2. Cervantes and Economic Theory
Cervantes and Economic Theory
Darío Fernández - Morera
Critics often subject a great writer to tortured interpretations that reflect their interests, obsessions, insecurities, and career needs. Shakespeare is a well-known example, with theatrical directors fiercely setting loose their creativity upon his texts, and producing a cigar-smoking Iago, a sympathetic Lady Macbeth, a lesbian Midsummer Night’s Dream, a feminist Taming of the Shrew, and a pacifist Henry V complete with British soldiers stomping on the flag of St. George.
3. In Defense of the Marketplace: Spontaneous Order in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair
In Defense of the Marketplace:
Spontaneous Order in Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
Paul A. Cantor
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
—Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
4. Shelley’s Radicalism: The Poet as Economist
Shelley’s Radicalism: The Poet as Economist
Paul A. Cantor
The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this; those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.
—Karl Marx1
5. Capitalist Vistas: Walt Whitman and Spontaneous Order
Capitalist Vistas: Walt Whitman and Spontaneous Order
Thomas Peyser
6. The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism
The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism
Paul A. Cantor
7. Cather’s Capitalism
Cather’s Capitalism
Stephen Cox
“Economics and art are strangers.”1 So said Willa Cather in an essay written deep in her last period of authorship.
For once in her life, Cather was wrong—though she was wrong for sufficient reason. Leftist critics had been hounding her about her novels’ alleged lack of relevance to current industrial and social problems.2 She responded by arguing that art must not be reduced to such partial and temporary terms. If this is “economics,” she suggested, then art should have nothing to do with it.
8. Conrad’s Praxeology
Conrad’s Praxeolog
Like Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad was a great economic novelist who maintained a contemptuous distance from the “economic” novel. Cather asked the rhetorical question: “[W]ho wants any more detail as to how Carmencita and her fellow factory-girls made cigars?”1 Not Cather; not Conrad, either. Both were interested in a deeper and broader subject, the vast field of exploration that surrounds and includes economics. Ludwig von Mises called this field “the general theory of human action, praxeology.”2
9. Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow”
Hyperinflation and Hyperreality:
Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow”
Paul A. Cantor
One may say that, apart from wars and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which compares in importance to [inflation]. The upheavals caused by inflations are so profound that people prefer to hush them up and conceal them.
—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
10. The Capitalist Road: The Riddle of the Market from Karl Marx to Ben Okri
The Capitalist Road:
The Riddle of the Market
from Karl Marx to Ben Okri
Chandran Kukathas
Contributors
Paul A. Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and has published widely on Shakespeare, Romanticism, comparative literature, and literary theory. He is known for his interdisciplinary work in political theory, econom ics, and popular culture. In 2007, he was Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University, teaching courses on Shakespeare and politics.
