Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture

LITERATURE &THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE LITERATURE THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY &S PONTANEOUS O RDER IN C ULTURE Edited by Paul A. Cantor & Stephen Cox LvMI LUDWIG VON MISES Cover credit: The Money Lender and His Wife (oil on panel), Marinus van Reymerswaele (c. 1490–1567), Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, Italy. The Bridgemann Art Library International. Permission granted. © 2009 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Ludwig von Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue Auburn, Alabama 36832 mises.org ISBN: 978-1-933550-64-0 CONTENTS Acknowledgments . .vii Preface . .ix 1. The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism . .1 Paul A. Cantor 2. Cervantes and Economic Theory . .99 Darío Fernández-Morera 3. In Defense of the Marketplace: Spontaneous Order in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair . .167 Paul A. Cantor 4. Shelley’s Radicalism: The Poet as Economist . .225 Paul A. Cantor 5. Capitalist Vistas: Walt Whitman and Spontaneous Order . .263 Thomas Peyser 6. The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism . .293 Paul A. Cantor 7. Cather’s Capitalism . .323 Stephen Cox v VI —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE 8. Conrad’s Praxeology . .371 Stephen Cox 9. Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow” . .433 Paul A. Cantor 10. The Capitalist Road: The Riddle of the Market from Karl Marx to Ben Okri . .469 Chandran Kukathas Contributors . .499 Index . .501 Acknowledgments n preliminary versions, several of these essays were presented at conferences at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. In particular, “The Poetics of Spontaneous Order” I was delivered as the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Scholars Conference on March 15, 2002. The contributors wish to express their gratitude to Lew Rockwell, Jeffrey Tucker, Judy Thommesen, Kathy White, and other members of the Institute for their support and encouragement of this project over the years. The essay “In Defense of the Marketplace” was published in two earlier (and truncated) versions: (1) one under the same title in The Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 23–64; (2) the other under the title “The Law Versus the Marketplace in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair” in Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance, Dennis Kezar, ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 87–126. An earlier version of the essay “Shelley’s Radicalism” was published under the title “The Poet as Economist: Shelley’s Critique of Paper Money and the British National Debt” in the Journal of Liber- tarian Studies 13 (1997): 21–44. An earlier version of the essay “The Invisible Man and the Invis- ible Hand” was published under the same title in The American Scholar 68 (1999): 69–102. An earlier version of the essay “Hyperinflation and Hyperreal- ity” was published under the title “Hyperinflation and Hyperreal- ity: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics” in The Review of Austrian Economics 7 (1994): 3–29. vii VIII —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE An earlier version of the essay “The Capitalist Road” was published under the same title in Quadrant, April 1998. Preface his book explores the possibility that forms of economic thinking sympathetic to capitalism may be able to illuminate our understanding of literature in new ways. For example, Tthe idea that free competition spurs creativity and progress in commerce and industry is well-established and well-documented. Might it be possible that competition is a healthy force in the cultural realm as well? In the introductory essay, Paul Cantor argues that in the case of serialized novels, the highly competitive nature of the publishing industry in nineteenth-century Britain in some ways actually improved the quality of the literature produced. This notion would seem obvious to most economists, but some literary critics may find it difficult to accept. Ever since the Romantics, commerce and culture have been viewed as antithetical, and many authors and critics have hoped to shield literature from the sup- posedly harmful effects of a competitive marketplace. Marxist literary theory has only deepened what was originally an 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, have achieved a virtual monopoly in the contemporary academy. Like any monopoly, this Marxist domination needs to be chal- lenged. In the academy, just as in the economy, people who face no competition grow complacent, failing to question their assumptions or to adapt to new developments. There have of course been many attacks over the years on Marxist approaches to literature, but they have generally come from critics who simply ix X —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE reject economic discussions of literature in any form, and support a purely aesthetic approach that disdains any consideration of the marketplace. To our knowledge, this is the first collection of essays that accepts the idea that economics is relevant to the study of literature, but offers free market principles, rather than Marxist, as the means of relating the two fields. As the introductory essay explains, we have turned specifically (though not exclusively) to what is known as the Austrian School of economics, represented chiefly by the writings of its most important the- orists, 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 Aus- trian School is the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically informed—hence we regard it as the most relevant to humanistic studies. Still, most of the principles we draw upon—the advantages of private property and free competition, the disadvantages of central planning and collec- tivism, the value of sound money and the dangers of inflation— are not unique to the Austrian School but are embraced by a wide range of economists today. Marxists themselves have increasingly been struggling with their Marxism, and trying to moderate its economic determin- ism. This is especially true in the field of Cultural Studies, where in recent decades scholars who basically associate themselves with Marxism have nevertheless begun to develop an understanding of the virtues of the marketplace. They have broken with the old Frankfurt School model of consumers as the passive dupes of an all-powerful capitalist marketing system. In spite of their anti-capitalist leanings, some scholars have found that they cannot appreciate and celebrate popular culture without to some extent appreciating and celebrating the commercial world that produces it. We applaud these efforts, but suggest that these scholars could make more progress if they finally broke with Marx. His materialistic, deterministic, and mechanistic view of reality stamps him as very much a man of the mid-nineteenth century. A great deal has been discovered in the sciences since Marx’s day, including the science of economics, and our model of PREFACE — XI reality is no longer a steam engine. The more we have come to understand the nature of complex systems and what is called their non-linearity, the more unpredictable they appear to be, and that is above all true of social systems. Marx’s laws of inevitable economic development now look like relics of the age of Newtonian physics, Hegelian historicism, and Comtean posi- tivism. Modern discoveries in fields such as physics, biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and chaos theory have stressed the importance of contingency in nature and thus opened up a space for indeterminacy and human freedom, especially in the realm of culture. Austrian economics, with its emphasis on chance, uncertainty, and unpredictability in human life, is far more in tune than Marxism with these trends in modern science. How might thinking in terms of free market principles give us fresh insights into the relation of literature and economics? To begin with, the free market itself provides a valuable model—it at first appears chaotic but upon closer inspection it turns out to have an underlying order, a self-organizing order that never achieves a static perfection, but is always working out imperfections over time. The idea of the market as a self-cor- recting feedback mechanism helps explain how commercial publishing could actually nurture the development of literature. Moreover, several of the essays in this book use the model of what Hayek calls “‘spontaneous order” to rethink the issue of literary form. The evolution of language and the growth of cities are good examples of what Hayek means by “spontaneous order”—human activities and developments that are not cen- trally planned and commanded but rather involve the free and uncoordinated interaction of individuals who may be aiming at their own limited goals but nevertheless end up producing a larger social good that only appears to have been designed in advance. Languages, for example, are profoundly ordered, but not because anyone planned them out in advance. A language develops its rich vocabulary and complex syntax over time in an evolutionary process to which all the speakers of the language contribute, usually without even knowing that they are doing so. The precise determination of the meanings of 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.

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