literature and liberty cantor

&
LITERATURE
THE
ECONOMICS OF
LIBERTY
S
PONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
LvMI
&
LITERATURE
THE
ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY
S PONTANEOUS O RDER IN C ULTURE
Edited by
Paul A. Cantor
& Stephen Cox
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.
/>Ludwig von Mises Institute
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mises.org
ISBN: 978-1-933550-64-0
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
CONTENTS
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
VI —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
I
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”
was delivered as the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at
the Austrian Scholars Conference on March 15, 2002. The contribu-
tors 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 pub-
lished 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
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of the essay “The Capitalist Road” was
published under the same title in Quadrant, April 1998.
VIII —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
T
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,
the 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 cul-
tural 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 lit-
erary 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
Preface
X —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
reject economic discussions of literature in any form, and sup-
port 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 introduc-
tory essay explains, we have turned specifically (though not
exclusively) to what is known as the Austrian School of econom-
ics, 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 princi-
ples 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 under-
standing 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, espe-
cially 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 mod-
ern 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. Lexicographers and grammarians discover
and articulate the logic that a language develops on its own and
without their help.
Language, in fact, often looks messy to lexicographers and
grammarians, but their attempts to clean it up and regularize it

usually fail as popular usage overwhelms academic attempts to
dictate linguistic order. Efforts to design a more logical language
from the ground up, such as Esperanto, have even less success
when their inventors try to get people actually to use the artifi-
cial language in their daily lives. Academicians want language to
achieve a static perfection, but fortunately real languages con-
tinue to evolve and develop new possibilities. As the history of
Latin shows, only a dead language can truly please academi-
cians. A living language never settles into an equilibrium, a fixed
form that follows the grammarian’s paradigms perfectly. The
irregular verb is the lifeblood of language. Language is a tribute
to the creativity of human beings and their ability to cooperate in
productive ways without advance planning or supervision by so-
called experts in the field.
The way languages resist attempts by central authorities such
as national academies to regulate them illustrates what Hayek
means by “spontaneous order.”
1
In his Law, Legislation and Lib-
erty, he discusses the evolution of British common law in similar
terms. He argues that common law judges do not make the law;
rather they discover and articulate the principles and rules of
conduct that human beings develop gradually over the years on
their own in the course of their social interaction. The economic
marketplace itself is Hayek’s primary example of spontaneous
order, involving unregulated and apparently chaotic activity that
nevertheless results in a deeper and more complex order than
any individual or set of individuals would be able to plan in
advance. Drawing upon this idea of a deeper order beneath an
1

For an excellent discussion of language as a form of spontaneous order,
and a Hayekian critique of “artificial languages,” see Richard Adelstein,
“Language Orders,” Constitutional Political Economy 7 (1996): 221–38. For a
popular account of linguistics that stresses the “spontaneous” character of
language, see John McWhorter, The Power of Babel (New York: Harper-
Collins, 2003).
PREFACE — XIII
2
The phenomenon Hayek labels “spontaneous order” is being investi-
gated in a wide range of fields today, from biology to cosmology to cyber-
netics, and under a variety of names, including “emergence,” “complex
adaptive systems,” “self-organization,” and “collective intelligence.” For a
concise and elegant statement of the idea of spontaneous order under the
rubric “organized complexity,” see Warren Weaver, “Science and Com-
plexity,” American Scientist 36 (1948): 536. For a sampling of books explor-
ing what Hayek calls “spontaneous order” in such fields as urban history,
software development, and biological evolution, see Manuel De Landa, A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997), Pierre Lévy,
Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Robert
Bononno, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1999), Steven Johnson, Emer-
gence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York:
Scribner, 2007), Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate
Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics
(New York: Henry Holt, 2008), especially chaps. 1-4, and Cass R. Sunstein,
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006). Some of these books refer to Hayek; some of them do not;
but they all in one way or another deal with questions of self-organization
and what Hayek calls the dispersed nature of knowledge in complex soci-
eties.
apparent disorder, several of our essays argue for the possibility

of a more open-ended and looser conception of literary form than
the one championed by the New Criticism, with its ideal of the
perfectly integrated work of literature. Cantor’s essay on Jon-
son’s Bartholomew Fair, for example, and Thomas Peyser’s essay
on Whitman’s Song of Myself suggest that the chaotic appearance
of these works mirrors the paradoxically ordered disorder of the
commercial societies they portray.
In our effort to secure a place for freedom in the understand-
ing of culture, “spontaneous order” is in many ways the central
concept of this book.
2
We show that works of literature often
have the “look” of a spontaneous order, that they can be gener-
ated in a process of spontaneous order, and that they sometimes
celebrate the spontaneous order of society, especially in its eco-
nomic form, the marketplace. Indeed, if one believes in the value
of economic freedom, one will look for authors who share this
attitude, and not dismiss them, as Marxist critics tend to do, as
mere captives of capitalist ideology. Several of our essays explore
the ways in which authors have celebrated the vitality, flexibility,
XIV —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
and productivity of free markets. We have found such celebra-
tions in unexpected places. Darío Fernández-Morera’s essay on
Don Quijote reveals Cervantes portraying the advantages of eco-
nomic freedom as early as the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury—long before Adam Smith is supposed to have “discovered”
the free market. Stephen Cox’s essay on Willa Cather’s O Pio-
neers! shows why a woman had special reasons for supporting
economic freedom. Contrary to the common idea that women
should view capitalism as oppressive, Cox demonstrates that

Cather found it liberating—both for her characters and herself as
an author. Chandran Kukathas’s essay on Ben Okri shows that a
favorable treatment of market activity can be found, not only in
classic works of the Western canon, but also in works of non-
Western literature. Beginning with Cervantes and Jonson at the
fountainhead of European literature, this book fittingly ends
with a contemporary Nigerian author. It thus reminds us that
economic freedom is not the exclusive discovery or preserve of
Western nations, but potentially the common heritage of human
beings everywhere.
Marxist critics often practice what is known as the hermeneu-
tics of suspicion—that is, they question the motives of authors
and seek to explain why some would ever choose to support cap-
italism. If one believes that socialism is the best economic system
and that capitalism oppresses humanity, one would of course not
accept a favorable portrayal of capitalism at face value. But once
one adopts a free market perspective, the positions are reversed
and one begins to wonder why so many authors have supported
socialism. One might then turn the tables on Marxism and apply
its technique of ideology critique to socialist authors, questioning
whether they may have dubious motives for attacking capital-
ism. Several of the essays in this volume explore the issue of what
Mises calls the anti-capitalistic mentality. Cox in his essay on
Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Cantor in his essay on Wells’s The
Invisible Man pose the question of whether anti-capitalistic intel-
lectuals have their own kind of parochial class interest. Both
essays argue that these intellectuals believe that they are not suf-
ficiently respected and rewarded under capitalism and thus turn
to socialism as the only way to give the cultural elite they think
PREFACE — XV

they belong to its “rightful” place in society—namely, ruling
over the ignorant masses.
The free market perspective also leads to reinterpreting eco-
nomic history, and hence literary history as well, insofar as it
reflects or even seeks to portray economic history. In the stan-
dard view of economic history, especially in Marxist versions,
capitalism is blamed for much of the suffering of humanity. But
Austrians and many other economists would counter that capi-
talism has vastly improved the human condition and that many
of the evils laid at its doorstep are really the result of government
interference with the normal functioning of the market. The
essays on Cervantes and Shelley show how these authors
directed their criticism against the war, tax, and monopoly poli-
cies of their governments; the Shelley and Mann essays look at
how these authors trace the economic suffering of their day to
governmental tampering with the money supply and the
inevitable—and corrosive—inflation that results. Cantor’s revi-
sionist essay on Shelley, for example, shows that the Romantic
poet blamed the misery of his day, not on the Industrial Revolu-
tion as is commonly supposed, but on the mercantilist and anti-
market policies of the British government.
These are just some of the ways in which a free market per-
spective might shed new light on literature and literary history.
In relating literature and economics, everything depends on the
form of economics one uses, and, contrary to what most literary
scholars seem to believe, alternatives to Marxist concepts are
available. Our essays demonstrate how fruitful and liberating
concepts of economic freedom can be in the understanding of
culture. Some of these essays have been published in preliminary
versions, but even they have been extensively revised and rewrit-

ten for this volume. As the work of a group of individualists, this
book was not centrally planned, and the topics of the essays
emerged independently over the years. Thus we do not claim to
offer a systematic and comprehensive treatment of our subject.
We have neglected many interesting points at which literature
and economics intersect, including some of the most frequently
discussed texts in this field, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and
Goethe’s Faust. Nevertheless we hope that we have sponta-
neously produced a book that offers a well-balanced coverage of
XVI —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
its subject. Most of the essays deal with fiction, but one deals
with drama and another with poetry—demonstrating that our
approach works across the boundaries of genre. The historical
range of the essays is broad, beginning with the early seven-
teenth century and extending almost to the present day. The geo-
graphic scope of the essays is also wide ranging; they deal with
authors from six different countries and three different conti-
nents.
We hasten to point out that what we are offering in this book
is only one approach to literature. Although our subject is large
and important, this book is in a sense narrowly targeted—we are
developing an alternative to Marxist and quasi-Marxist analyses
of the relation of literature and economics. We are not monoma-
niacally claiming that in Austrian economics we have found the
master key to all literature. We readily acknowledge that there
are many other valid ways of discussing literature, including
purely aesthetic approaches that have nothing to say about eco-
nomic matters. As we will show, one of the differences between
Austrian economics and Marxism is that it does not present itself
as a master science, with an underlying explanation for all phe-

nomena. Thus our reliance on Austrian economics allows us to
avoid the reductionist tendencies of readings of literature that
are rooted in Marxist assumptions. The emphasis on freedom
and individualism in the Austrian School means that when we
analyze authors in an economic context, we do not treat them as
representatives of a particular ideology, class consciousness, or
historical moment. We look at each author as an individual and
seek for his or her distinctive ideas. If we find specific economic
ideas in the authors we discuss, we believe that the ideas are gen-
uinely those of the authors and worthy of being taken seriously
and treated with respect.
Some may accuse us of being just as ideologically motivated
and biased as Marxist critics—simply trying to impose a free-
market perspective on authors where Marxists have been impos-
ing socialist ideas. However, our analyses are based on detailed,
careful readings of individual texts treated in their integrity—in
sharp contrast to the Marxist tendency to disregard authorial
intention and, in the style of Fredric Jameson, to seek to ferret out
the “political unconscious” in literary works. Our readings are
PREFACE — XVII
not Marxist-style interpretations with a free market twist.
Although our claims about the relevance of Austrian economics
to literary criticism are novel, our mode of interpretation is actu-
ally quite traditional, with a respect for conventional canons of
literary evidence and procedures that could generally be
described as close reading. Our Austrian perspective helps make
our readings concrete and practical, rather than abstract and the-
oretical, and it keeps us focused on what the authors have to say
as individuals and not in Marxist fashion on how they reflect a
class position (the closest we come to a Marxist-style reading is

Cantor’s essay on Wells, which turns Marxist ideology critique
back on itself).
In one respect we have set ourselves an especially difficult
task in this book. The majority of our readers, particularly those
coming from a literary background, are unlikely to be familiar
with Austrian economics. Unlike Marxist critics, who can assume
at least a passing acquaintance with Marxism among their read-
ers, we have had to spend more time than is usual in a book of
literary criticism expounding some of the principles of Austrian
economics. In addition, to be fair to the schools of criticism we
are challenging, we have had to demonstrate our familiarity with
their work and also with Marxist economics itself. As a result, the
scholarly apparatus of some of these essays may at times seem
excessive. To the targets of our critique, however, it may appear
insufficient. We have tried to strike a balance—to document our
claims adequately, while not overburdening our readers with
scholarship. We have used the notes to point our readers to the
literature of Austrian economics, especially the writings of Mises
and Hayek, where they can find the full articulation of the prin-
ciples we refer to and rely on. Books of Marxist or quasi-Marxist
literary criticism do not contain a full exposition of Marxist eco-
nomics. Similarly, this book is not a treatise on economics. It is
fundamentally a book of literary criticism, and we cannot replay
the whole dispute between Marxism and Austrian economics.
Nevertheless, we are trying to contribute to this all-important
debate by opening up a new, cultural front in the ongoing con-
flict.
In the end, we do not fool ourselves that Marxist critics will
be persuaded by our arguments, although we hope that they
XVIII —LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE

will give us a fair hearing. But this book is principally directed
to anyone who is interested in the relation of literature and eco-
nomics, but is not committed to a Marxist approach and may in
fact be searching for an alternative to it. Literary scholars should
appreciate our pointing them in the direction of a more humane
form of economics and sketching out some of its basic principles.
They may be surprised to see how different literature looks when
viewed from the perspective of an economic school that presents
the marketplace as a site of freedom and creativity. And they
might gain a new appreciation of the free market when they real-
ize that it operates on the same principle—spontaneous order—
that is at work in language and culture. By the same token, econ-
omists should appreciate our demonstrating that literary schol-
arship does not have to be Marxist and that free market princi-
ples can be profitably applied in the humanities. Economists will
be interested to see that principles they are familiar with from the
spontaneous order of the market, such as the division of labor,
can be observed operating in the realm of literature as well.
We ask only that people from all fields read our essays with
open minds. Much that we argue may initially sound strange,
but that is just one more sign of how dominant the Marxist para-
digm has become in the humanities in recent decades and how it
has limited the horizons of what passes for legitimate scholarly
discourse on literature and economics. Once one suspends the
misleading assumptions about human action that Marxism has
promulgated, the principles of Austrian economics begin to
sound a lot like common sense—human beings are free and
make their choices as individuals. What the Austrian School can
offer literary 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 understand-
ing literature and artistic creativity.
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task
of the artist now.
—Samuel Beckett
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
—Theodor Adorno
I.
I
n the contemporary academy, to say that one is taking an eco-
nomic approach to literature seems tantamount to saying that
one is taking a Marxist approach. Despite the fact that there
are many flourishing schools of economic thought (Keyne-
sian, neoclassical, monetarist, supply side, public choice, to name
but a few)—some of them quite antithetical to Marxism—only one
seems to be employed in the study of culture, and indeed the
whole field of what is called Cultural Studies is Marxist in its
foundations.
1
One can of course find a good deal of variation
1
1
In the introduction to his influential and widely used anthology, The Cul-
tural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), Simon During actually builds a
left-wing orientation into his definition of Cultural Studies:
1
The Poetics of Spontaneous Order:
Austrian Economics and
Literary Criticism

P A U L A. C A N T O R
2—LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
among literary critics interested in economics, but it is almost
always variation among different Marxist paradigms. One critic
may use Marx himself, another may draw upon a twentieth-cen-
tury Marxist revisionist such as Lukács or Adorno, still another
may rely on even more sophisticated interpreters of Marx, such
as Gramsci or Althusser. Consider, for example, this characteri-
zation of the development of the Birmingham school of Cultural
Studies, which is supposed to give us an idea of its wide-ranging
intellectual roots:
[Stuart] Hall sketches the achievements of the Birm-
ingham Centre as a series of theoretical illuminations
from abroad, beginning with a progressively radical or
quasi-Marxist (but not clearly Marxist enough) tripar-
tite Raymond Williams, through the importation of
French structuralism (Barthes, Lévi-Strauss) and an
older German Marxist tradition (Benjamin, Brecht), to
an also tripartite but much more satisfactorily Marxist
and vanguard Louis Althusser.
2
This passage comes close to summing up the standard recipe for
economic criticism of literature—mix quasi-Marxism with van-
guard Marxism, and add just a soupçon of fashionable French
thought (structuralist or poststructuralist) to give it flavor.
One could easily be impressed by the dazzling array of theo-
retical positions in contemporary criticism—and the endless
debates among them—and conclude that critics interested in eco-
nomics embrace a genuine variety of schools in the field. But to
cut through this deceptive complexity, one might ask a simple

question: how many literary critics are sympathetic to socialism
As a field, it accepts that studying culture is rarely value-free,
and so, embracing clearly articulated, left-wing values, it
seeks to extend and critique the relatively narrow range of
norms, methods, and practices embedded in the traditional,
past-fixated, canon-forming humanities. (p. 27)
Evidently for During, by definition, a centrist or a right-wing Cultural Stud-
ies could not exist.
2
Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and
America (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 63.
THE POETICS OF SPONTANEOUS ORDER: AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND LITERARY CRITICISM — 3
and critical of capitalism, and how many are sympathetic to cap-
italism 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 pro-socialist.
3
John Vernon speaks
for a whole generation of critics when he defines his position:
3
This is obviously a vast generalization, and I do not have the space to
document it fully. I think it is true, however, to anyone’s experience of liter-
ary criticism today. (And let me stress that I am not claiming that all literary
criticism today is Marxist; only that virtually all criticism that attempts to
apply economics to literature is fundamentally Marxist in its assumptions.)
For a good overview of the history of economic criticism, see Mark Osteen
and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criti-
cism: An historical introduction” in the collection of essays they edited, The

New Economic Criticism: Studies at the intersection of literature and economics
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3–50. Osteen and Woodmansee certainly
succeed in showing the wide variety of approaches that have been taken in
economic criticism, and yet somehow they all end up being, broadly speak-
ing, on the left. Although mainly concerned with the past few decades,
Osteen and Woodmansee concede that there is a long history of economic
criticism: “Of course, economic criticism existed even before 1960 in, for
example, the brand of Marxism practiced by Lukács, the Frankfurt school,
and Left critics of the 1930s” (p. 13). As they turn to more recent work that
“addresses the economic habits of individual authors,” they characterize it
as “generally adhering to Left or Marxist ideology” (p. 14). When they dis-
cuss individual authors, they criticize F. Rossi-Landi, whose “work is
flawed by adherence to an old-fashioned Marxism that emphasizes produc-
tion at the expense of consumption” (p. 14). They then praise Jean-Joseph
Goux for “synthesizing Marxism and post-structuralism” (p. 16). Even
when they finally turn to a non-Marxist approach—what they call “the the-
oretics of gift exchange”—they characterize it as “a broad range of anti-
bourgeois and anti-capitalist writing” (p. 28). They describe approvingly the
most recent work in the field this way: “Although proceeding from a Left
political stance, these studies have initiated a more sophisticated under-
standing of the power—and limits—of capitalist discourses” (p. 34). In sum,
Osteen and Woodmansee have studied the field of economic criticism care-
fully and yet do not mention a single form of pro-capitalist criticism. Their
own volume illustrates the point; it is indeed “new” in many respects, but
not in offering any pro-capitalist 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 much of the Marxist critique of capitalism, espe-
cially as it applies to the nineteenth century.
4
something—but I know of only two volumes of literary criticism that are
openly pro-capitalist: Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century
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-social-
ist criticism is more common; I would particularly recommend George Wat-
son’s The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1998),
and critics in the field of Slavics have generally been, for understandable
reasons, less enamored of Marxism than their colleagues in other literatures
(I discuss the case of Gary Saul Morson later in this essay). Two of the books
of economic criticism that I have found most impressive are Lee Erickson,
The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of
Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996) and Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to
Amis (London: Palgrave, 2002). These books are by no means programmat-
ically pro-capitalist, but they do show an appreciation of how markets func-
tion in positive ways and, more generally, a fundamental grasp of econom-
ics. Erickson, for example, demonstrates that he understands the law of
marginal utility (see Literary Form, pp. 9–10, 132–33). As for Delany, unlike
all the other scholars in economic criticism I know of, he actually has a B.A.
in economics from McGill and an M.A. from Stanford, and worked as an
economist for the Bank of Canada in Ottawa and the International Labor
Office in Geneva. He admits to having been taught by “Keynesian and
Marxist” professors in economics, but his book shows that he has been
heavily influenced by Richard Cobden, one of the great proponents of free
trade in the nineteenth century (p. 234). That may explain why Delany says:

“I want in this book to give commercial culture its due, and to respect the
Cobdenite agenda that so closely anticipated the globalism of today” (p. 8).
Another book of literary criticism that defends the market economy is
Sharon O’Dair’s Class, Critics and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines in the Culture
Wars (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), which offers, para-
doxically, a kind of left-wing critique of Marxism. O’Dair states clearly that
“capitalism is routinely demonized in critical discourse” (p. 60) and ana-
lyzes at length the anti-capitalistic bias in literary studies (see especially p.
65). She presents Max Weber’s sociology as superior to Marxism in its
understanding of the phenomenon of class (see especially pp. 51–52).
4
John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22.
THE POETICS OF SPONTANEOUS ORDER: AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND LITERARY CRITICISM — 5
In short, Vernon is not a Marxist—except when it comes to criti-
cizing capitalism. And he goes on to cite Marx throughout his
book as his chief—and virtually his only—authority on economic
matters.
Francis Barker and Peter Hulme epitomize the anti-capitalist
orientation of contemporary criticism in this passage from their
well-known essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Critique operates in a number of ways, adopting vari-
ous strategies and lines of attack as it engages with the
current ideological formations, but one aspect of its
campaign is likely to have to remain constant. Capital-
ist societies have always presupposed the naturalness
and universality of their own structures and modes of
perception, so, at least for the foreseeable future, cri-
tiques will need to include an historical moment, coun-
tering capitalism’s self-universalization by reasserting

the rootedness of texts in the contingency of history.
5
Barker and Hulme are trying to stress the pluralism of what they
call “critique,” but of one thing they are certain—its task must be
to fight capitalism.
It is odd that this kind of Marxist thinking should enjoy such
a monopoly in economic approaches to literature; academics
rarely achieve this kind of agreement. This situation is all the
odder when one considers that Marxism has lost a good deal of its
credibility as an economic theory since the collapse of the Soviet
Union and much of the communist bloc. Throughout the twenti-
eth century many economists challenged the assumptions and
conclusions of Marxism, and the way economic developments
worked out in practice seemed to confirm these theoretical
doubts.
6
Marxism, after all, claims to be a predictive science;
Marx supposedly came up with laws of economic development,
5
Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish:
the discursive con-texts of The Tempest,” Alternative Shakespeares, John
Drakakis, ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 194.
6
For critiques of Marxism in theoretical and practical terms, see David
Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories (Har-
mondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1987) and Yuri N. Maltsev, ed., Requiem for
Marx (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993).
6—LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
centering on the inevitable transition from one economic mode of
production to another (feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to

socialism). The triumph of capitalist over communist economies
in the late twentieth century thus dealt a serious blow to the pres-
tige of Marxism, as history appeared to reverse itself in a way
that should not have been possible according to Marx’s theories.
Of course, loyal Marxists have come up with ways to salvage
their economic doctrines; they can claim, for example, that the
Soviet Union never followed true Marxist principles. This argu-
ment might be more convincing if the same theorists had not ear-
lier been offering the Soviet Union or China or Cuba as living
proof that socialism can outperform capitalism. Thus, most
observers of economic developments in the twentieth century
have concluded that the active competition between capitalism
and socialism has proved the superiority of the free market over
the centrally planned, command economies of the communist
bloc.
7
This situation leaves us with an oft-noted paradox—just
when Marxism has lost prestige in the world at large, even in
many wings of the academy, it has seemed to triumph in litera-
ture departments and the humanities in general. A cynic might
speak of the retreat of Marxism into literature departments—
having failed to triumph in the real world, it had to seek refuge
in the one place where it is least likely to be subject to the rigor-
ous test of objective reality. And indeed the prominent role of
Marxism in literary and cultural studies has developed in tan-
dem with the spread of postmodernism in the academy and its
attempt to subvert traditional conceptions of “naive” reality and
objective truth. The curious alliance between Marxism and post-
modernism in contemporary literary studies has led to the fur-
ther paradox of a movement that once presented itself as an

objective science joining forces with a movement that denies the
possibility of objective science. Having begun under Marx as an
explicitly anti-utopian movement, Marxism by the end of the
7
For a comprehensive treatment of this subject, with a wealth of histori-
cal material, see Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding
Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking
the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).