There's no reason to clap for the guy introducing the real star. This is my second opportunity to do this. I'm excited about it.
The lecture is, of course, Paul Cantor, and it's something we've all looked forward to.
The book in question is this one, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which came out only earlier this year,
Here, an interesting little publication history behind this book. When the PDF arrived of
the guts of the book, we were so excited about it that we went ahead and posted the whole
thing online, unheard of, in the academic publishing world. So it was available to everyone.
And then about 10 days later, we put out the Kindle edition. So it was for sale on Amazon.
So already the authors of the papers and the editors were receiving emails commenting about
the book and Paul Cantor wrote me and he said, is this book ever going to exist in the physical
world?
But it was about a month later or something, it did come to exist in the physical world
and we have copies downstairs, very, very beautiful book and I'm pleased to say that
both the editors, Stephen Cox and Paul Cantor, reported receiving many compliments about
It's a book that was really 18 years in the making. It began in 1992 at the first Austrian
Scholars Conference in New York. Paul Cantor came and gave a paper and the paper was on
and Thomas Mann and the implications of one of his short stories for the theory of and
practice of inflation and how it affects society. And I remember sitting out there in the audience
for that and thinking this is a remarkable moment. We're seeing something completely
new here. We're seeing Austrian economics applied to a sector of knowledge that it's
Murray Rothbard was beside himself with glee about this paper in particular and also about
the implications of this field of research so that was all those many years ago and here
now we see that that one paper that was delivered in 1992 spawned an entire new field of research
The results are in front of us today, the first of what I hope is going to be many efforts in this direction.
I remember as an undergraduate reading Human Action, and Mises would frequently use this sentence.
He says, praxeology and its heretofore most elaborated application of economics.
You remember reading this many times in his work.
And the first thing that occurs to you is you think, well, what else does it apply to besides economics, really?
And what's taking everybody so long to get to these other applications?
Well, this is an example of an application of praxeology that goes beyond economics
or in addition to economics, literary criticism.
And I'm thrilled to be living in times where we see this coming to life for the first time.
He's done for literary criticism in many ways what Rothbard did for politics, to apply Misesian logic to a completely new field.
He's provided both new methods for interpreting literature and new names and figures to admire and learn from.
So much of our own understanding of our intellectual history is derived from that given to us by Hayek and Mises and Rothbard.
and what Cantor has done is blown open a whole new sector for us and given us all sorts of
new heroes, you know, people that they appear in here. We're already busy making t-shirts
of all these individuals, by the way. First, that's always the second step, right? Right.
In some ways, though, it is a follow-up on an older project, one begun by Henry Hazlitt,
as a matter of fact. He was a literary critic long before he became an economist. He worked
for the Nation magazine writing literary criticism and in fact he wrote a book on the topic
of literary criticism that integrated questions of economic theory into literary criticism.
It's called something, Anatomy of Criticism, a Trialogue, something like that. It's a very
interesting book, extremely rare until a couple of years ago when we brought it up in our
series of books. So, in some ways, I think we can say that Paul Cantor is in this respect
a Haslidean. But who is Paul Cantor? He's a professor of literature at the University
of Virginia, author of several books on both what you consider high scholarship of Shakespeare,
but also application of literary criticism to popular culture. And he's sort of famous
Thanks for doing this. We're fortunate that as a very young man he studied himself under
Mises and Mises' seminar and carried the legacy with him his entire life and it shows how
the effects of one person can have long past his death. So here Mises lives on in the work
The work of Cantor and in Cantor's students, incredible.
He some years ago came to the Mises Institute and gave a week-long series of lectures on
the history of culture and I think there were a total of ten lectures.
Those lectures are now part of iTunes University and they are among the most popular.
We have about 175,000 or so downloads from iTunes University every week, and iTunes U
is constantly featuring Paul Cantor's series on culture and capitalism up at the top of
the page.
If you go there, you can see it.
So he's definitely another superstar in our midst, one with a personal lineage that traces
back to Mises, so he has a special, honored place in our hearts, and I give you Professor
Dr. Paul Cantor.
Well thank you very much Jeff for that introduction and it's a real pleasure and honor to be here.
I should say that my co-editor Stephen Cox sends his regrets.
He has something of an administrative position at the University of California at San Diego
and is currently involved in the budget cuts in his state.
I was told they now just have to find $20 billion more to cut and they'll be fine.
So I understand why he is busy at the moment and Dario Fernandez-Morera had hoped to be
here, one of the authors in the book, but he had to go to Guatemala.
So either I have my priorities right or I just got nothing better to do.
But anyway, I'm here and we'll try to represent the whole book for you.
This is really the appropriate place to talk about this book.
This book really does arise out of the Mises Institute.
More than half the essays were presented here as papers at one time or another.
As Jeff pointed out, it all began with the essay contest that was really sponsored by
the 10th anniversary Mises Institute occasion.
I had this lecture I'd been giving on Thomas Mann, decided I'd submit that and it was chosen
and the rest is history. I gave the Ludwig von Mises lecture one year and that has become
the first chapter in the book and Chandran Kukathis who contributed gave the Hayek lecture
one year. So this book is deeply steeped in the Mises Institute and we're all very grateful
for all the assistance over the years and for the absolutely beautiful job that was
done with the book. To say a few words about my own career, I genuinely am an English professor,
I have a PhD in English, I know how to scan poetry, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da.
Psyambic Pentameter. But in my youth, I was very much interested in economics, was very
fortunate to attend Mises' seminar, 1961 to 1962. It really was a difficult decision for
me to go into English and not into economics. And I will say, it's not that I loved Mises
is less, is that I love Shakespeare more. It really took someone as titanic as Shakespeare
to win me away from economics. And I was so happy when decades later I figured out how
to combine the two loves of my life, economics, Austrian economics and literature. And so
maybe it all worked out well in the end, because we have been able to open up a new front in
Let me stress that this book is not the be-all and the end-all in literary theory.
We were not out to transform the whole of literary theory.
We recognize people can still go count syllables and study iambic pentameter.
There's lots of useful ways to talk about literature that don't involve economics.
What we did set out to do in this book is to counter the really unhealthy trend in literary criticism
that insofar as it does deal with economics, it does so ignorantly, which is to say in
a Marxist fashion. That is, whether it's outright Marxism or quasi-Marxism or pseudo-Marxism,
when my colleagues decide to talk about literature and economics, it's always from a Marxist
perspective. Now, there's all sorts of theoretical ramifications for that, but I want to cut
Let's jump to the chase and look at the fundamental ways in which the study of literature and
economics has been Marxist.
First of all, literary critics will seek out any way they can to find criticisms of capitalism
in literature and celebrations of various forms of collectivism, including specifically Marxist
ones.
that's not a difficult chance for them, not a difficult task for them because a lot of
authors have been sympathetic to various forms of collectivism and hostile to free markets.
I'll actually go into some reasons for that and several of the essays in this book attempt
to deal with just that issue.
So you get a great deal of discussions of ways in which literature exposes the horrors
of capitalism and sometimes the way it celebrates life on the good old collective farm.
When literary critics of this type find an author who somehow celebrates free markets
Capitalism, that's false consciousness. Those authors are accused of being the
dupes of capitalism and a great deal of this brand of economic criticism of
literature deals with how the market ensnares authors and how they become a
spokesman for the capitalist system and all these arguments about class
as Consciousness, and so it is a great deal of this kind of literary criticism deals with
that aspect.
And then beyond that, to the extent that these critics or analysts look at the origins of
literature in the real world, the material conditions behind the production of literature,
They find that as one more aspect of how bad capitalism is.
And so you find endless studies of how the capitalist system has corrupted literature.
These usually date, deal with literature, dealing from the 19th century on, but sometimes
earlier, endless complaints about the literary industry, about publishers, about all the
Apparatus, booksellers, whatever, book advertising and so on, and unending arguments about how
commerce corrupts culture.
And these critics can find nothing good to be said for the way in which the market treats
literature or contributes to its production.
You might think people would acknowledge the fact that the free market has delivered books
in numbers unheard of in the history of humanity and brought culture to vast numbers of people
in a way that never been possible before, but no, that's just the mass production of
literature, the commodification of culture.
This is the sort of thing that my colleagues convey against.
Well this is what we might not be a little too optimistic a term, but to at least argue
One of the things that attracted our attention is writers who have celebrated free markets.
And there are many of them.
I think one of the most interesting essays in the book is Dario Fernández Moreira's
is an essay on Don Quixote, where he shows the spirit of freedom in Cervantes, who himself
was a victim of various governments. He was imprisoned by foreign governments, by his
own government, and Dario shows all sorts of ways in which Don Quixote celebrates market
Activity. One of the most interesting aspects of that essay is of course that
Cervantes wrote before Adam Smith and so Dario's essay is an excellent
contribution to that program that Murray Rothbard and others have pursued of
showing that Smith didn't invent capitalism and wasn't the first person
to theorize free markets. In fact Dario turns to the very Spanish scholastics
that Rothbard was interested in, and that's a very interesting essay in showing how, again, long before the Scottish Enlightenment, there were thinkers in Spain who were analyzing economic phenomena in a kind of free market way.
I contributed an essay on a play by Ben Johnson for Bartholomew Fair which I
argue is the first defense of free markets in English literary history and
so on down the line. Steve Cox has an excellent essay on Willard Cather which
in particular shows why a woman author would be particularly sympathetic to
of Free Markets, and how in her book, Old Pioneers, the labor theory of value turns
out to be the way the heroines' brothers oppress her. You know, they're doing all the physical
labor on the farm, they therefore claim they should get all the credit. And that Marxist
argument turns out to be anti-female because she's the smart one in the group and knows
how to run the farm and understands she's contributing more value than they do, even
even though her physical labor is less, Chandran Kukathis contributes an essay on the Nigerian
author Ben Okri, which shows here in a kind of post-colonial context, we have an author
celebrating free markets and so on down the line. So I think we've done a good job in
showing that literature is not necessarily anti-market in its attitudes. We also then
and turn the tables on these Marxist arguments for the false consciousness of authors who support capitalism.
Steve Cox and I have essays that analyze the false consciousness of left-wing authors
and showing that they are as much captive of their class position as any pro-capitalist has ever been.
has ever been. One of Sieve's essays is on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. That's
really one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and truly prophetic. It's hard to
believe how prescient it was. It's a novel about what appears to be a left-wing anarchist
This socialist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and create an international incident.
It turns out that this terrorist plot is sponsored by a foreign right-wing government in England
which is trying to get England to clamp down on all the political exiles that England had
been giving safe harbor to.
And the amazing thing about the book is it shows that the extreme left and the extreme
right are the same.
They both hate capitalism, they both hate freedom, they both hate any form of contingency
in life.
The plot is to, again, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, which is where the prime meridian
is, you know, Greenwich Mean Time, and Steve makes the brilliant observation in this book
is that both the extreme right and left want to blow up time.
You know, exactly what we understand from Austrian economics.
Austrian economics, which is all about time and uncertainty,
and various collectivist forms of economics,
they feel they can eliminate that, eliminate the element of time and uncertainty, and Steve
really is great, focuses right in on that point, and again, he's got great
help from Conrad here, who did do a pretty good job of writing this, and one of the things
The things he shows, Conrad shows, and Steve brings out his essay, it's getting the similarity
between the various supporters of authority in the book.
They're all fat.
Now, not that there's anything wrong with that, I say from a personal perspective, but
there's this amazing laziness to the Home Secretary in Britain, to the communist revolutionary
in the book and these are all people who are living off the fat of land, if you will. It's
a very good book about bringing out the parasitic nature of government and Conrad really focuses
in on the attitude of especially left-wing intellectuals that the world owes them money,
it owes them a job, they're smarter and therefore they should get more benefits out of society
And I find the same thing in my essay on H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, which I analyze first as Wells' critique of the invisible hand idea.
I think that's kind of the undercut of the work, but after showing that Wells' critique of capitalism fails,
Welles, I go through and show how the same time Welles in many ways portrays himself
as this invisible man character who's disaffected, revolutionary, again thinks the world owes
him a living, does not like the way the market rewards intellectuals and so comes up with
this scheme of invisibility which he chiefly uses to take money from the rich and give
Give it to himself, actually, not even give it to the poor.
So again, a couple of the essays deal with this issue of the biases of the left-wing intellectuals
and the left-wing artists.
One of the things that I understood as I began to analyze The Invisible Man, there's a marvelous
This is the most moment in the story when the invisible man disappears from Wells himself.
It's an odd narrative moment, but he says, what the invisible man did that afternoon, nobody knows.
This isn't a novel where he's been tracing his movements all along.
And that gave me an insight that bears on this issue of why so many authors are biased towards socialism.
And that is that authors are themselves central planners.
That is, by and large, they are used to being in control of the world, and they like a world that is neatly plotted out, and they think that's the way the world should operate, that one person should think out the whole of a little world, and that's what it is to create a novel or a play, and that helps explain why, when novelists try to think about the real world, they think it needs an author,
is to say a socialist government. They're not happy with the messiness, the contingency of free markets.
This comes out particularly in the genre of utopia, which is, at the same time, a novel and a form of socialism, almost always.
That is, the people who write utopian novels are trying to give you a simple plan, simple design by which to run the whole world.
I think this actually goes a long way to explaining why so many authors have been socialists.
The reverse of this is an interesting development in the field of Slavics.
One of the few areas where you will find any literary critics who are anti-Marxist is Slavic, Slavic departments.
undoubtedly because they follow the Soviet Union and other Marxist regimes more closely than people in other fields.
And there's a great critic named Gary Saul Morrison, who's written a book, Narrative and Freedom, The Shadows of Time,
which I discuss in the first chapter in the book.
And he argues that particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky deliberately created novels in which they as authors were no longer in control.
Now I know that sounds absurd at first, but what he's talking about is the fact that as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote their novels,
they allowed their characters a certain freedom. They allowed their characters to surprise them.
And Morrison has shown that if you look at the notebook books of either author they'll basically say I was going to have this guy marry that woman but I realized it wouldn't work out and he'd marry someone else.
and Morson makes a very powerful argument, again the book is called Deteriorative and Freedom
that this was a major attempt to find a new literary form that would accommodate freedom, contingency and creativity
and he talks about the interesting fact that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy worked in the field of serialized novels
novels, the way Dickens did for example, that is these novels would come out periodically,
maybe weekly, maybe monthly, and the interesting thing is that in the case of Tolstoy, he deliberately
said I'm just going to publish this thing serially, see what happens, I don't know where
War and Peace is going to end, I don't know where Anna Karenina is going to end, I'm going
I'm going to see what happens, and I'm never going to change it.
Whatever happens, happens.
And Morrison argues that this created a very powerful new form of literature.
I think many people would say that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are the greatest novelists
ever.
And he argues this is one of the reasons.
And here's a new literary form which evolves over time, which embodies an element of time
and Contingency, just as Austrian Economics says economic activity does.
And that led me, the first chapter is largely about the serialized novel.
I discussed Dickens mainly, and this was in fact the subject of my Mises lecture, now
much expanded in this chapter, and it's there that I was able to go after this negative
of Attitude towards Commerce that is so prevalent among my colleagues.
The 19th century novel was a very commercial form of publishing, people like Dickens made
a fortune of money and the 19th century novel was a major element in British commerce and
That leads most of my colleagues who write on this subject to complain about this form
and to complain how authors like Dickens were corrupted by the commercial nature of publishing.
This would be one example, let's say, might be great expectations.
What we have in the novel, as we know it, is famously a second ending, a second thought
about the ending. I won't exactly say it ends happily now, but Dickens had originally written
a sadder ending and then was persuaded, actually by a fellow novelist, Bullwer Lytton, to create
a scene in which Pip and Estella would get together. And people have complained about
that as a happy ending, a Hollywood ending. And again, I think one can argue on both sides
of this issue. But in general what you find is people arguing that the
publication system in 19th century Britain imposed limits, constraints on
authors, made them write at a certain pace. Again, these novels were typically
brought out in weekly installments or monthly numbers. There are lots of cases
on records of authors being told to finish up their novel quick because
were coming to the 20th installment and we do have novelists complaining about that sort of thing.
And in general, when you read a number of these Marxist critics of the Victorian novel,
they presented as if the publishers were in charge and they were telling the authors what to write
and telling people what to read.
And so this becomes an image of everything that's wrong with capitalism in the Marxist view.
And in particular, it's this famous notion that you can sell anything, that capitalism is an example of you produce worthless goods and then you foist them off on an ignorant and unsuspecting public by virtue of clever advertising.
It's really quite amazing to read Marxist analyses. I cite some of them in this first essay, where literature is presented as the very opposite of an expression of freedom and creativity.
It's presented as this commodified system. One of the interesting aspects of it is it's all ex post facto reasoning.
critics will look at what sold which novels were big successes and conclude
that that was a formula that publishers were imposing even though no one ever
predicted any of these things ahead of time and that's what I go through using
some pretty serious studies of how the Victorian novel actually operated and
can show that on the contrary, it actually was a form of spontaneous order, an example
of how markets operate at their best, in which you basically had a feedback and correction
mechanism in which authors would plan out novels ahead of time, they'd sketch in what
they thought the plot was going to be already, I would say, anticipating what the public
wanted and therefore incorporating a kind of proleptic feedback in that sense but
in any case they would start publishing and then see how the audience reacted
and it's just like soap operas today on television if a character increased
ratings in this case says you'd pump up the role of that character in the book
talk, and if you were writing some character that you as an author may have loved but sales
were going down, that character got hit by a train in the next installment.
And again, this exaggerates a bit the degree of feedback, but there's no question that
this is what was going on, that it was a case of a market phenomenon where authors were
trying to give the public what it wanted and in the process, I argue, largely improving
their work.
And it is interesting that for all the complaints about the vulgarity of commercial literature,
the Victorian public largely selected out what we now think of as the greatest novelist.
Dickens was by far the most popular novelist of his day, and everyone would acknowledge that among British novelists of the 19th century, he was artistically the best.
It's not as if the public was choosing the worst novels, and by and large the novels that have survived are the ones that were successful with the public.
There's an Italian critic, Franco Moretti, I also discussed in the chapter, who calls himself a Marxist, but he's a market Marxist.
He basically has done studies showing the way in which success in the marketplace actually tracks aesthetic value.
He's done some remarkable work in that field that I cite in the chapter.
in the Chapter. So this is the other way in which we try to reverse these Marxist analysis
of literature and try to show that in fact the conditions of commercial publication in
19th century Britain, they weren't perfect, in many ways they did produce complaints from
the authors, but those that worked within the system actually found that it put them
They come in touch with their audience, and that's really, I think, where the vitality of the Victorian novel comes from, I think it's where the vitality of much of the popular culture in our day comes from, and so, in fact, the publishers acted as middlemen in this system.
The authors were largely writing on their own, the audience was free to buy books or rent them, actually books were rented in the 19th century the way DVDs are now, because they were relatively expensive at the beginning of the century.
The authors generally, the publishers, served as the key link up, anticipating what demand,
what it might be, steering authors sometimes in the right direction.
In short, the Marxist view is that the publication process is entirely negative.
It's hegemonic, as they like to say.
It imprisons authors and the public.
Instead I try to show, it opens up pathways of communication and I discovered the work of Robert Darten, the great French historian and he had done wonderful studies of just this subject with regard to some of the great publishing projects in 18th century France and especially the French encyclopedia and he in a kind of historical detail that I don't have the patience to uncover, did wonderful studies of how French
Publishers basically used their network of selling agents to go around France, find out
what people wanted to read, report back, and help steer authors in that direction.
So it really turns Marxism on its head in that sense, showing that capitalism actually
really solved the great problem of how to create a mass literature, typically through
creating modes of mass distribution of literature.
As I like to put it, for decades Marxist literary critics have been trying to denigrate writers
by showing how they were implicated in capitalist systems, that their books somehow were involved
of Commercial Enterprises. In fact, this shouldn't have been lowering the authors in the minds
of these critics, it should have been elevating capitalism. They actually were uncovering
whole areas in which they could show that capitalism was participating in the production
of culture, but they hate capitalism so much they couldn't recognize that. It is true there
There have been some very positive trends in what's called cultural studies where critics
who are sympathetic to popular culture have begun to understand the principle of consumer
sovereignty and the whole principle of Marxist analysis of literature, especially the famous
Frankfurt School which in many ways dominated cultural studies for much of the second half
of the 20th century.
The principle there was summed up in the phrase of Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry.
They were particularly interested in Hollywood and how it manufactures mass entertainment
which it imposes on the public.
The one thing they never bothered to do was study the public and see how the public was
reacting.
has been a new sort of fan-based form of cultural studies which studies the actual reaction of audiences for TV shows
and shows that in fact they're not these passive consumers that the Frankfurt School claimed.
People have been able to analyze the letters that soap opera fans send to the producers of the show and other such forms.
and it's interesting to see that again it's a feedback loop and suggestions from the fans have changed the course of a series that gives them a creative role even to the fan and there have been a whole bunch of studies, a man named Henry Jenkins who used to be at MIT and I think is now at USC has done wonderful studies particularly of Star Trek fans in this regard and I try to do something similar in discussing the Victorian novel
first chapter and I think that is an area where maybe we can make some common
cause with one strand of cultural studies as I try to point out to those
people what they need to do is learn some Austrian economics. They're
discovering the principle of the sovereignty of the consumer which is
utterly incomprehensible to them within their Marxist framework if they just
Let's read some Austrian economics, they'd see there's actually a good theoretical basis
for what they're doing.
So broadly speaking, we put spontaneous order in the subtitle because that idea from Hayek
unites a number of the essays, many of them study the phenomenon of spontaneous order.
Tom Peyser's essay on Whitman shows that Whitman's celebration of American democracy was a kind
of bottom-up vision of America, celebrating its people and not its government, celebrating
the market energies of America.
A number of our essays basically look at how literature portrays spontaneous order.
At the same time, we try to show how literature is produced by spontaneous order, and my study
in the book of 19th century publication basically argues that that's the nature, it's why culture
is so unpredictable, and why after the fact these Marxists could explain why a book succeeded,
but they can never predict it ahead of time.
And finally, we do examine the issue of literary form itself in a number of the essays and
try to show that literature itself often takes a form of order that looks messy on the surface,
that has a lot of loose ends, but underneath there's a deeper structure that we would call
All-Spontaneous Order. Again, Morrison's study of the Russian novel does a very good
job of showing that. We've been trying to broaden the notion of literary form without
overturning the traditional notion. That is to say, our image of literary order is basically
Only that of a lyric poem, of a beautifully written 42-line lyric by Yates or T.S. Eliot
that is absolute literary perfection, that is created by a single author and that totally
fulfills his vision and in which famously every word is necessary.
This is the old ideal of the new criticism that I was brought up on and so many people
have been brought upon an ideal of literary perfection where no word could be omitted
from the poem and it still being the same poem and no word could be added to it.
One famous reflection of it is that in the movie Amadeus where the ideal of Mozart's
Music, you know, every note is perfect, Salieri is the speech, remove one note and it would
be chaos, and you know, that's a great ideal, and some works of literature, some works of
art approach it, but war and peace? Remove one word and it falls to pieces? I'm sorry,
and in fact there are many studies where they discovered in the process of
printing the book they lost a word or two and not and just actually there's
some guys written a whole book about this that authors see their novel their
proofread they forget somebody left out a whole sentence somebody left out a whole
chapter and you know it's still a great book and that's one of the things I try
do in the this opening theoretical chapter on I call it the poetics of
spontaneous order that there is a form of order that is not perfection and that
is the great lesson about the economic order from the point of view of
Austrian economics that the market isn't perfect and above all it's not an image
In the age of static perfection, what the market is, is a continually self-correcting mechanism.
It is a feedback loop. It is never perfect, but it's always perfecting itself.
It's always moving towards a better state and trying to eliminate problems.
And as we know from economics, the huge problem with socialism is it thinks that some form of
static economic perfection is possible
and even neoclassical economic shares
that view on all this notion of market failure
and equilibrium and how we need to second-guess the market
all of that has its equivalent
I figured out in literary criticism
when you uphold
amount of literary form
that's really an abstraction
One line from Human Action that began to resonate in my mind as I worked on this, I think I can quote it correctly, is the living is not perfect because it is subject to change, the dead is not perfect because it does not live.
And that's one of the many profound lines in the 800 pages of Human Action.
And that's what I began to realize I was stumbling upon here, was the phenomenon that literature could be structured and have form without having a kind of static perfection, without having been perfectly planned out by a single mind ahead of time.
One of the problems with literary critics is that they are Monday morning quarterbacks.
They are analyzing works after they have been created. And indeed, I would say the function
of the literary critic is to try to find the structure or the plan of the work. The problem
comes when you assume that that plan was fully articulated by the author before the work
came into being. I would say that the notion of literary perfection is what Kant would
call a regulative ideal, or we might call a heuristic device. We should always be thinking
that a work of literature is perfect and that it perfectly coheres, that everything falls
into place. That's the best guideline for analyzing it because it will make us think
carefully about it but literary works are in reality like sausages and maybe
you don't want to know how they were made sometimes if you know how they're
made you'll think they must be a mess so it's useful to think okay they're
perfect but don't assume that because you've been able to find a pattern in
it that the author necessarily had that in mind it may be possible again I don't
I wish to deny, especially when you look at some of the great lyric poetry written that
this thing was perfectly planned out ahead of time, but when you study the history of
the creation of literature, you find lots of elements of contingency, things that just
came along.
It's one of the things that Morrison chose about Dostoevsky, for example, that he would
work from newspaper incidents and sometimes you will see something will happen in one
of his novels that's based on a newspaper incident that occurred months or sometimes
a year after Dusty F. C. started writing the novel. And a major turn in the novel occurs
not because of his initial plan, but because of something he experienced, sometimes something
he saw in the world later. And Morrison thinks Dusty F. C. is a greater writer for just that
reason. And this is one of the things I tried to open up in the opening chapter of the work.
in the sense that literature is process, not product.
Yes, ultimately you have a product in front of you.
You have a book.
And we tend to think of it, therefore, as this single artifact
created in a single, all-seeing act of creation.
But in fact, if you study something like the serialized novel,
you see that these great works by Dickens, by Tolstoy, by Dostoevsky
were created over long periods of time in a process where in many ways the work was continually being reshaped in the author's own mind and partially as a result of feedback from the audience.
That makes creativity a much messier process, a more contingent process.
Some ways it doesn't suit the minds of academics who want everything perfectly laid out and frozen for all eternity.
It's why they've always liked Latin as a language, not any of these living languages.
But it's encouraging to me that there are a number of critics who've been turning in
this direction and seeing that literature itself is a product of what we would call
spontaneous order.
You can even say, using Hayek's formula, that literature is the product of human action
but not of human design in the sense that when you look at the history of one of these
great 19th century novels, at every moment human beings were creating these novels, but
the whole process was not designed in advance and the final product, the novel that emerges
is very different, let's say, from what Dickens imagined it to be at the beginning.
We have lots of detailed information to show that.
The Old Curiosity Shop
He didn't even start it out as a novel
He was creating, he thought, a new magazine
but the story of one character, little Nell
fascinated the audience so much
and boosted sales
to an unprecedented level that he said
I'm gonna write a novel about this
and the result is we've got The Old Curiosity Shop
So, as I say
we've tried to use
the principles of Austrian economics here
to open up new perspectives on literature
show that it can celebrate
the market in spontaneous order, it can be seen as the product of the market in
spontaneous order, and above all that many literary works take a form that's
analogous to what we think of as spontaneous order. So we hope we've opened
up a new frontier. It is true that many of the Marxists have had to retreat to
literary studies having been refuted in the economic world, but we're going to go
Go after them there as well and maybe open up some new perspectives on literature in the process.
So, thank you.
I'd be happy to take questions. We've got some time. Yes.
Do you think that Dickens' reputation for how to divide and control is correct?
He was himself a businessman. One of the biggest projects of his life was, this is very Victorian, it was a reclaiming fallen women project.
He devoted a lot of his life to this and the kind of institution he created was designed to introduce women to entrepreneurship and get them to be able to become productive citizens.
So people have mistaken that critique of industrialism in hard times for the whole of Dickens' opinion.
If you look at him more deeply, he has a lot of affinities with Manchester liberalism.
The editors on Freetrade are just extraordinarily good.
Yes?
Well, Mario Vargas Llosa would be the most prominent one.
Before he was a presidential candidate in Peru, he actually was a rather good novelist.
Now, if you want to see an author who appreciates capitalism and absolutely pillories left-wing
Schemes, Reid Vargas Llosa. He was well read in Hayek, in Sites Hayek, and I particularly,
his greatest novel is something called War of the End of the World, which is about various
forms of millennial schemes to change Brazil in the 19th century. But he is probably the
most self-consciously pro-capitalist author I can think of alive today.
yes I have not unfortunately I mean to do so but I something I can't remember Yuri
Well, I was very impressed by this work of Gary Saul Morson. Again, it's called Narrow and Freedom and he argues that freedom is the central value in Dostoevsky and that he set out to find a way to liberate his own characters from authorial tyranny and give them their freedom to make their choices themselves and Morson, I mean, again, I
I defer to his knowledge. He's read the books in Russian, for example, and is actually very anti-Marxist in his attitudes.
And so I wish I could claim I'd arrived at this independently, but he makes a very powerful argument in this book that for both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,
freedom is the central value and that characters define themselves by their
acts of freedom and that's why both as novelists tried to avoid the situation
where they mapped out ahead of time what their characters were going to do. Yes.
Oh yes, she's one of the central figures in it. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill
Gaskell is a remarkably pro-capitalist work. Interestingly enough, it was serialized in
Dickens' own journal roughly at the time of Hardin Times. They were in competition and
Dickens was a little upset that Gaskell was so pro-capitalist in that work. Gaskell had
come to Manchester and at first hated it. She came from kind of Jane Austen country,
She came to understand Manchester, she came to appreciate, and above all, she has scenes
in that book, which is set in Manchester, in the very heart of industrial England, where
women are sort of whistling on their way to the factory, and happy coming home, and she
points out that the alternative to this was domestic servitude, and that when they worked
in a household, they were subject to all sorts of problems and basically were working for
room and board and not for pay and that factories represented freedom for them, where they could
just get paid for their work, go home, leave the job behind them and spend the money the
way they wanted.
So here it's quite remarkable, a woman novelist who is celebrating not just capitalism but
and Industrial Capitalism. I should also say that Elizabeth Gaskell is the central example
of the chapter. This is a kind of morbid joke, I guess. I discussed it in the Mises Lecture
and people laughed, but I will say that Elizabeth Gaskell's masterwork for many people is a
novel called Wives and Daughters, and unfortunately she died before she could finish it. Please
don't laugh because the last time I mentioned, people did. But that's a key example for me
because here's a novel which people like Henry James have called her best novel
and it's only 85% complete.
She did not live to write the last two chapters. Moreover, she never got to
revise it at all, so there's several contradictions in it. She gets the
political affiliation of one character.
It's Tory at one point, Wig at another.
So there are things that are
imperfect about this novel, including the fact that it lacks an ending. Yet it's a
great novel.
I offer as my example of the sort of 85% complete novel. That's good enough.
You can read it.
No one puts that book down
and says, oh, I wasted my time. The thing's not complete. You can pretty much
infer how the plot's going to end from what was written.
And so that's a really interesting example from a theoretical
point of view. Here's a novel that is manifestly imperfect in the sense of
incomplete. Yet many people call it her best novel.
It has a kind of perfection that is not the perfection of the perfectly crafted lyric poem.
Aristotle would have a problem because he says work must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
This actually lacks an end, and yet it is sufficiently complete so that you can, in effect, infer the deeper structure from what we have been.
It's still a great novel. So yeah, Elizabeth Gaskill is there. Yes.
What about the Lord of the Rings?
What about it? I love it!
How much do you love it?
Well, there's nothing in this book, but I could...
I mean, one of the interesting things about the Lord of the Rings is
it is a kind of, let me say,
medieval critique of the modern nation state.
I mean if I were a libertarian trying to make something with it I would say that
Tolkien being a medievalist offers you a defense of the old medieval notion of
the liberties and that the ring is the nation state the one ring to rule them
all and the great horror in Tolkien is of central power and I think his own
experience of World War I the 20th century led him to see the most demonic
Force in the World is the all-encompassing, all-destroying modern nation state. It's a
kind of reactionary critique of modernity and that's that I'm sure Tolkien was not a
libertarian. But there are libertarian lessons that can be learned from it. The
need for local government, for example, in a weird way that book is a celebration
of the Shire. Leave it alone. You can only destroy it by this great power with
all its armies and its machines trying to take it over. So again, I know that it's
not in this book, but maybe someday I'll write an essay on it. Yes, okay, I do not
do that. I must say that I have a problem with my colleagues when
and they're preaching Marxism in the classroom and so I do not try to introduce Austrian
economics directly. Students ask me about it, I point them in the direction of Mises
and Hayek but I try to avoid being as polemical as... I mean I feel students, they take an
English course, they should be studying English literature. I do try, you know, I do things,
I try to shake them up. Gaskell is one of the examples I use showing here's a woman in favor of capitalism for what it does for women.
I try to point that out to them. It's incredible trying to get a simple idea that through their skulls,
I cannot believe that there could be anything good about capitalism, but I at least try to plant the seed. Yes.
Not much to tell you the truth, though I cite him in the Thomas Mann essay. I mean, there's some clever ideas in Baudrillard, but like so many French theorists, he could say it's simpler, and it's not all that profound. Sometimes we reduce it to what it really is. But he was a heck of a good photographer, it turns out.
In the book The Unbound, the book ended with the X-Files. Did you say that you had anything to say about modern television, or did you continue to touch on the notion of globalization?
on fear of invasion, American pop culture. I've continued to work on, I got two essays on Deadwood coming out. I mean I continue to work on popular culture, but you know I don't want to take up too much time on that. I'm pretending to be a literary critic for today.
I wanted to ask you about the influence of H. R. Mankiewicz. He's not that good. He's also known for his work in the internet and in the private sector and in commerce.
Well, I mean, I think it's a great failure on his part. I was actually very inspired by Mencken
and my teens reading things by him. I think Mencken reflects deeper trends that directly
influence all these other people. In other words, it's not as if he turned around the
world where literatures were all pro-capitalist. I mean, you see those attitudes in John Ruskin
and Matthew Arnold. This is so deeply embedded in the English intellectuals that I think,
although Mencken is an example of this, I don't think he really is a historical force
in producing it. It predates him by at least a hundred years.
Okay, one last question. Yes.
What about Trollope?
What? They're all very interesting.
Do you think they liked Trollope?
Well, again, I think they didn't like it.
Now, Trollope is an interesting figure because he, for example, he hated the serial novel system
System, and so secretly he would write the novel out and then pretend he was producing
it in installments, but I don't know, and of course in Charles Casey he didn't like
America because it was too commercial, I mean in many ways these English authors suffer
from the aristocratic heritage in England, as I point out a lot, this contempt for commerce
Congress is fundamentally an aristocratic contempt. It begins in England really as a
right-wing and reactionary phenomenon. But, you know, Gaskill would be the best example
of an English novelist who appreciated a Congress, but she had to fight her way through it. But
again, you know, unfortunately, as I began, the majority of authors do not show an appreciation
of Commerce or Capitalism. How often do you ever see a sympathetic portrayal of a businessman
or businesswoman in a 19th century novel? It's ironic that all these people were business
people themselves and nothing in the history of the world, nothing ever did more for women
as a cultural force than the 19th century British novel. It's the first field that
that was open to them and in which they came to the fore and triumphed.
And this is, again, I cannot get this through to my students, that it is 19th century capitalism
that made George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters possible, and it really
was a case where there was a, you know, Dickens was not a feminist, but he saw that Elizabeth
Gaskill sold books, so he turned the pages of his journal over to her. He saw that she
was potential competition, so he decided to get her writing for him. And it's a perfect
example of that great lesson that capitalism overcomes prejudice, that you would have to
pay, if you were somehow a misogynist or anti-feminist as a publisher of the ninth century, you were
going to pay a huge price for it, and they didn't pay it. Instead, they published women
in unprecedented numbers. There's no cultural field in which women ever achieved as much
as the 19th century novels. Their first great breakthrough form, and it was a triumph of
British commerce and British capitalism. Good place to end, right?
Dr. Cantor has agreed to sign books downstairs in the bookstore using his Mises Institute
pen.
Can we give you one of those?
Okay.
I'll work on that.
So he'll be downstairs and now to close out the conference I'd like to introduce Doug
Douglas French, who's been a great champion of this very expensive for us conference and
I think he probably sat down with Joseph Salerno for what, 47 different times going through
the schedule every three days over the last several months so he's been involved in every
detail and has been a real trooper through this whole thing. The President of the Mises
Institute, Douglas French.
Well, of course, Jeff said everything I wanted to say.
You may have noticed when you walked in some books on a table downstairs, a little book
called Inclined to Liberty, and if you haven't picked one up, please do.
The author has graciously donated them to this conference as he does to all of our conferences
around the country when we do Mises Circles.
The author's in the room.
He helped us in funding this conference.
and if he would stand, Mr. Lew Carabini.
Before I let you stampede Martha's Buffet to the north, I want to talk a little bit
about this room because if you were here last year, it seated quite a few less than this.
We had walls that were there and there were book stacks in the back and, by the way, if
you haven't been up to the third floor, please make the trek and take a look and be amazed.
But it's been quite a project, quite an undertaking to move things around, move walls around.
And thankfully, we have someone who works here who does the books, but she's not satisfied
doing the books.
She likes to do other things and draw pictures and be a contractor.
And she's the person who really made a full-court press to get this building done and in shape and ready for this week.
She's not here right now, but please recognize Norma Willick for her work in getting this building done.
Of course, Norma couldn't do her work if we didn't have a sponsor for the project, and
it's a guy who does so much for us, and he's here hopefully in the room, oh yeah, I do
see him, he's our favorite pipe pusher from Pasco, Washington, Mr. Jim Wolfe, please stand.
Well, Jeff already mentioned him, but another round of applause, please, for our conference
director, Mr. Joe Salerno, and of course, Joe got plenty of help from the guy who is
This is really the main spring for Institute progress, I think. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker.
Applause
Of course, lots of staff are involved. I won't name them all, but I think all of you interface with Pat Barnett and Christy Holmes and Chad Parrish, who's right up there.
Will Seitz down in the bookstore who's going to sell you a copy of Mr. Cantor's book so that he can sign it for you here in a little bit.
Someone I wanted to mention who doesn't get recognized a lot, but all the printed material that's around the schedules and everything is done by Kathy White.
And that sounds like no big deal, except this schedule is a moving target like you can't imagine.
So we constantly go to Kathy and say, oh, you've got to change it.
Well, I just changed it a few minutes. Well, you've got to change it again.
So anyway, Kathy White is not here, but she certainly deserves recognition.
Just a word about the conference. I can't imagine the Keynesians or the Marxists have the breadth that this conference would have.
Imagine, you know, we've talked about money, we've talked about business cycle theory, but sociology, law, ethics, history, religion, literature, and rap music.
Does it get any wider than that? If you can't relate to people, to the cause of liberty and economic education in a free market with that repertoire, then, well, there's probably no hope.
But I think there is plenty of hope. And actually, the people in this room are the hope. It's your ideas and the work that you do that is going to make the world a better place.
So please keep doing that for us and see you next year, March 10th through the 12th.
Good night.