Mises, Borges, Mariana, and Cervantes: When Liberal Politics and Economics Are Serious Fiction

Writers such as Rand, Borges, Mises, and Cervantes signal that the culture war must also be engaged by pushing back within the field of literature. Even Mariana reveals a striking literary sensibility in such politically critical texts as _De rege et institutione regis_ and _De monetae mutatione._ Neither classical liberals nor libertarians should give ground to Marxists when it comes to the production and interpretation of culture, least of all literature, where we have a natural advantage in the history of narrative fiction. Storytelling should be in our wheelhouse as much as theirs. Ancient, medieval, and early modern novels are suggestive of Austrian and Salamancan theory, because novels are always already mercantile. Free market economic thinking may help us understand literature, and the Austrian emphasis on spontaneous social structures may be useful as well. But marketplaces are more than abstract ways of relating literature to economics; they are inscribed in the very genesis and development of literature as a field from late antiquity to the Renaissance.