literature and liberty cantor

[...]... criticism is a way of thinking that is fully grounded in economic reality and still supports the principles of freedom and individualism And, as we show throughout this book, the principles of freedom and individualism are vital to understanding literature and artistic creativity 1 The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism P A U L A C A N T O R To find a form that accommodates... Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Ladislav Matejka and I.R Titunik, trans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp 17–24 For perhaps the most important example of this rejection, see Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp 75–82 and “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Problems in Materialism and. .. theorists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek We argue that this brand of economics, which focuses on the freedom of the individual actor and the subjectivity of values, is more suited to the study of literature and artistic creativity than a materialist, determinist, and collectivist doctrine such as Marxism The Austrian School is the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically... ORDER: AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND LITERARY CRITICISM — 3 and critical of capitalism, and how many are sympathetic to capitalism and critical of socialism? On this fundamental issue that divides economists, any survey of literary criticism today would reveal a remarkable and nearly complete uniformity of opinion Economic discussions of literature are almost all anti-capitalist in spirit, and are often avowedly... criticism (with the possible exception of Paul Delany’s essay) It may be hard to believe and I may well be missing 4 LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE And in this respect I am not a Marxist I don’t believe that social and economic reality always determines thought or that understanding modes of production is the single most important key to history But I do accept... Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Russell A Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007) Anti-socialist criticism is more common; I would particularly recommend George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1998), and critics in the field of Slavics... reject economic approaches to literature entirely, and try to maintain the aesthetic purity of the realm of literature by keeping it strictly divorced from the sordid, mercenary considerations of the economic realm In view of the crudeness of many Marxist analyses of literature, one can sympathize with the impulse to keep the realms of literature and economics separate And yet for all the high-mindedness... much credit: they have made a plausible and even a persuasive case for the relevance of economics to literature and literary activity Economics is a central realm of human activity, and to the extent that literature attempts to deal with human life, it must inevitably come to terms with economic issues And however idealistic a view one holds of the creation of literature, at some 8On the peculiar survival... Press, 1986), pp 137–78 and Darío Fernández-Morera, American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996) 8 LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE level it does seem to be bound up with economic activity as ordinarily understood If we need to raise economic questions in order to achieve a fuller understanding of literature, we should take... Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright, Culture and Enterprise: The Development, Representation and Morality of Business (London: Routledge, 2000) Although this book does not involve much literary criticism (it deals chiefly with cinema and television), it makes many of the observations we are making about the relevance of Austrian economics to understanding cultural phenomena 12 LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS . aristocratic contempt for and distrust of market principles and practices. And in the field of literature and economics, Marxism and its offshoots, such as cultural materialism and the new historicism,. words and the rules of grammar is a late cultural development, and involves ex XII LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE post facto reasoning. Lexicographers and. the principles of freedom and individualism. And, as we show throughout this book, the principles of freedom and individualism are vital to understand- ing literature and artistic creativity. To