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Law and Literature, Jean Baudrillard, E.M. Forster, Russell Kirk, Austrian Economics, Harold Bloom, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, Paul Cantor, Stephen Cox, Marxism, Austrian Economics and Literature, Spontaneous Order, English Departments, Richard Weaver, free market, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Von Mises, Allan Bloom, Jean-François Lyotard, Walt Whitman, The Independent Review, John M. Ellis, F. A. Hayek, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Lionel Trilling, Miguel de Cervantes, Ben Johnson, Percy Shelley, H. G. Wells, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, New Criticism

Book Review: Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature and the Economics of Liberty

In Law-and-Literature, Humane Economy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Book Reviews, Politics, Arts & Letters, Libertarianism, Austrian Economics, Western Civilization, History, Novels, Economics, Conservatism, Communism, Humanities, Liberalism, Fiction, Literature, Essays, Philosophy, Western Philosophy on January 23, 2012 at 4:53 am

The following book review originally appeared here in the Fall 2010 issue of The Independent Review.

Humans are not automated and predictable, but beautifully complex and spontaneous. History is not linear. Progress is not inevitable. Our world is strangely intertextual and multivocal. It is irreducible to trite summaries and easy answers, despite what our semiliterate politicians would have us believe. Thinking in terms of free-market economics allows us to appreciate the complicated dynamics of human behavior while making sense of the ambiguities leading to and following from that behavior. With these realities in mind, I applaud Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox for compiling the timely collection Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which places imaginative literature in conversation with Austrian economic theory.

Cantor and Cox celebrate the manifold intricacies of the market, which, contrary to popular opinion, is neither perfect nor evil, but a proven catalyst for social happiness and well-being. They do not recycle tired attacks on Marxist approaches to literature: they reject the “return to aesthetics” slogans of critics such as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John M. Ellis, and they adopt the principles, insights, and paradigms of the Austrian school of economics. Nor do Cantor and Cox merely invert the privilege of the terms Marxist and capitalist (please excuse my resort to Derridean vocabulary), although they do suggest that one might easily turn “the tables on Marxism” by applying “its technique of ideology critique to socialist authors, questioning whether they have dubious motives for attacking capitalism.” Cantor and Cox are surprisingly the first critics to look to Austrian economics for literary purposes, and their groundbreaking efforts are sure to ruffle a few feathers—but also to reach audiences who otherwise might not have heard of Austrian economics.

Cantor and Cox submit that the Austrian school offers “the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically informed.” They acknowledge that this school is heterodox and wide ranging, which, they say, are good things. By turning to economics in general, the various contributors to this book—five in all—suggest that literature is not created in a vacuum but rather informs and is informed by the so-called real world. By turning to Austrian economics in particular, the contributors seek to secure a place for freedom and liberty in the understanding of culture. The trouble with contemporary literary theory, for them, lies not with economic approaches, but with bad economic approaches. An economic methodology of literary theory is useful and incisive so long as it pivots on sound philosophies and not on obsolete or destructive ideologies. Austrian economics appreciates the complexity and nuance of human behavior. It avoids classifying individuals as cookiecutter caricatures. It champions a humane-economy counter to mechanistic massproduction, central planning, and collectivism. Marxism, in contrast, is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive–in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an age in which, quite frankly, we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely products of culture or otherwise culturally underwritten. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices, for better or worse, affect lives, circumstances, and communities. (“Ideas have consequences,” as Richard Weaver famously remarked.) And communities themselves consist of multiplicities that defy simple labels. It is not insignificant, in light of these principles, that Michel Foucault late in his career instructed his students to read the collected works of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Read the rest of this entry »

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genealogy, History, knowledge, Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, origins, Paul Ree, philosophy, society, Western philosophy

Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy

In Art, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Rhetoric, Western Philosophy, Writing on September 17, 2011 at 10:02 am

“Genealogy […] requires patience and knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its ‘cyclopean monuments’ are constructed from ‘discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method’; they cannot be the product of ‘large and well-meaning errors.’ In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins.’”

—Michel Foucault, from “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

This brief passage by Foucault has three references to Nietzsche. The essay from which the passage is drawn demonstrates Foucault’s immense debt to Nietzsche, citing as it does no other thinker but Nietzsche (save for a fleeting reference to Paul Ree, whose term “Ursprung,” or “origin,” Nietzsche adopts). Of all Nietzsche’s ideas and practices, genealogy is the one that Foucault cultivates most impressively. Genealogy is a methodology by and with which one documents or tracks the development of ideas and their relation to human organization. In other words, genealogy traces knowledge to its systemic formations across various networks of discourse. That is why genealogy “requires patience” and “depends on a vast accumulation of source material.” It is a process, and processes take time to work out.

Genealogy does not recover origins because origins are not recoverable. Origins are fluid, not fixed; they are not, strictly speaking, origins at all—if, that is, “origins” is taken to mean single, absolute causes or definite, immutable sources. Rather, for Foucault, “origins” is a term of convenience—perhaps strategically essentialized—referring to sets of beliefs and activities that constitute discursive structures mobilized by numerous truth claims. That is why Foucault can employ the term “origins” in one sentence and then, in a subsequent sentence, seemingly reverse course by calling origins “chimeras.” The point is not to define or explain origins; the point is to discredit the idea of origins as self-evident and immanently knowable.

Origins themselves are inaccessible; the emergence and development of structures based on ideas, however, are not only accessible, but also edifying. Foucault’s genealogy, therefore, seeks to collect data about numerous truth claims and then to explain how these data form and shape culture. As Foucault says of genealogy, “It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins.’” Note the quotation marks around “origins.” Those marks suggest an intent to divest that term of its expressive purchase. Origins are knowable only as points of loss or complication, only as intricate and multifaceted constructs that, when examined closely, signify multiple and heterogeneous phenomena and that thus enable and sustain further inquiry. Read the rest of this entry »

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