Back Cover

Literature and the Economics of Liberty constitutes a major critical statement on the relationship between economics and literature.

Challenging a Marxist orthodoxy that has tended to dominate literary and cultural studies, this highly original and provocative collection of essays offers a radically new understanding of the relationship between art and the marketplace, one that celebrates the freedom of the individual author and the spontaneous order of modern culture. Bringing to bear the decisive insights of the Austrian School of economics on the practice of literary criticism, its contributors attempt nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of the western (and non-western) literary traditions.

—Michael Valdez Moses, Duke University

This book is a radical test of the intellectual honesty and the intellectual courage of most contemporary literary scholars, critics, and theoreticians. Would they have the intellectual honesty to recognize that this book has decisively refuted and exploded the conventional leftist anticapitalist neo-marxist foundations of the literary academy? And would they have the intellectual courage to read this book in the first place, with its formidable scholarship, impeccable logic, and lucid frankness, when it would mean, given a positive answer to the first question, a pretty thorough rewriting of all of their lecture notes? Who would have thought that one day Friedrich Hayek and Charles Darwin would unseat Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin as the imaginative sources of literary theory?

— Frederick Turner, University of Texas, Dallas

PAUL A. CANTOR is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

STEPHEN COX is Professor of Literature and Director of the Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego.