Literature And The Economics Of Liberty Spontaneous Order In Culture

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com At the heart of Austrian economics is the concept of "spontaneous order." What appears to be chaotic in the social interaction of vast numbers of individuals in the marketplace in fact reflects a deeper order, what Adam Smith calls "the invisible hand." The free market produces more rational results than any form of central planning because markets use self-correcting mechanisms to adapt to perpetually changing economic conditions.This book explores the idea that spontaneous order is the concept that can bridge the economic and cultural realms. Austrian economics and literature deal with the same world - the concrete human world of open-ended and infinite possibility. In both Austrian economics and literature, human beings reveal their natures only in concrete acts of choice - the deepest expression of their freedom.In addition to developing a new framework for understanding and interpreting literature, this book offers rich new readings of a wide range of literary classics from many different nations. Drawing upon years of interdisciplinary experience in literature and economics, the contributors open up fresh perspectives on works as traditional as Cervantes's Don Quijote and as contemporary as Okri's The Famished Road.

The economic theories of Karl Marx and his disciples continue to be anthologized in books of literary theory and criticism and taught in humanities classrooms to the exclusion of other, competing economic paradigms. Marxism is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive — in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an era when we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely the products of culture or class. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices affect lives, circumstances, and communities. Even literary scholars who reject pure Marxism are still motivated by it, because nearly all economic literary theory derives from Marxism or advocates for vast economic interventionism as a solution to social problems. Such interventionism, however, has a track-record of mass murder, war, taxation, colonization, pollution, imprisonment, espionage, and enslavement — things most scholars of imaginative literature deplore. Yet most scholars of imaginative literature remain interventionists. Literature and Liberty offers these scholars an alternative economic paradigm, one that over the course of human history has eliminated more generic bads than any other system. It argues that free market or libertarian literary theory is more humane than any variety of Marxism or interventionism. Just as Marxist historiography can be identified in the use of structuralism and materialist literary theory, so should free-market libertarianism be identifiable in all sorts of literary theory. Literature and Liberty disrupts the near monopolistic control of economic ideas in literary studies and offers a new mode of thinking for those who believe that arts and literature should play a role in discussions about law, politics, government, and economics. Drawing from authors as wide-ranging as Emerson, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry Hazlitt, and Mark Twain, Literature and Liberty is a significant contribution to libertarianism and literary studies.

Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha presents five major facets of liberty as they appear in the first modern novel. Analyzing the novelist’s attitudes towards religion, feminism, slavery, politics, and economics, Graf argues that Cervantes should be considered a major precursor to great liberal thinkers like Locke, Smith, Mill, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, and Twain. Graf indicates not only the medieval and early modern grounds for Cervantes’s ideas but also the ways in which he anticipated and influenced a wide range of modern articulations of personal freedom. Resistance to tyranny, freedom of conscience, the liberation of women, the abolition of slavery, and the principles of a free market economy are all still fundamental to modern Western Civilization, making Don Quiijote de la Mancha extremely relevant to today’s world. Anatomy of Liberty walks us through how Cervantes’ seminal work both foreshadowed and relates to today’s modern society.

This Modern Guide explores central ideas, concepts, and themes in the Austrian school of economics, with a focus on how they, and with them the overall theory, have evolved over recent decades. Leading scholars offer their insights into potential directions of future research in the field, pointing towards contemporary debates and their potential conclusions, underdeveloped aspects and extensions of theory, and current applications of interest.

In Austrian economic thought, “human action” guides all social and cultural experience. For both the real world and for fictional texts, this starting point can illuminate literature in new ways and offer valuable insight for literary critics who have previously been beholden to Marxism and other anti-capitalist perspectives. In Re-Reading Economics in Literature: A Capitalist Critical Perspective, Matt Spivey posits that in its relationship to literature, Austrian economic criticism entails a methodology that embraces the following: 1) an analytical reading that promotes both the individual artist as the creator of literature and the individual reader as the consumer of literature; 2) an understanding of the entrepreneurial quality of literature, that capitalism is a system that embraces creativity and evolution in the marketplace; and 3) a recognition of subjective value as fundamental to human choice and action, both in art and in the real world. In addition to the study of the individual, Spivey also incorporates the concepts of business cycles, government intervention, social dynamics, and technological evolution in his analysis. Scholars of literary studies and economics will find this book particularly useful.