WEBVTT NOTE Economics and Literature: A Tribute and Celebration 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 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. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:17.000 The lecture is, of course, Paul Cantor, and it's something we've all looked forward to. 3 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 The book in question is this one, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which came out only earlier this year, 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:29.400 Here, an interesting little publication history behind this book. When the PDF arrived of 5 00:00:29.400 --> 00:00:33.560 the guts of the book, we were so excited about it that we went ahead and posted the whole 6 00:00:33.560 --> 00:00:40.360 thing online, unheard of, in the academic publishing world. So it was available to everyone. 7 00:00:40.360 --> 00:00:47.960 And then about 10 days later, we put out the Kindle edition. So it was for sale on Amazon. 8 00:00:47.960 --> 00:00:53.760 So already the authors of the papers and the editors were receiving emails commenting about 9 00:00:53.760 --> 00:00:58.720 the book and Paul Cantor wrote me and he said, is this book ever going to exist in the physical 10 00:00:58.720 --> 00:00:59.720 world? 11 00:00:59.720 --> 00:01:06.760 But it was about a month later or something, it did come to exist in the physical world 12 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:11.280 and we have copies downstairs, very, very beautiful book and I'm pleased to say that 13 00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:16.960 both the editors, Stephen Cox and Paul Cantor, reported receiving many compliments about 14 00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:30.600 It's a book that was really 18 years in the making. It began in 1992 at the first Austrian 15 00:01:30.600 --> 00:01:37.780 Scholars Conference in New York. Paul Cantor came and gave a paper and the paper was on 16 00:01:37.780 --> 00:01:44.700 and Thomas Mann and the implications of one of his short stories for the theory of and 17 00:01:44.700 --> 00:01:52.340 practice of inflation and how it affects society. And I remember sitting out there in the audience 18 00:01:52.340 --> 00:01:57.020 for that and thinking this is a remarkable moment. We're seeing something completely 19 00:01:57.020 --> 00:02:01.980 new here. We're seeing Austrian economics applied to a sector of knowledge that it's 20 00:02:01.980 --> 00:02:13.500 Murray Rothbard was beside himself with glee about this paper in particular and also about 21 00:02:13.500 --> 00:02:20.500 the implications of this field of research so that was all those many years ago and here 22 00:02:20.500 --> 00:02:27.140 now we see that that one paper that was delivered in 1992 spawned an entire new field of research 23 00:02:27.140 --> 00:02:38.140 The results are in front of us today, the first of what I hope is going to be many efforts in this direction. 24 00:02:38.140 --> 00:02:45.140 I remember as an undergraduate reading Human Action, and Mises would frequently use this sentence. 25 00:02:45.140 --> 00:02:50.140 He says, praxeology and its heretofore most elaborated application of economics. 26 00:02:50.140 --> 00:02:52.140 You remember reading this many times in his work. 27 00:02:52.140 --> 00:02:57.140 And the first thing that occurs to you is you think, well, what else does it apply to besides economics, really? 28 00:02:57.140 --> 00:03:01.140 And what's taking everybody so long to get to these other applications? 29 00:03:01.140 --> 00:03:06.140 Well, this is an example of an application of praxeology that goes beyond economics 30 00:03:06.140 --> 00:03:10.140 or in addition to economics, literary criticism. 31 00:03:10.140 --> 00:03:17.140 And I'm thrilled to be living in times where we see this coming to life for the first time. 32 00:03:17.140 --> 00:03:27.140 He's done for literary criticism in many ways what Rothbard did for politics, to apply Misesian logic to a completely new field. 33 00:03:27.140 --> 00:03:36.140 He's provided both new methods for interpreting literature and new names and figures to admire and learn from. 34 00:03:36.140 --> 00:03:44.140 So much of our own understanding of our intellectual history is derived from that given to us by Hayek and Mises and Rothbard. 35 00:03:44.140 --> 00:03:48.540 and what Cantor has done is blown open a whole new sector for us and given us all sorts of 36 00:03:48.540 --> 00:03:52.740 new heroes, you know, people that they appear in here. We're already busy making t-shirts 37 00:03:52.740 --> 00:03:58.980 of all these individuals, by the way. First, that's always the second step, right? Right. 38 00:03:58.980 --> 00:04:03.300 In some ways, though, it is a follow-up on an older project, one begun by Henry Hazlitt, 39 00:04:03.300 --> 00:04:08.140 as a matter of fact. He was a literary critic long before he became an economist. He worked 40 00:04:08.140 --> 00:04:15.640 for the Nation magazine writing literary criticism and in fact he wrote a book on the topic 41 00:04:15.640 --> 00:04:22.540 of literary criticism that integrated questions of economic theory into literary criticism. 42 00:04:22.540 --> 00:04:28.980 It's called something, Anatomy of Criticism, a Trialogue, something like that. It's a very 43 00:04:28.980 --> 00:04:34.500 interesting book, extremely rare until a couple of years ago when we brought it up in our 44 00:04:34.500 --> 00:04:40.500 series of books. So, in some ways, I think we can say that Paul Cantor is in this respect 45 00:04:40.500 --> 00:04:45.580 a Haslidean. But who is Paul Cantor? He's a professor of literature at the University 46 00:04:45.580 --> 00:04:54.020 of Virginia, author of several books on both what you consider high scholarship of Shakespeare, 47 00:04:54.020 --> 00:05:00.900 but also application of literary criticism to popular culture. And he's sort of famous 48 00:05:00.900 --> 00:05:06.560 Thanks for doing this. We're fortunate that as a very young man he studied himself under 49 00:05:06.560 --> 00:05:15.180 Mises and Mises' seminar and carried the legacy with him his entire life and it shows how 50 00:05:15.180 --> 00:05:23.680 the effects of one person can have long past his death. So here Mises lives on in the work 51 00:05:23.680 --> 00:05:29.040 The work of Cantor and in Cantor's students, incredible. 52 00:05:29.040 --> 00:05:36.120 He some years ago came to the Mises Institute and gave a week-long series of lectures on 53 00:05:36.120 --> 00:05:39.960 the history of culture and I think there were a total of ten lectures. 54 00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:46.380 Those lectures are now part of iTunes University and they are among the most popular. 55 00:05:46.380 --> 00:05:54.340 We have about 175,000 or so downloads from iTunes University every week, and iTunes U 56 00:05:54.340 --> 00:05:58.980 is constantly featuring Paul Cantor's series on culture and capitalism up at the top of 57 00:05:58.980 --> 00:05:59.980 the page. 58 00:05:59.980 --> 00:06:01.860 If you go there, you can see it. 59 00:06:01.860 --> 00:06:07.780 So he's definitely another superstar in our midst, one with a personal lineage that traces 60 00:06:07.780 --> 00:06:13.020 back to Mises, so he has a special, honored place in our hearts, and I give you Professor 61 00:06:13.020 --> 00:06:24.980 Dr. Paul Cantor. 62 00:06:24.980 --> 00:06:29.740 Well thank you very much Jeff for that introduction and it's a real pleasure and honor to be here. 63 00:06:29.740 --> 00:06:35.100 I should say that my co-editor Stephen Cox sends his regrets. 64 00:06:35.100 --> 00:06:41.100 He has something of an administrative position at the University of California at San Diego 65 00:06:41.100 --> 00:06:45.940 and is currently involved in the budget cuts in his state. 66 00:06:45.940 --> 00:06:51.420 I was told they now just have to find $20 billion more to cut and they'll be fine. 67 00:06:51.420 --> 00:06:56.500 So I understand why he is busy at the moment and Dario Fernandez-Morera had hoped to be 68 00:06:56.500 --> 00:07:01.040 here, one of the authors in the book, but he had to go to Guatemala. 69 00:07:01.040 --> 00:07:05.740 So either I have my priorities right or I just got nothing better to do. 70 00:07:05.740 --> 00:07:10.680 But anyway, I'm here and we'll try to represent the whole book for you. 71 00:07:10.680 --> 00:07:15.360 This is really the appropriate place to talk about this book. 72 00:07:15.360 --> 00:07:21.080 This book really does arise out of the Mises Institute. 73 00:07:21.080 --> 00:07:27.440 More than half the essays were presented here as papers at one time or another. 74 00:07:27.440 --> 00:07:35.480 As Jeff pointed out, it all began with the essay contest that was really sponsored by 75 00:07:35.480 --> 00:07:38.960 the 10th anniversary Mises Institute occasion. 76 00:07:38.960 --> 00:07:44.360 I had this lecture I'd been giving on Thomas Mann, decided I'd submit that and it was chosen 77 00:07:44.360 --> 00:07:50.880 and the rest is history. I gave the Ludwig von Mises lecture one year and that has become 78 00:07:50.880 --> 00:07:57.880 the first chapter in the book and Chandran Kukathis who contributed gave the Hayek lecture 79 00:07:57.880 --> 00:08:03.760 one year. So this book is deeply steeped in the Mises Institute and we're all very grateful 80 00:08:03.760 --> 00:08:08.640 for all the assistance over the years and for the absolutely beautiful job that was 81 00:08:08.640 --> 00:08:18.680 done with the book. To say a few words about my own career, I genuinely am an English professor, 82 00:08:18.680 --> 00:08:27.320 I have a PhD in English, I know how to scan poetry, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da. 83 00:08:27.320 --> 00:08:35.440 Psyambic Pentameter. But in my youth, I was very much interested in economics, was very 84 00:08:35.440 --> 00:08:43.520 fortunate to attend Mises' seminar, 1961 to 1962. It really was a difficult decision for 85 00:08:43.520 --> 00:08:49.200 me to go into English and not into economics. And I will say, it's not that I loved Mises 86 00:08:49.200 --> 00:08:57.360 is less, is that I love Shakespeare more. It really took someone as titanic as Shakespeare 87 00:08:57.360 --> 00:09:02.720 to win me away from economics. And I was so happy when decades later I figured out how 88 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:10.080 to combine the two loves of my life, economics, Austrian economics and literature. And so 89 00:09:10.080 --> 00:09:17.880 maybe it all worked out well in the end, because we have been able to open up a new front in 90 00:09:17.880 --> 00:09:23.880 Let me stress that this book is not the be-all and the end-all in literary theory. 91 00:09:23.880 --> 00:09:28.880 We were not out to transform the whole of literary theory. 92 00:09:28.880 --> 00:09:33.880 We recognize people can still go count syllables and study iambic pentameter. 93 00:09:33.880 --> 00:09:38.880 There's lots of useful ways to talk about literature that don't involve economics. 94 00:09:38.880 --> 00:09:45.880 What we did set out to do in this book is to counter the really unhealthy trend in literary criticism 95 00:09:45.880 --> 00:09:52.720 that insofar as it does deal with economics, it does so ignorantly, which is to say in 96 00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:59.720 a Marxist fashion. That is, whether it's outright Marxism or quasi-Marxism or pseudo-Marxism, 97 00:10:00.840 --> 00:10:07.840 when my colleagues decide to talk about literature and economics, it's always from a Marxist 98 00:10:08.360 --> 00:10:13.840 perspective. Now, there's all sorts of theoretical ramifications for that, but I want to cut 99 00:10:13.840 --> 00:10:20.760 Let's jump to the chase and look at the fundamental ways in which the study of literature and 100 00:10:20.760 --> 00:10:23.280 economics has been Marxist. 101 00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:30.920 First of all, literary critics will seek out any way they can to find criticisms of capitalism 102 00:10:30.920 --> 00:10:38.480 in literature and celebrations of various forms of collectivism, including specifically Marxist 103 00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:39.480 ones. 104 00:10:39.480 --> 00:10:47.480 that's not a difficult chance for them, not a difficult task for them because a lot of 105 00:10:47.480 --> 00:10:55.000 authors have been sympathetic to various forms of collectivism and hostile to free markets. 106 00:10:55.000 --> 00:10:59.880 I'll actually go into some reasons for that and several of the essays in this book attempt 107 00:10:59.880 --> 00:11:02.440 to deal with just that issue. 108 00:11:02.440 --> 00:11:10.540 So you get a great deal of discussions of ways in which literature exposes the horrors 109 00:11:10.540 --> 00:11:19.680 of capitalism and sometimes the way it celebrates life on the good old collective farm. 110 00:11:19.680 --> 00:11:27.480 When literary critics of this type find an author who somehow celebrates free markets 111 00:11:27.480 --> 00:11:33.880 Capitalism, that's false consciousness. Those authors are accused of being the 112 00:11:33.880 --> 00:11:39.800 dupes of capitalism and a great deal of this brand of economic criticism of 113 00:11:39.800 --> 00:11:48.320 literature deals with how the market ensnares authors and how they become a 114 00:11:48.320 --> 00:11:55.320 spokesman for the capitalist system and all these arguments about class 115 00:11:55.320 --> 00:12:03.280 as Consciousness, and so it is a great deal of this kind of literary criticism deals with 116 00:12:03.280 --> 00:12:05.840 that aspect. 117 00:12:05.840 --> 00:12:13.840 And then beyond that, to the extent that these critics or analysts look at the origins of 118 00:12:13.840 --> 00:12:21.160 literature in the real world, the material conditions behind the production of literature, 119 00:12:21.160 --> 00:12:26.880 They find that as one more aspect of how bad capitalism is. 120 00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:34.480 And so you find endless studies of how the capitalist system has corrupted literature. 121 00:12:34.480 --> 00:12:39.320 These usually date, deal with literature, dealing from the 19th century on, but sometimes 122 00:12:39.320 --> 00:12:49.000 earlier, endless complaints about the literary industry, about publishers, about all the 123 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:56.960 Apparatus, booksellers, whatever, book advertising and so on, and unending arguments about how 124 00:12:56.960 --> 00:13:02.240 commerce corrupts culture. 125 00:13:02.240 --> 00:13:10.780 And these critics can find nothing good to be said for the way in which the market treats 126 00:13:10.780 --> 00:13:14.760 literature or contributes to its production. 127 00:13:14.760 --> 00:13:20.960 You might think people would acknowledge the fact that the free market has delivered books 128 00:13:20.960 --> 00:13:27.000 in numbers unheard of in the history of humanity and brought culture to vast numbers of people 129 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:31.760 in a way that never been possible before, but no, that's just the mass production of 130 00:13:31.760 --> 00:13:34.760 literature, the commodification of culture. 131 00:13:34.760 --> 00:13:39.000 This is the sort of thing that my colleagues convey against. 132 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:42.720 Well this is what we might not be a little too optimistic a term, but to at least argue 133 00:13:42.720 --> 00:14:00.080 One of the things that attracted our attention is writers who have celebrated free markets. 134 00:14:00.080 --> 00:14:02.160 And there are many of them. 135 00:14:02.160 --> 00:14:06.480 I think one of the most interesting essays in the book is Dario Fernández Moreira's 136 00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:15.280 is an essay on Don Quixote, where he shows the spirit of freedom in Cervantes, who himself 137 00:14:15.280 --> 00:14:20.920 was a victim of various governments. He was imprisoned by foreign governments, by his 138 00:14:20.920 --> 00:14:33.040 own government, and Dario shows all sorts of ways in which Don Quixote celebrates market 139 00:14:33.040 --> 00:14:37.120 Activity. One of the most interesting aspects of that essay is of course that 140 00:14:37.120 --> 00:14:43.960 Cervantes wrote before Adam Smith and so Dario's essay is an excellent 141 00:14:43.960 --> 00:14:49.480 contribution to that program that Murray Rothbard and others have pursued of 142 00:14:49.480 --> 00:14:53.840 showing that Smith didn't invent capitalism and wasn't the first person 143 00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:59.520 to theorize free markets. In fact Dario turns to the very Spanish scholastics 144 00:14:59.520 --> 00:15:16.520 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. 145 00:15:16.520 --> 00:15:22.520 I contributed an essay on a play by Ben Johnson for Bartholomew Fair which I 146 00:15:22.520 --> 00:15:28.880 argue is the first defense of free markets in English literary history and 147 00:15:28.880 --> 00:15:34.800 so on down the line. Steve Cox has an excellent essay on Willard Cather which 148 00:15:34.800 --> 00:15:41.960 in particular shows why a woman author would be particularly sympathetic to 149 00:15:41.960 --> 00:15:48.000 of Free Markets, and how in her book, Old Pioneers, the labor theory of value turns 150 00:15:48.000 --> 00:15:53.600 out to be the way the heroines' brothers oppress her. You know, they're doing all the physical 151 00:15:53.600 --> 00:15:58.120 labor on the farm, they therefore claim they should get all the credit. And that Marxist 152 00:15:58.120 --> 00:16:03.720 argument turns out to be anti-female because she's the smart one in the group and knows 153 00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:08.360 how to run the farm and understands she's contributing more value than they do, even 154 00:16:08.360 --> 00:16:14.160 even though her physical labor is less, Chandran Kukathis contributes an essay on the Nigerian 155 00:16:14.160 --> 00:16:20.880 author Ben Okri, which shows here in a kind of post-colonial context, we have an author 156 00:16:20.880 --> 00:16:27.000 celebrating free markets and so on down the line. So I think we've done a good job in 157 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:34.440 showing that literature is not necessarily anti-market in its attitudes. We also then 158 00:16:34.440 --> 00:16:44.440 and turn the tables on these Marxist arguments for the false consciousness of authors who support capitalism. 159 00:16:44.440 --> 00:16:51.440 Steve Cox and I have essays that analyze the false consciousness of left-wing authors 160 00:16:51.440 --> 00:17:03.440 and showing that they are as much captive of their class position as any pro-capitalist has ever been. 161 00:17:03.440 --> 00:17:09.720 has ever been. One of Sieve's essays is on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. That's 162 00:17:09.720 --> 00:17:15.920 really one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and truly prophetic. It's hard to 163 00:17:15.920 --> 00:17:26.920 believe how prescient it was. It's a novel about what appears to be a left-wing anarchist 164 00:17:26.920 --> 00:17:35.880 This socialist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and create an international incident. 165 00:17:35.880 --> 00:17:42.920 It turns out that this terrorist plot is sponsored by a foreign right-wing government in England 166 00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:49.680 which is trying to get England to clamp down on all the political exiles that England had 167 00:17:49.680 --> 00:17:55.040 been giving safe harbor to. 168 00:17:55.040 --> 00:17:59.480 And the amazing thing about the book is it shows that the extreme left and the extreme 169 00:17:59.480 --> 00:18:01.060 right are the same. 170 00:18:01.060 --> 00:18:09.560 They both hate capitalism, they both hate freedom, they both hate any form of contingency 171 00:18:09.560 --> 00:18:10.560 in life. 172 00:18:10.560 --> 00:18:15.280 The plot is to, again, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, which is where the prime meridian 173 00:18:15.280 --> 00:18:21.920 is, you know, Greenwich Mean Time, and Steve makes the brilliant observation in this book 174 00:18:21.920 --> 00:18:27.400 is that both the extreme right and left want to blow up time. 175 00:18:27.400 --> 00:18:30.720 You know, exactly what we understand from Austrian economics. 176 00:18:30.720 --> 00:18:34.520 Austrian economics, which is all about time and uncertainty, 177 00:18:34.520 --> 00:18:38.160 and various collectivist forms of economics, 178 00:18:38.160 --> 00:18:42.240 they feel they can eliminate that, eliminate the element of time and uncertainty, and Steve 179 00:18:42.240 --> 00:18:47.200 really is great, focuses right in on that point, and again, he's got great 180 00:18:47.200 --> 00:18:51.600 help from Conrad here, who did do a pretty good job of writing this, and one of the things 181 00:18:51.600 --> 00:18:59.440 The things he shows, Conrad shows, and Steve brings out his essay, it's getting the similarity 182 00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:03.920 between the various supporters of authority in the book. 183 00:19:03.920 --> 00:19:04.920 They're all fat. 184 00:19:04.920 --> 00:19:10.440 Now, not that there's anything wrong with that, I say from a personal perspective, but 185 00:19:10.440 --> 00:19:21.460 there's this amazing laziness to the Home Secretary in Britain, to the communist revolutionary 186 00:19:21.460 --> 00:19:26.060 in the book and these are all people who are living off the fat of land, if you will. It's 187 00:19:26.060 --> 00:19:35.060 a very good book about bringing out the parasitic nature of government and Conrad really focuses 188 00:19:35.060 --> 00:19:42.980 in on the attitude of especially left-wing intellectuals that the world owes them money, 189 00:19:42.980 --> 00:19:48.740 it owes them a job, they're smarter and therefore they should get more benefits out of society 190 00:19:48.740 --> 00:20:02.340 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. 191 00:20:02.340 --> 00:20:10.540 I think that's kind of the undercut of the work, but after showing that Wells' critique of capitalism fails, 192 00:20:10.540 --> 00:20:16.860 Welles, I go through and show how the same time Welles in many ways portrays himself 193 00:20:16.860 --> 00:20:24.060 as this invisible man character who's disaffected, revolutionary, again thinks the world owes 194 00:20:24.060 --> 00:20:30.580 him a living, does not like the way the market rewards intellectuals and so comes up with 195 00:20:30.580 --> 00:20:37.040 this scheme of invisibility which he chiefly uses to take money from the rich and give 196 00:20:37.040 --> 00:20:42.180 Give it to himself, actually, not even give it to the poor. 197 00:20:42.180 --> 00:20:51.180 So again, a couple of the essays deal with this issue of the biases of the left-wing intellectuals 198 00:20:51.180 --> 00:20:53.120 and the left-wing artists. 199 00:20:53.120 --> 00:21:01.600 One of the things that I understood as I began to analyze The Invisible Man, there's a marvelous 200 00:21:01.600 --> 00:21:06.600 This is the most moment in the story when the invisible man disappears from Wells himself. 201 00:21:06.600 --> 00:21:13.600 It's an odd narrative moment, but he says, what the invisible man did that afternoon, nobody knows. 202 00:21:13.600 --> 00:21:16.600 This isn't a novel where he's been tracing his movements all along. 203 00:21:16.600 --> 00:21:25.600 And that gave me an insight that bears on this issue of why so many authors are biased towards socialism. 204 00:21:25.600 --> 00:21:30.600 And that is that authors are themselves central planners. 205 00:21:30.600 --> 00:22:00.600 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, 206 00:22:00.600 --> 00:22:09.600 is to say a socialist government. They're not happy with the messiness, the contingency of free markets. 207 00:22:09.600 --> 00:22:20.600 This comes out particularly in the genre of utopia, which is, at the same time, a novel and a form of socialism, almost always. 208 00:22:20.600 --> 00:22:29.600 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. 209 00:22:29.600 --> 00:22:37.600 I think this actually goes a long way to explaining why so many authors have been socialists. 210 00:22:37.600 --> 00:22:44.600 The reverse of this is an interesting development in the field of Slavics. 211 00:22:44.600 --> 00:22:54.600 One of the few areas where you will find any literary critics who are anti-Marxist is Slavic, Slavic departments. 212 00:22:54.600 --> 00:23:03.600 undoubtedly because they follow the Soviet Union and other Marxist regimes more closely than people in other fields. 213 00:23:03.600 --> 00:23:12.600 And there's a great critic named Gary Saul Morrison, who's written a book, Narrative and Freedom, The Shadows of Time, 214 00:23:12.600 --> 00:23:16.600 which I discuss in the first chapter in the book. 215 00:23:16.600 --> 00:23:28.600 And he argues that particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky deliberately created novels in which they as authors were no longer in control. 216 00:23:28.600 --> 00:23:38.600 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, 217 00:23:38.600 --> 00:23:45.600 they allowed their characters a certain freedom. They allowed their characters to surprise them. 218 00:23:45.600 --> 00:24:00.600 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. 219 00:24:00.600 --> 00:24:05.600 and Morson makes a very powerful argument, again the book is called Deteriorative and Freedom 220 00:24:05.600 --> 00:24:16.600 that this was a major attempt to find a new literary form that would accommodate freedom, contingency and creativity 221 00:24:16.600 --> 00:24:24.600 and he talks about the interesting fact that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy worked in the field of serialized novels 222 00:24:24.600 --> 00:24:32.160 novels, the way Dickens did for example, that is these novels would come out periodically, 223 00:24:32.160 --> 00:24:38.960 maybe weekly, maybe monthly, and the interesting thing is that in the case of Tolstoy, he deliberately 224 00:24:38.960 --> 00:24:45.160 said I'm just going to publish this thing serially, see what happens, I don't know where 225 00:24:45.160 --> 00:24:48.880 War and Peace is going to end, I don't know where Anna Karenina is going to end, I'm going 226 00:24:48.880 --> 00:24:53.800 I'm going to see what happens, and I'm never going to change it. 227 00:24:53.800 --> 00:24:55.760 Whatever happens, happens. 228 00:24:55.760 --> 00:25:01.320 And Morrison argues that this created a very powerful new form of literature. 229 00:25:01.320 --> 00:25:05.640 I think many people would say that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are the greatest novelists 230 00:25:05.640 --> 00:25:06.640 ever. 231 00:25:06.640 --> 00:25:08.560 And he argues this is one of the reasons. 232 00:25:08.560 --> 00:25:16.040 And here's a new literary form which evolves over time, which embodies an element of time 233 00:25:16.040 --> 00:25:23.640 and Contingency, just as Austrian Economics says economic activity does. 234 00:25:23.640 --> 00:25:30.840 And that led me, the first chapter is largely about the serialized novel. 235 00:25:30.840 --> 00:25:37.000 I discussed Dickens mainly, and this was in fact the subject of my Mises lecture, now 236 00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:43.960 much expanded in this chapter, and it's there that I was able to go after this negative 237 00:25:43.960 --> 00:25:51.680 of Attitude towards Commerce that is so prevalent among my colleagues. 238 00:25:51.680 --> 00:26:01.120 The 19th century novel was a very commercial form of publishing, people like Dickens made 239 00:26:01.120 --> 00:26:09.160 a fortune of money and the 19th century novel was a major element in British commerce and 240 00:26:09.160 --> 00:26:16.240 That leads most of my colleagues who write on this subject to complain about this form 241 00:26:16.240 --> 00:26:24.080 and to complain how authors like Dickens were corrupted by the commercial nature of publishing. 242 00:26:24.080 --> 00:26:31.520 This would be one example, let's say, might be great expectations. 243 00:26:31.520 --> 00:26:37.760 What we have in the novel, as we know it, is famously a second ending, a second thought 244 00:26:37.760 --> 00:26:44.320 about the ending. I won't exactly say it ends happily now, but Dickens had originally written 245 00:26:44.320 --> 00:26:51.040 a sadder ending and then was persuaded, actually by a fellow novelist, Bullwer Lytton, to create 246 00:26:51.040 --> 00:26:58.760 a scene in which Pip and Estella would get together. And people have complained about 247 00:26:58.760 --> 00:27:06.120 that as a happy ending, a Hollywood ending. And again, I think one can argue on both sides 248 00:27:06.120 --> 00:27:11.800 of this issue. But in general what you find is people arguing that the 249 00:27:11.800 --> 00:27:17.880 publication system in 19th century Britain imposed limits, constraints on 250 00:27:17.880 --> 00:27:25.560 authors, made them write at a certain pace. Again, these novels were typically 251 00:27:25.560 --> 00:27:29.880 brought out in weekly installments or monthly numbers. There are lots of cases 252 00:27:29.880 --> 00:27:35.320 on records of authors being told to finish up their novel quick because 253 00:27:35.320 --> 00:27:41.120 were coming to the 20th installment and we do have novelists complaining about that sort of thing. 254 00:27:41.120 --> 00:27:48.120 And in general, when you read a number of these Marxist critics of the Victorian novel, 255 00:27:48.120 --> 00:27:55.120 they presented as if the publishers were in charge and they were telling the authors what to write 256 00:27:55.120 --> 00:27:58.420 and telling people what to read. 257 00:27:58.420 --> 00:28:04.740 And so this becomes an image of everything that's wrong with capitalism in the Marxist view. 258 00:28:04.740 --> 00:28:22.540 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. 259 00:28:22.540 --> 00:28:38.540 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. 260 00:28:38.540 --> 00:28:49.540 It's presented as this commodified system. One of the interesting aspects of it is it's all ex post facto reasoning. 261 00:28:49.540 --> 00:28:56.020 critics will look at what sold which novels were big successes and conclude 262 00:28:56.020 --> 00:29:04.540 that that was a formula that publishers were imposing even though no one ever 263 00:29:04.540 --> 00:29:09.700 predicted any of these things ahead of time and that's what I go through using 264 00:29:09.700 --> 00:29:14.900 some pretty serious studies of how the Victorian novel actually operated and 265 00:29:14.900 --> 00:29:21.980 can show that on the contrary, it actually was a form of spontaneous order, an example 266 00:29:21.980 --> 00:29:31.300 of how markets operate at their best, in which you basically had a feedback and correction 267 00:29:31.300 --> 00:29:38.460 mechanism in which authors would plan out novels ahead of time, they'd sketch in what 268 00:29:38.460 --> 00:29:43.580 they thought the plot was going to be already, I would say, anticipating what the public 269 00:29:43.580 --> 00:29:50.420 wanted and therefore incorporating a kind of proleptic feedback in that sense but 270 00:29:50.420 --> 00:29:56.180 in any case they would start publishing and then see how the audience reacted 271 00:29:56.180 --> 00:30:04.340 and it's just like soap operas today on television if a character increased 272 00:30:04.340 --> 00:30:10.580 ratings in this case says you'd pump up the role of that character in the book 273 00:30:10.580 --> 00:30:15.700 talk, and if you were writing some character that you as an author may have loved but sales 274 00:30:15.700 --> 00:30:23.020 were going down, that character got hit by a train in the next installment. 275 00:30:23.020 --> 00:30:28.740 And again, this exaggerates a bit the degree of feedback, but there's no question that 276 00:30:28.740 --> 00:30:37.060 this is what was going on, that it was a case of a market phenomenon where authors were 277 00:30:37.060 --> 00:30:44.900 trying to give the public what it wanted and in the process, I argue, largely improving 278 00:30:44.900 --> 00:30:47.100 their work. 279 00:30:47.100 --> 00:30:55.140 And it is interesting that for all the complaints about the vulgarity of commercial literature, 280 00:30:55.140 --> 00:31:02.300 the Victorian public largely selected out what we now think of as the greatest novelist. 281 00:31:02.300 --> 00:31:12.300 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. 282 00:31:12.300 --> 00:31:24.300 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. 283 00:31:24.300 --> 00:31:33.300 There's an Italian critic, Franco Moretti, I also discussed in the chapter, who calls himself a Marxist, but he's a market Marxist. 284 00:31:33.300 --> 00:31:41.300 He basically has done studies showing the way in which success in the marketplace actually tracks aesthetic value. 285 00:31:41.300 --> 00:31:46.300 He's done some remarkable work in that field that I cite in the chapter. 286 00:31:46.300 --> 00:31:53.020 in the Chapter. So this is the other way in which we try to reverse these Marxist analysis 287 00:31:53.020 --> 00:32:02.020 of literature and try to show that in fact the conditions of commercial publication in 288 00:32:02.020 --> 00:32:07.700 19th century Britain, they weren't perfect, in many ways they did produce complaints from 289 00:32:07.700 --> 00:32:13.060 the authors, but those that worked within the system actually found that it put them 290 00:32:13.060 --> 00:32:36.060 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. 291 00:32:36.060 --> 00:32:54.060 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. 292 00:32:54.060 --> 00:33:02.380 The authors generally, the publishers, served as the key link up, anticipating what demand, 293 00:33:02.380 --> 00:33:06.900 what it might be, steering authors sometimes in the right direction. 294 00:33:06.900 --> 00:33:13.460 In short, the Marxist view is that the publication process is entirely negative. 295 00:33:13.460 --> 00:33:16.060 It's hegemonic, as they like to say. 296 00:33:16.060 --> 00:33:18.700 It imprisons authors and the public. 297 00:33:18.700 --> 00:33:48.700 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 298 00:33:48.700 --> 00:33:56.860 Publishers basically used their network of selling agents to go around France, find out 299 00:33:56.860 --> 00:34:03.260 what people wanted to read, report back, and help steer authors in that direction. 300 00:34:03.260 --> 00:34:10.900 So it really turns Marxism on its head in that sense, showing that capitalism actually 301 00:34:10.900 --> 00:34:17.860 really solved the great problem of how to create a mass literature, typically through 302 00:34:17.860 --> 00:34:23.580 creating modes of mass distribution of literature. 303 00:34:23.580 --> 00:34:33.540 As I like to put it, for decades Marxist literary critics have been trying to denigrate writers 304 00:34:33.540 --> 00:34:40.540 by showing how they were implicated in capitalist systems, that their books somehow were involved 305 00:34:40.900 --> 00:34:47.580 of Commercial Enterprises. In fact, this shouldn't have been lowering the authors in the minds 306 00:34:47.580 --> 00:34:52.860 of these critics, it should have been elevating capitalism. They actually were uncovering 307 00:34:52.860 --> 00:35:00.620 whole areas in which they could show that capitalism was participating in the production 308 00:35:00.620 --> 00:35:06.020 of culture, but they hate capitalism so much they couldn't recognize that. It is true there 309 00:35:06.020 --> 00:35:12.940 There have been some very positive trends in what's called cultural studies where critics 310 00:35:12.940 --> 00:35:18.460 who are sympathetic to popular culture have begun to understand the principle of consumer 311 00:35:18.460 --> 00:35:25.620 sovereignty and the whole principle of Marxist analysis of literature, especially the famous 312 00:35:25.620 --> 00:35:30.940 Frankfurt School which in many ways dominated cultural studies for much of the second half 313 00:35:30.940 --> 00:35:32.260 of the 20th century. 314 00:35:32.260 --> 00:35:40.900 The principle there was summed up in the phrase of Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry. 315 00:35:40.900 --> 00:35:45.580 They were particularly interested in Hollywood and how it manufactures mass entertainment 316 00:35:45.580 --> 00:35:47.940 which it imposes on the public. 317 00:35:47.940 --> 00:35:53.780 The one thing they never bothered to do was study the public and see how the public was 318 00:35:53.780 --> 00:35:54.780 reacting. 319 00:35:54.780 --> 00:36:05.780 has been a new sort of fan-based form of cultural studies which studies the actual reaction of audiences for TV shows 320 00:36:05.780 --> 00:36:12.780 and shows that in fact they're not these passive consumers that the Frankfurt School claimed. 321 00:36:12.780 --> 00:36:21.780 People have been able to analyze the letters that soap opera fans send to the producers of the show and other such forms. 322 00:36:21.780 --> 00:36:51.780 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 323 00:36:51.780 --> 00:36:58.140 first chapter and I think that is an area where maybe we can make some common 324 00:36:58.140 --> 00:37:03.140 cause with one strand of cultural studies as I try to point out to those 325 00:37:03.140 --> 00:37:07.460 people what they need to do is learn some Austrian economics. They're 326 00:37:07.460 --> 00:37:12.060 discovering the principle of the sovereignty of the consumer which is 327 00:37:12.060 --> 00:37:16.100 utterly incomprehensible to them within their Marxist framework if they just 328 00:37:16.100 --> 00:37:22.860 Let's read some Austrian economics, they'd see there's actually a good theoretical basis 329 00:37:22.860 --> 00:37:24.620 for what they're doing. 330 00:37:24.620 --> 00:37:34.740 So broadly speaking, we put spontaneous order in the subtitle because that idea from Hayek 331 00:37:34.740 --> 00:37:42.020 unites a number of the essays, many of them study the phenomenon of spontaneous order. 332 00:37:42.020 --> 00:37:49.460 Tom Peyser's essay on Whitman shows that Whitman's celebration of American democracy was a kind 333 00:37:49.460 --> 00:37:55.620 of bottom-up vision of America, celebrating its people and not its government, celebrating 334 00:37:55.620 --> 00:38:00.740 the market energies of America. 335 00:38:00.740 --> 00:38:07.700 A number of our essays basically look at how literature portrays spontaneous order. 336 00:38:07.700 --> 00:38:13.480 At the same time, we try to show how literature is produced by spontaneous order, and my study 337 00:38:13.480 --> 00:38:21.780 in the book of 19th century publication basically argues that that's the nature, it's why culture 338 00:38:21.780 --> 00:38:31.980 is so unpredictable, and why after the fact these Marxists could explain why a book succeeded, 339 00:38:31.980 --> 00:38:34.300 but they can never predict it ahead of time. 340 00:38:34.300 --> 00:38:41.500 And finally, we do examine the issue of literary form itself in a number of the essays and 341 00:38:41.500 --> 00:38:53.780 try to show that literature itself often takes a form of order that looks messy on the surface, 342 00:38:53.780 --> 00:39:01.260 that has a lot of loose ends, but underneath there's a deeper structure that we would call 343 00:39:01.260 --> 00:39:07.060 All-Spontaneous Order. Again, Morrison's study of the Russian novel does a very good 344 00:39:07.060 --> 00:39:16.920 job of showing that. We've been trying to broaden the notion of literary form without 345 00:39:16.920 --> 00:39:25.660 overturning the traditional notion. That is to say, our image of literary order is basically 346 00:39:25.660 --> 00:39:35.020 Only that of a lyric poem, of a beautifully written 42-line lyric by Yates or T.S. Eliot 347 00:39:35.020 --> 00:39:42.580 that is absolute literary perfection, that is created by a single author and that totally 348 00:39:42.580 --> 00:39:49.420 fulfills his vision and in which famously every word is necessary. 349 00:39:49.420 --> 00:39:55.200 This is the old ideal of the new criticism that I was brought up on and so many people 350 00:39:55.200 --> 00:40:03.320 have been brought upon an ideal of literary perfection where no word could be omitted 351 00:40:03.320 --> 00:40:13.680 from the poem and it still being the same poem and no word could be added to it. 352 00:40:13.680 --> 00:40:19.760 One famous reflection of it is that in the movie Amadeus where the ideal of Mozart's 353 00:40:19.760 --> 00:40:25.280 Music, you know, every note is perfect, Salieri is the speech, remove one note and it would 354 00:40:25.280 --> 00:40:32.980 be chaos, and you know, that's a great ideal, and some works of literature, some works of 355 00:40:32.980 --> 00:40:44.200 art approach it, but war and peace? Remove one word and it falls to pieces? I'm sorry, 356 00:40:44.200 --> 00:40:49.760 and in fact there are many studies where they discovered in the process of 357 00:40:49.760 --> 00:40:54.960 printing the book they lost a word or two and not and just actually there's 358 00:40:54.960 --> 00:40:59.560 some guys written a whole book about this that authors see their novel their 359 00:40:59.560 --> 00:41:03.520 proofread they forget somebody left out a whole sentence somebody left out a whole 360 00:41:03.520 --> 00:41:10.300 chapter and you know it's still a great book and that's one of the things I try 361 00:41:10.300 --> 00:41:14.460 do in the this opening theoretical chapter on I call it the poetics of 362 00:41:14.460 --> 00:41:22.620 spontaneous order that there is a form of order that is not perfection and that 363 00:41:22.620 --> 00:41:28.100 is the great lesson about the economic order from the point of view of 364 00:41:28.100 --> 00:41:35.020 Austrian economics that the market isn't perfect and above all it's not an image 365 00:41:35.020 --> 00:41:42.020 In the age of static perfection, what the market is, is a continually self-correcting mechanism. 366 00:41:42.020 --> 00:41:49.020 It is a feedback loop. It is never perfect, but it's always perfecting itself. 367 00:41:49.020 --> 00:41:56.020 It's always moving towards a better state and trying to eliminate problems. 368 00:41:56.020 --> 00:42:03.020 And as we know from economics, the huge problem with socialism is it thinks that some form of 369 00:42:03.020 --> 00:42:06.940 static economic perfection is possible 370 00:42:06.940 --> 00:42:09.720 and even neoclassical economic shares 371 00:42:09.720 --> 00:42:12.180 that view on all this notion of market failure 372 00:42:12.180 --> 00:42:16.620 and equilibrium and how we need to second-guess the market 373 00:42:16.620 --> 00:42:19.900 all of that has its equivalent 374 00:42:19.900 --> 00:42:22.740 I figured out in literary criticism 375 00:42:22.740 --> 00:42:24.420 when you uphold 376 00:42:24.420 --> 00:42:26.660 amount of literary form 377 00:42:26.660 --> 00:42:29.140 that's really an abstraction 378 00:42:29.140 --> 00:42:47.140 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. 379 00:42:47.140 --> 00:42:54.140 And that's one of the many profound lines in the 800 pages of Human Action. 380 00:42:54.140 --> 00:43:14.140 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. 381 00:43:14.140 --> 00:43:19.740 One of the problems with literary critics is that they are Monday morning quarterbacks. 382 00:43:19.740 --> 00:43:26.660 They are analyzing works after they have been created. And indeed, I would say the function 383 00:43:26.660 --> 00:43:33.380 of the literary critic is to try to find the structure or the plan of the work. The problem 384 00:43:33.380 --> 00:43:41.380 comes when you assume that that plan was fully articulated by the author before the work 385 00:43:41.380 --> 00:43:47.380 came into being. I would say that the notion of literary perfection is what Kant would 386 00:43:47.380 --> 00:43:53.980 call a regulative ideal, or we might call a heuristic device. We should always be thinking 387 00:43:53.980 --> 00:43:59.060 that a work of literature is perfect and that it perfectly coheres, that everything falls 388 00:43:59.060 --> 00:44:04.540 into place. That's the best guideline for analyzing it because it will make us think 389 00:44:04.540 --> 00:44:13.260 carefully about it but literary works are in reality like sausages and maybe 390 00:44:13.260 --> 00:44:18.300 you don't want to know how they were made sometimes if you know how they're 391 00:44:18.300 --> 00:44:23.340 made you'll think they must be a mess so it's useful to think okay they're 392 00:44:23.340 --> 00:44:28.140 perfect but don't assume that because you've been able to find a pattern in 393 00:44:28.140 --> 00:44:33.940 it that the author necessarily had that in mind it may be possible again I don't 394 00:44:33.940 --> 00:44:39.220 I wish to deny, especially when you look at some of the great lyric poetry written that 395 00:44:39.220 --> 00:44:44.060 this thing was perfectly planned out ahead of time, but when you study the history of 396 00:44:44.060 --> 00:44:50.260 the creation of literature, you find lots of elements of contingency, things that just 397 00:44:50.260 --> 00:44:51.260 came along. 398 00:44:51.260 --> 00:44:56.640 It's one of the things that Morrison chose about Dostoevsky, for example, that he would 399 00:44:56.640 --> 00:45:03.140 work from newspaper incidents and sometimes you will see something will happen in one 400 00:45:03.140 --> 00:45:08.740 of his novels that's based on a newspaper incident that occurred months or sometimes 401 00:45:08.740 --> 00:45:14.300 a year after Dusty F. C. started writing the novel. And a major turn in the novel occurs 402 00:45:14.300 --> 00:45:19.180 not because of his initial plan, but because of something he experienced, sometimes something 403 00:45:19.180 --> 00:45:25.620 he saw in the world later. And Morrison thinks Dusty F. C. is a greater writer for just that 404 00:45:25.620 --> 00:45:32.980 reason. And this is one of the things I tried to open up in the opening chapter of the work. 405 00:45:32.980 --> 00:45:38.980 in the sense that literature is process, not product. 406 00:45:38.980 --> 00:45:41.980 Yes, ultimately you have a product in front of you. 407 00:45:41.980 --> 00:45:44.980 You have a book. 408 00:45:44.980 --> 00:45:49.980 And we tend to think of it, therefore, as this single artifact 409 00:45:49.980 --> 00:45:53.980 created in a single, all-seeing act of creation. 410 00:45:53.980 --> 00:45:57.980 But in fact, if you study something like the serialized novel, 411 00:45:57.980 --> 00:46:01.980 you see that these great works by Dickens, by Tolstoy, by Dostoevsky 412 00:46:01.980 --> 00:46:15.980 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. 413 00:46:15.980 --> 00:46:21.980 That makes creativity a much messier process, a more contingent process. 414 00:46:21.980 --> 00:46:29.980 Some ways it doesn't suit the minds of academics who want everything perfectly laid out and frozen for all eternity. 415 00:46:29.980 --> 00:46:36.700 It's why they've always liked Latin as a language, not any of these living languages. 416 00:46:36.700 --> 00:46:41.700 But it's encouraging to me that there are a number of critics who've been turning in 417 00:46:41.700 --> 00:46:47.100 this direction and seeing that literature itself is a product of what we would call 418 00:46:47.100 --> 00:46:50.120 spontaneous order. 419 00:46:50.120 --> 00:46:56.380 You can even say, using Hayek's formula, that literature is the product of human action 420 00:46:56.380 --> 00:47:00.980 but not of human design in the sense that when you look at the history of one of these 421 00:47:00.980 --> 00:47:06.700 great 19th century novels, at every moment human beings were creating these novels, but 422 00:47:06.700 --> 00:47:13.700 the whole process was not designed in advance and the final product, the novel that emerges 423 00:47:13.700 --> 00:47:18.580 is very different, let's say, from what Dickens imagined it to be at the beginning. 424 00:47:18.580 --> 00:47:24.180 We have lots of detailed information to show that. 425 00:47:24.180 --> 00:47:26.180 The Old Curiosity Shop 426 00:47:26.180 --> 00:47:28.180 He didn't even start it out as a novel 427 00:47:28.180 --> 00:47:30.180 He was creating, he thought, a new magazine 428 00:47:30.180 --> 00:47:32.180 but the story of one character, little Nell 429 00:47:32.180 --> 00:47:34.180 fascinated the audience so much 430 00:47:34.180 --> 00:47:36.180 and boosted sales 431 00:47:36.180 --> 00:47:38.180 to an unprecedented level that he said 432 00:47:38.180 --> 00:47:40.180 I'm gonna write a novel about this 433 00:47:40.180 --> 00:47:42.180 and the result is we've got The Old Curiosity Shop 434 00:47:42.180 --> 00:47:44.180 So, as I say 435 00:47:44.180 --> 00:47:46.180 we've tried to use 436 00:47:46.180 --> 00:47:48.180 the principles of Austrian economics here 437 00:47:48.180 --> 00:47:50.180 to open up new perspectives on literature 438 00:47:50.180 --> 00:47:52.180 show that it can celebrate 439 00:47:52.180 --> 00:47:58.700 the market in spontaneous order, it can be seen as the product of the market in 440 00:47:58.700 --> 00:48:03.460 spontaneous order, and above all that many literary works take a form that's 441 00:48:03.460 --> 00:48:08.620 analogous to what we think of as spontaneous order. So we hope we've opened 442 00:48:08.620 --> 00:48:15.540 up a new frontier. It is true that many of the Marxists have had to retreat to 443 00:48:15.540 --> 00:48:19.360 literary studies having been refuted in the economic world, but we're going to go 444 00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:24.360 Go after them there as well and maybe open up some new perspectives on literature in the process. 445 00:48:24.360 --> 00:48:26.360 So, thank you. 446 00:48:35.360 --> 00:48:39.360 I'd be happy to take questions. We've got some time. Yes. 447 00:48:39.360 --> 00:48:46.360 Do you think that Dickens' reputation for how to divide and control is correct? 448 00:49:09.360 --> 00:49:20.360 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. 449 00:49:20.360 --> 00:49:36.360 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. 450 00:49:36.360 --> 00:49:46.760 So people have mistaken that critique of industrialism in hard times for the whole of Dickens' opinion. 451 00:49:46.760 --> 00:49:55.800 If you look at him more deeply, he has a lot of affinities with Manchester liberalism. 452 00:49:55.800 --> 00:49:58.800 The editors on Freetrade are just extraordinarily good. 453 00:49:58.800 --> 00:49:59.800 Yes? 454 00:49:59.800 --> 00:50:11.400 Well, Mario Vargas Llosa would be the most prominent one. 455 00:50:11.400 --> 00:50:15.920 Before he was a presidential candidate in Peru, he actually was a rather good novelist. 456 00:50:15.920 --> 00:50:24.640 Now, if you want to see an author who appreciates capitalism and absolutely pillories left-wing 457 00:50:24.640 --> 00:50:34.320 Schemes, Reid Vargas Llosa. He was well read in Hayek, in Sites Hayek, and I particularly, 458 00:50:34.320 --> 00:50:38.840 his greatest novel is something called War of the End of the World, which is about various 459 00:50:38.840 --> 00:50:47.440 forms of millennial schemes to change Brazil in the 19th century. But he is probably the 460 00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:53.640 most self-consciously pro-capitalist author I can think of alive today. 461 00:50:53.640 --> 00:51:04.840 yes I have not unfortunately I mean to do so but I something I can't remember Yuri 462 00:51:23.640 --> 00:51:53.640 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 463 00:51:53.640 --> 00:52:02.640 I defer to his knowledge. He's read the books in Russian, for example, and is actually very anti-Marxist in his attitudes. 464 00:52:02.640 --> 00:52:15.640 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, 465 00:52:15.640 --> 00:52:21.620 freedom is the central value and that characters define themselves by their 466 00:52:21.620 --> 00:52:27.680 acts of freedom and that's why both as novelists tried to avoid the situation 467 00:52:27.680 --> 00:52:35.240 where they mapped out ahead of time what their characters were going to do. Yes. 468 00:52:35.240 --> 00:52:44.920 Oh yes, she's one of the central figures in it. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill 469 00:52:44.920 --> 00:52:51.720 Gaskell is a remarkably pro-capitalist work. Interestingly enough, it was serialized in 470 00:52:51.720 --> 00:52:57.560 Dickens' own journal roughly at the time of Hardin Times. They were in competition and 471 00:52:57.560 --> 00:53:05.360 Dickens was a little upset that Gaskell was so pro-capitalist in that work. Gaskell had 472 00:53:05.360 --> 00:53:11.040 come to Manchester and at first hated it. She came from kind of Jane Austen country, 473 00:53:11.040 --> 00:53:18.520 She came to understand Manchester, she came to appreciate, and above all, she has scenes 474 00:53:18.520 --> 00:53:26.720 in that book, which is set in Manchester, in the very heart of industrial England, where 475 00:53:26.720 --> 00:53:31.640 women are sort of whistling on their way to the factory, and happy coming home, and she 476 00:53:31.640 --> 00:53:37.960 points out that the alternative to this was domestic servitude, and that when they worked 477 00:53:37.960 --> 00:53:42.940 in a household, they were subject to all sorts of problems and basically were working for 478 00:53:42.940 --> 00:53:49.280 room and board and not for pay and that factories represented freedom for them, where they could 479 00:53:49.280 --> 00:53:54.320 just get paid for their work, go home, leave the job behind them and spend the money the 480 00:53:54.320 --> 00:53:55.320 way they wanted. 481 00:53:55.320 --> 00:54:02.860 So here it's quite remarkable, a woman novelist who is celebrating not just capitalism but 482 00:54:02.860 --> 00:54:08.060 and Industrial Capitalism. I should also say that Elizabeth Gaskell is the central example 483 00:54:08.060 --> 00:54:13.240 of the chapter. This is a kind of morbid joke, I guess. I discussed it in the Mises Lecture 484 00:54:13.240 --> 00:54:19.580 and people laughed, but I will say that Elizabeth Gaskell's masterwork for many people is a 485 00:54:19.580 --> 00:54:24.980 novel called Wives and Daughters, and unfortunately she died before she could finish it. Please 486 00:54:24.980 --> 00:54:30.420 don't laugh because the last time I mentioned, people did. But that's a key example for me 487 00:54:30.420 --> 00:54:34.940 because here's a novel which people like Henry James have called her best novel 488 00:54:34.940 --> 00:54:37.700 and it's only 85% complete. 489 00:54:37.700 --> 00:54:41.660 She did not live to write the last two chapters. Moreover, she never got to 490 00:54:41.660 --> 00:54:46.420 revise it at all, so there's several contradictions in it. She gets the 491 00:54:46.420 --> 00:54:48.980 political affiliation of one character. 492 00:54:48.980 --> 00:54:52.840 It's Tory at one point, Wig at another. 493 00:54:52.840 --> 00:54:54.420 So there are things that are 494 00:54:54.420 --> 00:54:58.720 imperfect about this novel, including the fact that it lacks an ending. Yet it's a 495 00:54:58.720 --> 00:55:00.040 great novel. 496 00:55:00.040 --> 00:55:05.380 I offer as my example of the sort of 85% complete novel. That's good enough. 497 00:55:05.380 --> 00:55:07.120 You can read it. 498 00:55:07.120 --> 00:55:09.520 No one puts that book down 499 00:55:09.520 --> 00:55:14.520 and says, oh, I wasted my time. The thing's not complete. You can pretty much 500 00:55:14.520 --> 00:55:18.000 infer how the plot's going to end from what was written. 501 00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:21.360 And so that's a really interesting example from a theoretical 502 00:55:21.360 --> 00:55:25.600 point of view. Here's a novel that is manifestly imperfect in the sense of 503 00:55:25.600 --> 00:55:29.040 incomplete. Yet many people call it her best novel. 504 00:55:29.040 --> 00:55:35.920 It has a kind of perfection that is not the perfection of the perfectly crafted lyric poem. 505 00:55:35.920 --> 00:55:41.840 Aristotle would have a problem because he says work must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 506 00:55:41.840 --> 00:55:49.760 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. 507 00:55:49.760 --> 00:55:54.480 It's still a great novel. So yeah, Elizabeth Gaskill is there. Yes. 508 00:55:54.480 --> 00:55:58.480 What about the Lord of the Rings? 509 00:55:58.480 --> 00:56:02.480 What about it? I love it! 510 00:56:02.480 --> 00:56:04.480 How much do you love it? 511 00:56:04.480 --> 00:56:06.480 Well, there's nothing in this book, but I could... 512 00:56:06.480 --> 00:56:10.480 I mean, one of the interesting things about the Lord of the Rings is 513 00:56:10.480 --> 00:56:16.480 it is a kind of, let me say, 514 00:56:16.480 --> 00:56:20.480 medieval critique of the modern nation state. 515 00:56:20.480 --> 00:56:25.600 I mean if I were a libertarian trying to make something with it I would say that 516 00:56:25.600 --> 00:56:32.400 Tolkien being a medievalist offers you a defense of the old medieval notion of 517 00:56:32.400 --> 00:56:38.080 the liberties and that the ring is the nation state the one ring to rule them 518 00:56:38.080 --> 00:56:43.320 all and the great horror in Tolkien is of central power and I think his own 519 00:56:43.320 --> 00:56:47.920 experience of World War I the 20th century led him to see the most demonic 520 00:56:47.920 --> 00:56:55.840 Force in the World is the all-encompassing, all-destroying modern nation state. It's a 521 00:56:55.840 --> 00:57:02.520 kind of reactionary critique of modernity and that's that I'm sure Tolkien was not a 522 00:57:02.520 --> 00:57:07.960 libertarian. But there are libertarian lessons that can be learned from it. The 523 00:57:07.960 --> 00:57:13.080 need for local government, for example, in a weird way that book is a celebration 524 00:57:13.080 --> 00:57:20.480 of the Shire. Leave it alone. You can only destroy it by this great power with 525 00:57:20.480 --> 00:57:25.480 all its armies and its machines trying to take it over. So again, I know that it's 526 00:57:25.480 --> 00:57:37.120 not in this book, but maybe someday I'll write an essay on it. Yes, okay, I do not 527 00:57:37.120 --> 00:57:42.760 do that. I must say that I have a problem with my colleagues when 528 00:57:42.760 --> 00:57:51.920 and they're preaching Marxism in the classroom and so I do not try to introduce Austrian 529 00:57:51.920 --> 00:57:57.960 economics directly. Students ask me about it, I point them in the direction of Mises 530 00:57:57.960 --> 00:58:07.880 and Hayek but I try to avoid being as polemical as... I mean I feel students, they take an 531 00:58:07.880 --> 00:58:12.280 English course, they should be studying English literature. I do try, you know, I do things, 532 00:58:12.280 --> 00:58:19.280 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. 533 00:58:19.280 --> 00:58:26.280 I try to point that out to them. It's incredible trying to get a simple idea that through their skulls, 534 00:58:26.280 --> 00:58:33.280 I cannot believe that there could be anything good about capitalism, but I at least try to plant the seed. Yes. 535 00:58:33.280 --> 00:59:01.280 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. 536 00:59:01.280 --> 00:59:23.280 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? 537 00:59:31.280 --> 00:59:47.280 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. 538 00:59:47.280 --> 01:00:12.280 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. 539 01:00:12.280 --> 01:00:35.740 Well, I mean, I think it's a great failure on his part. I was actually very inspired by Mencken 540 01:00:35.740 --> 01:00:46.100 and my teens reading things by him. I think Mencken reflects deeper trends that directly 541 01:00:46.100 --> 01:00:50.740 influence all these other people. In other words, it's not as if he turned around the 542 01:00:50.740 --> 01:00:59.560 world where literatures were all pro-capitalist. I mean, you see those attitudes in John Ruskin 543 01:00:59.560 --> 01:01:10.560 and Matthew Arnold. This is so deeply embedded in the English intellectuals that I think, 544 01:01:10.560 --> 01:01:16.920 although Mencken is an example of this, I don't think he really is a historical force 545 01:01:16.920 --> 01:01:21.280 in producing it. It predates him by at least a hundred years. 546 01:01:21.280 --> 01:01:25.280 Okay, one last question. Yes. 547 01:01:25.280 --> 01:01:28.280 What about Trollope? 548 01:01:28.280 --> 01:01:32.280 What? They're all very interesting. 549 01:01:32.280 --> 01:01:35.280 Do you think they liked Trollope? 550 01:01:35.280 --> 01:01:40.280 Well, again, I think they didn't like it. 551 01:01:40.280 --> 01:01:46.280 Now, Trollope is an interesting figure because he, for example, he hated the serial novel system 552 01:01:46.280 --> 01:01:51.840 System, and so secretly he would write the novel out and then pretend he was producing 553 01:01:51.840 --> 01:02:00.840 it in installments, but I don't know, and of course in Charles Casey he didn't like 554 01:02:00.840 --> 01:02:09.540 America because it was too commercial, I mean in many ways these English authors suffer 555 01:02:09.540 --> 01:02:15.180 from the aristocratic heritage in England, as I point out a lot, this contempt for commerce 556 01:02:15.180 --> 01:02:20.500 Congress is fundamentally an aristocratic contempt. It begins in England really as a 557 01:02:20.500 --> 01:02:27.500 right-wing and reactionary phenomenon. But, you know, Gaskill would be the best example 558 01:02:27.500 --> 01:02:33.300 of an English novelist who appreciated a Congress, but she had to fight her way through it. But 559 01:02:33.300 --> 01:02:40.140 again, you know, unfortunately, as I began, the majority of authors do not show an appreciation 560 01:02:40.140 --> 01:02:46.860 of Commerce or Capitalism. How often do you ever see a sympathetic portrayal of a businessman 561 01:02:46.860 --> 01:02:54.060 or businesswoman in a 19th century novel? It's ironic that all these people were business 562 01:02:54.060 --> 01:03:02.060 people themselves and nothing in the history of the world, nothing ever did more for women 563 01:03:02.060 --> 01:03:08.300 as a cultural force than the 19th century British novel. It's the first field that 564 01:03:08.300 --> 01:03:14.020 that was open to them and in which they came to the fore and triumphed. 565 01:03:14.020 --> 01:03:21.680 And this is, again, I cannot get this through to my students, that it is 19th century capitalism 566 01:03:21.680 --> 01:03:28.740 that made George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters possible, and it really 567 01:03:28.740 --> 01:03:35.780 was a case where there was a, you know, Dickens was not a feminist, but he saw that Elizabeth 568 01:03:35.780 --> 01:03:43.100 Gaskill sold books, so he turned the pages of his journal over to her. He saw that she 569 01:03:43.100 --> 01:03:48.180 was potential competition, so he decided to get her writing for him. And it's a perfect 570 01:03:48.180 --> 01:03:53.540 example of that great lesson that capitalism overcomes prejudice, that you would have to 571 01:03:53.540 --> 01:03:59.220 pay, if you were somehow a misogynist or anti-feminist as a publisher of the ninth century, you were 572 01:03:59.220 --> 01:04:03.580 going to pay a huge price for it, and they didn't pay it. Instead, they published women 573 01:04:03.580 --> 01:04:11.860 in unprecedented numbers. There's no cultural field in which women ever achieved as much 574 01:04:11.860 --> 01:04:18.400 as the 19th century novels. Their first great breakthrough form, and it was a triumph of 575 01:04:18.400 --> 01:04:23.400 British commerce and British capitalism. Good place to end, right? 576 01:04:23.400 --> 01:04:41.600 Dr. Cantor has agreed to sign books downstairs in the bookstore using his Mises Institute 577 01:04:41.600 --> 01:04:42.600 pen. 578 01:04:42.600 --> 01:04:43.600 Can we give you one of those? 579 01:04:43.600 --> 01:04:44.600 Okay. 580 01:04:44.600 --> 01:04:45.600 I'll work on that. 581 01:04:45.600 --> 01:04:49.600 So he'll be downstairs and now to close out the conference I'd like to introduce Doug 582 01:04:49.600 --> 01:04:54.160 Douglas French, who's been a great champion of this very expensive for us conference and 583 01:04:54.160 --> 01:04:58.600 I think he probably sat down with Joseph Salerno for what, 47 different times going through 584 01:04:58.600 --> 01:05:03.280 the schedule every three days over the last several months so he's been involved in every 585 01:05:03.280 --> 01:05:07.280 detail and has been a real trooper through this whole thing. The President of the Mises 586 01:05:07.280 --> 01:05:10.280 Institute, Douglas French. 587 01:05:10.280 --> 01:05:23.900 Well, of course, Jeff said everything I wanted to say. 588 01:05:23.900 --> 01:05:28.320 You may have noticed when you walked in some books on a table downstairs, a little book 589 01:05:28.320 --> 01:05:34.200 called Inclined to Liberty, and if you haven't picked one up, please do. 590 01:05:34.200 --> 01:05:42.640 The author has graciously donated them to this conference as he does to all of our conferences 591 01:05:42.640 --> 01:05:45.240 around the country when we do Mises Circles. 592 01:05:45.240 --> 01:05:46.960 The author's in the room. 593 01:05:46.960 --> 01:05:51.480 He helped us in funding this conference. 594 01:05:51.480 --> 01:06:05.860 and if he would stand, Mr. Lew Carabini. 595 01:06:05.860 --> 01:06:11.880 Before I let you stampede Martha's Buffet to the north, I want to talk a little bit 596 01:06:11.880 --> 01:06:18.980 about this room because if you were here last year, it seated quite a few less than this. 597 01:06:18.980 --> 01:06:24.780 We had walls that were there and there were book stacks in the back and, by the way, if 598 01:06:24.780 --> 01:06:30.860 you haven't been up to the third floor, please make the trek and take a look and be amazed. 599 01:06:30.860 --> 01:06:38.100 But it's been quite a project, quite an undertaking to move things around, move walls around. 600 01:06:38.100 --> 01:06:43.580 And thankfully, we have someone who works here who does the books, but she's not satisfied 601 01:06:43.580 --> 01:06:44.580 doing the books. 602 01:06:44.580 --> 01:06:48.380 She likes to do other things and draw pictures and be a contractor. 603 01:06:48.380 --> 01:06:56.180 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. 604 01:06:56.180 --> 01:07:03.180 She's not here right now, but please recognize Norma Willick for her work in getting this building done. 605 01:07:03.180 --> 01:07:15.180 Of course, Norma couldn't do her work if we didn't have a sponsor for the project, and 606 01:07:15.180 --> 01:07:21.380 it's a guy who does so much for us, and he's here hopefully in the room, oh yeah, I do 607 01:07:21.380 --> 01:07:32.300 see him, he's our favorite pipe pusher from Pasco, Washington, Mr. Jim Wolfe, please stand. 608 01:07:32.300 --> 01:07:45.120 Well, Jeff already mentioned him, but another round of applause, please, for our conference 609 01:07:45.120 --> 01:08:00.300 director, Mr. Joe Salerno, and of course, Joe got plenty of help from the guy who is 610 01:08:00.300 --> 01:08:08.300 This is really the main spring for Institute progress, I think. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker. 611 01:08:08.300 --> 01:08:16.300 Applause 612 01:08:16.300 --> 01:08:26.300 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. 613 01:08:26.300 --> 01:08:38.300 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. 614 01:08:38.300 --> 01:08:48.300 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. 615 01:08:48.300 --> 01:08:56.300 And that sounds like no big deal, except this schedule is a moving target like you can't imagine. 616 01:08:56.300 --> 01:09:00.300 So we constantly go to Kathy and say, oh, you've got to change it. 617 01:09:00.300 --> 01:09:03.300 Well, I just changed it a few minutes. Well, you've got to change it again. 618 01:09:03.300 --> 01:09:08.300 So anyway, Kathy White is not here, but she certainly deserves recognition. 619 01:09:08.300 --> 01:09:26.300 Just a word about the conference. I can't imagine the Keynesians or the Marxists have the breadth that this conference would have. 620 01:09:26.300 --> 01:09:37.300 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. 621 01:09:37.300 --> 01:09:54.900 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. 622 01:09:54.900 --> 01:10:05.900 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. 623 01:10:05.900 --> 01:10:13.900 So please keep doing that for us and see you next year, March 10th through the 12th. 624 01:10:13.900 --> 01:10:15.900 Good night.