able to correct its imperfections
in a systematic and rational manner.
In an imperfect and ever-changing world, the market will never achieve equilibrium,
but it has a way of working out disequilibria over time.
This is what distinguishes spontaneous orders in general. Over time, they are self-correcting and hence self-regulating systems.
One might say that they are always perfecting themselves, but they never achieve perfection.
Now, using that idea of spontaneous order as combining perfection and imperfection,
let me approach literature finally and say that this insight might help us
mediate between what we saw as the extreme positions of the new criticism
and deconstruction that literature is either wholly ordered or wholly
disordered. Now again to be sure literature will always offer us examples
of consciously designed order. When a great poet sits down to write he may
create a masterpiece in which every element falls perfectly into place. A
A great lyric poem comes as close to perfection of order as the human mind can produce.
But does the lyric poem provide the proper model for all literature?
In a way, that was the chief claim of the New Critics.
But it is difficult to apply their conception of literary order to a 1,000 page novel.
Is it really true that if we changed a single word in War and Peace, it would become a different work?
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.
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.
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.
The simple fact is that under normal circumstances, a thousand-page novel will take longer to write than a 20-line lyric poem.
In theory, this difference in time of composition need not have any effect on the form of the finished product.
There is no reason in the abstract why a novelist cannot maintain a lyric poet's strict control over his materials.
And some novels do at least approach the kind of perfection of form we associate with the best lyric poetry.
Flaubert certainly hoped so.
But in practice, the fact that novels generally take years rather than days to write tends to introduce a certain looseness into their form.
under their form. Working on page 750 of his manuscript, a novelist will sometimes forget
what he wrote 18 months earlier on page 150 and allow minor inconsistencies to slip into
his narrative. Even when he goes back to revise his manuscript, a novelist may fail to notice
such errors and allow them to survive in the published version. This tendency towards lucidness
of form was compounded by the way novels often were published in the heyday of the genre
in the 19th century. Many were initially serialized
in popular periodicals, appearing installments
of a few chapters at a time, usually on a weekly
or monthly basis. This method of publication put a premium on length.
Novelists were sometimes literally paid by the word, and since they had to commit in advance
to a certain number of installments, say 20, they had an incentive to fill out a story
to reach the set length rather than to economize in their narratives
and make them go on only as long as the subject matter dictated.
This premium on length in itself promoted a certain looseness
of form in 19th century novels, but more importantly,
serial publication forced novelists
to commit their ideas to print as they were composing,
and hence before their novels were finished.
Evidence from novelist notes, diaries, and communications
show that they generally did plan out
their works in advance.
They usually had a good idea of what
the overall shape of their novels was going to be,
and they often have sketches for the chapters that we're going to write later.
But precisely from looking at such sketches, we know that novels frequently
altered their plans in the course of composition, introducing new characters
and plot turns as they worked up their material.
Later installments could revise the direction in which the novel was going,
but they could not unwrite the installments already published,
and in some cases widely read and fixed in the public's imagination.
Thus, later chapters in serialized novels sometimes ended up inconsistent with chapters
published earlier.
Of course, the serialized form of novel was not always its final form.
Novels successful in serialization were frequently repackaged in book form, and at that stage
novelists often had a chance to revise their work.
Many availed themselves of the opportunity to change the text, sometimes eliminating
inconsistencies that had crept into their plots, sometimes tightening up the narratives,
Sometimes writing new scenes, even new endings.
But given the way we romanticize the author's ceaseless quest for form and perfection,
we may be surprised to learn that 19th century novelists often did not take full advantage
of this chance to revise their work for book publication.
Sometimes an author was too engrossed in new work to take pains with the old.
Sometimes the way the public had become attached to particular scenes during the process of
of Civilization prevented an author from tampering with his work.
Whatever the reasons, many book versions of novels
do not depart substantially from the original serial installments.
In cases like this, the form of a novel becomes the product
not of a single moment of centrally planned creation,
but of a certain history of composition and publication.
Thus, the novel's form comes to incorporate an element
of historical contingency.
Serial publication could thus result in the presence of the equivalent of vestigial organs in some novels.
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.
He might start a subplot in motion that looked as if it were going to propel the character to prominence later in the action.
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.
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.
But such a character would probably not be removed from the final book version of the novel
perhaps because the author had a lingering affection for him
or more likely just because cutting him out of the narrative would see more trouble than it was worth
The character would in effect remain as a monument to an earlier stage of the evolution of that novel
much as a vestigial organ points to earlier stages of the species evolution
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.
Of course, the new critics were nothing if not ingenious, and they made their reputations turning the seemingly extraneous into the absolutely essential.
I have no doubt that no matter how forgotten the character might be by the end of a novel,
any new critic worth his salt would be able to demonstrate that the novel would not be the same without him.
But this seems to be a case where we better serve by invoking the concept of history
and turning to the novel's process of composition to explain its anomalies.
Instead of trying to find the place of the character in the central plan for the novel
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.
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.
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.
of Art, suggests that the novel is not entirely perfect according to a new critical conception
of literary form, but it also points to the fact that the author was working on perfecting
his novel over time, revising an original conception, presumably to improve upon it.
One might wish that the author had revised the character completely out of the book when
assembling it for the installments, but some remnants of imperfection in the final version
do not mean that the book completely lacks unity and order.
In fact, only because such a novel is generally well ordered
are we able to note a few elements in it that are extraneous.
If the book lacked all coherence, we would never notice that some elements are out of place.
Now, finally, let me offer a concrete example here of contingency of form in the novel,
and especially of how imperfection and perfection are compatible.
Elizabeth Gaskell is not as well known or as celebrated as Charles Dickens or George
Eliot but she was a star in the galaxy of great Victorian novelists and even gave Dickens
a run for his money in terms of popularity in their day. Gaskell's last novel is called
Wives and Daughters and it's widely considered to be her artistic masterpiece as some of
you may know was recently made into a version for television in England. The novel is not
It's not quite as long as one of Dickens' Monsters, but it does come to about 650 pages in the Penguin edition.
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.
The novel shows how skillfully a talented and experienced Victorian novelist could work within the serial format.
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.
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.
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.
Nevertheless, for a book that is generally well planned and well executed, wives and daughters have some surprising and striking inconsistencies.
In chapter 9, Gaskell writes of one of her main characters, the troublesome stepmother of her heroine.
She could no longer blush, and at 18 she had been very proud of her blushes.
Yet in the very next chapter, Gaskell writes of the same woman she felt herself blush.
Compounding the Error, Gaskell later in the same chapter has Mrs. Kirkpatrick blush again
This is a very trivial matter, but it seems strange that as accomplished a writer as Gaskell could make such a glaring error
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
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.
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.
and the Country Squire.
One might well wonder why Gaskell failed to eliminate such glaring inconsistencies in the serial version
when the novel came out in book form.
Smith and Elder published it in two volumes in 1866.
Here is where an element of historical contingency enters our story.
Unfortunately, Gaskell died just before finishing the novel.
Well, that's it. There, a laugh about some sweet Mrs. Gaskell died.
What kind of audience is this? I can't believe this. I don't even want questions from a crowd like this.
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.
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.
How can we regard Wives and Daughters as an artistic whole if Gaskell did not live to finish it?
According to Aristotle, a well-made plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
But strictly speaking, Wives and Daughters has no end.
Despite the Cornhill editor's efforts, we are left with some loose threads.
For example, we never find out what happened to one important character in the novel, Mr. Preston.
And since he is in many respects the villain of the piece, creating serious problems for not one but two young women,
More importantly, as Gaskell's story breaks off, the hero and heroine are not yet married.
They're engaged, but the hero's going off to Africa.
Thus, we're denied the proper closure to the story we'd expect in a Victorian novel.
Even the Cornhill editor was moved to write of Gaskell's death and what it did to the novel a few days longer,
And it would have been a triumphal column, crowned with the capital of festal leaves and flowers.
Now it is another sort of column. One of those sad white pillars would stand broken in the churchyard.
Katie, don't laugh. This is very Victorian.
Instead of picturing wives and daughters as the crowning masterpiece of Gaskell's career, Greenwood implies that her death turned it into a ruin.
But is Wives and Daughters truly a ruin?
This view seems to be the product of another one of these false dichotomies.
A novel must either be triumphantly complete or remains hopelessly fragmentary.
But this way of talking about this book does not seem true to the average reader's impression.
A critic might insist on theoretical grounds that without its final chapters,
wives and daughters must be regarded as incomplete.
But the fact is that readers tend to put down the novel with a feeling of satisfaction at the end.
Gaskell composed enough of the story for us to see clearly how it was going to come out.
We have no doubt that the hero and heroine were going to be married.
Dickens died in the middle of writing his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drude, but it was literally in the middle.
He had composed only about one half of the book when he was felled by a fatal stroke.
Thus, Edwin Drew does really feel like an unfinished work.
Indeed, readers have debated ever since what the solution to Dickens' mystery was going to be.
But no such mystery surrounds the ending of Wives and Daughters.
If one had to formulate the situation mathematically,
one would be tempted to say that Gaskell's novel is about 90% complete,
and that is very different from 50% complete.
Indeed, one feels like saying that Gaskell's novel is complete enough,
complete enough for us to appreciate it as an artistic whole.
Thus, Wives and Daughters is more like one of Darwin's animals than one of Aristotle's.
Its parts do not form a perfectly perfect whole, various inconsistencies remain in the plot,
and above all, it does lack a proper ending. Still, its form suffices.
The novel has enough narrative consistency and closure to function as a satisfying reading experience.
Wives and Daughters is an excellent example of how elements of temporality and historical contingency can have a place in literary form.
The fact that the novel was composed over a long period of time no doubt led to the inconsistencies in the narrative
and the fact that Gasparov happened to die before completing the story left it without the full closure we would normally expect.
In its final published form, Wives and Daughters thus combines a kind of imperfection with a kind of perfection.
Perfection. But one can still talk about the novel as a coherent literary experience in
the face of its manifest imperfections. Ever since Aristotle, critics have been speaking
of literary form as organic and have used biological analogies in talking about literature.
But that means that if Darwin really did revise our notion of biological form, we need to
consider revising our notion of literary form as well. Darwin's looser conception of biological
may prove more useful in comprehending the form of the novel than the Aristotelian conception
that provided the foundation for the new criticism and its analysis of poetry.
Now, Wives and Daughters is, of course, only one novel, and in many ways it constitutes a special case.
Fortunately, authors do not routinely die just before finishing their novels, though this audience seems to really appreciate that idea.
Nevertheless, the imperfections of Gaskell's last novel are more typical of the genre than one might expect.
For example, in an earlier novel, North and South, Gaskell did have a chance to revise the serialized version before publication,
but in the first edition of North and South as a book, she actually introduced some new errors into the text,
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.
And more generally, the serialized novel may be only one example of how spontaneous orders operate in literature.
We have time to discuss only one way in which the concept of spontaneous order is applicable to literature.
Literature. Several critics, notably Franco Moretti and Gary Saul Morrison, have been
working in innovative ways to introduce Darwinian concepts into literary studies. The result
of this reconception of literary form, allowing for a greater open-endedness of form in certain
genres, has been to show a way out of the dead end in which the conflict between the
new criticism and deconstruction threaten to leave us. What we've learned from economics
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.
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.
The deconstructionists thought they had refuted the new critics and overturned any notion of coherence in literature
when they were able to show that some literary works do not fit the model of perfect literary form.
It is revealing that much of the early deconstructive criticism dealt with novels
where it is indeed easier to find loose threads and imperfection of form.
But the deconstructive critics ended up overgeneralizing just the way the new critics had done.
The fact that a thousand-page novel has some loose threads does not mean that a perfectly crafted 14-line sonnet does, too.
The New Critics aired by taking the brief lyric masterpiece as their model of all literature,
and the Deconstructive Critics aired by taking the loose-bagging novel as their model of all literature.
As we have learned from Austrian economics, we need to respect the heterogeneity of phenomena,
and a one-size-fits-all approach to every kind of literature is unlikely to work,
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.
Only then can we be true to the genuine diversity of phenomena in the literary realm,
acknowledging the perfect artifice of the lyric masterpiece while at the same time making room for the open-endedness of the novel,
is a novel which, as a form of spontaneous order, is in many respects truer to the spontaneity of life itself.
Thank you for a very interesting talk on something I know nothing about.
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.
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?
Yes, they do, and they usually make a point of denying what the critics have said.
And very often they'll say, I didn't mean anything, authors are very protective.
Now, I just wrote this book on, among other things, Gilligan's Island.
The producer of Gilligan's Island did contact me to say I got it exactly right.
That's exactly what he meant.
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.
And, you know, Mr. Suck Up Elizabethan Playwright here, big Hollywood producer, Sherwood Shor.
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.
Thomas Mann, for example, read an essay by the young Howard Nemerov about Magic Mountain
and he loved it and he wrote him a note and said, yeah, and in fact the odd thing is
Nemerov had said something about the unconscious use of the Dr. Faust legend
and Mann went on to write Dr. Faustus and some people thought that essay influenced him in that direction
Direction. So sometimes critics do get it right, and even rarer, sometimes authors acknowledge it.
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,
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.
And then, I guess, certainly, Donald McCloskey, who's written the novel, I think, changes his thinking between narratives and metaphors,
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.
Whereas narratives is a form that stories take, stories come and go through time.
So you're trying to make a distinction between, on the one hand, evolutionary economics and mathematical economics.
and Mathematical Analysis, functional case, a medical level, Austrian analysis, which makes up a phenomenon,
and you know, there's three.
Yeah. All those things are perfectly valid and I intend to take them up.
Part of my problem is it took so long to set up the framework that I can only give one little example.
The first phenomenon we were talking about, spontaneity and composition,
Gary Saul Morrison has studied brilliantly in his book, Narrative and Freedom, and I highly recommend that.
I highly recommend that. He takes the chief cases of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and shows, for example, the case of Dostoevsky.
He deliberately did not plan out his novels. He let events in the real world change the course of his novels.
His characters sometimes respond to things they've read about in the newspapers that hadn't even happened when Dostoevsky started writing the novels.
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.
All your other points were valid as well. I just wanted to take one example of spontaneous order in the limited time I had.
But I was more interested in creating the framework.
And the third time is literary criticism.
My next point is, I just wondered how many miles you could get out of Austrian literary theories.
You put it alongside Marxist theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
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.
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,
but that reading everything through, you know, the woman dies, why should that determine the whole world of literature?
and so on for reading everything through the lens of suffering under heterosexist agendas.
In other words, these are oversimplifications of the work of literature.
And so it seems to me like even in the same public, it's different, Austrian reading.
In other words, once you get past the general point that new critics are wrong to see things in terms of perfect design,
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.
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.
Thanks a lot. You just ruined my career.
Fortunately, I have my Straussian analysis of Shakespeare to fall back on.
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
and can actually open up perspectives rather than closing them down.
And I have done a number of essays, the one I did on Thomas Mann's disorderly sorrow
to show how the Austrian theory of inflation helps us actually understand that story.
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.
Again, I certainly would not say that all literary critics should now become Austrians.
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.
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.
You know, if you don't understand inflation, it's hard to understand Thomas Mann's story about the 1920s German inflation.
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.