The American Mercury | The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities

Posts Tagged ‘The American Mercury’

"Of the Standard of Taste", Allen Tate, Austrian Economics, Austrian Economics and Literature, Berkeley, Bloomsbury, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, Cleanth Brooks, David Hume, De Quincey, Diderot, Dwight Macdonald, E. Phillips Oppenheim, e.e. cummings, Economics in One Lesson, Ezra Pound, Foucault, Fredric Jameson, George Santayana, Gertrude Stein, H. L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, Harold Bloom, Henry Hazlitt, Hobbes, Hume, I.A. Richards, Irving Babbitt, James Joyce, Jeffrey Tucker, John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke, Landor, Lenin, Lionel Trilling, Marianne Moore, Martin Heidegger, Marxists, Monroe Beardsley, New Criticism, New Humanists, Northrop Frye, On Being Creative, Paul Elmer More, Plato, Robert Frost, Roman Jakobson, Russell Kirk, Russian Formalism, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Temple Bailey, Terry Eagleton, The American Mercury, The Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Idea, The Nation, Time Will Run Back, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Voltaire, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, William Hazlitt, William James, William K. Wimsatt, Wittgenstein, Yuri Tynyanov

Henry Hazlitt, Literary Critic

In American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Creative Writing, Creativity, Economics, Essays, Ethics, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on March 20, 2012 at 9:05 am

The following appeared here at Prometheus Unbound and here at Mises.org.

Remembered mostly for his contributions to economics, including his pithy and still-timely classic Economics in One Lesson (1946), Henry Hazlitt was a man who wore many hats. He was a public intellectual and the author or editor of some 28 books, one of which was a novel, The Great Idea (1961) — published in Britain and later republished in the United States as Time Will Run Back (1966) — and another of which, The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), was a trialogue on literary criticism. (Hazlitt’s book came out 24 years before Northrop Frye published a book of criticism under the same title.) Great-great-grandnephew to British essayist William Hazlitt, the boy Henry wanted to become like the eminent pragmatist and philosopher-psychologist William James, who was known for his charming turns of phrase and literary sparkle. Relative poverty would prevent Hazlitt’s becoming the next James. But the man Hazlitt forged his own path, one that established his reputation as an influential man of letters.

In part because of his longstanding support for free-market economics, scholars of literature have overlooked Hazlitt’s literary criticism; and Austrian economists — perhaps for lack of interest, perhaps for other reasons — have done little to restore Hazlitt’s place among the pantheon of 20th century literary critics. Yet Hazlitt deserves that honor.

He may not have been a Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, or Kenneth Burke, but Hazlitt’s criticism is valuable in negative terms: he offers a corrective to much that is wrong with literary criticism, both then and now. His positive contributions to literary criticism seem slight when compared to those of the figures named in the previous sentence. But Hazlitt is striking in his ability to anticipate problems with contemporary criticism, especially the tendency to judge authors by their identity. Hazlitt’s contributions to literary criticism were not many, but they were entertaining and erudite, rivaling as they did the literary fashions of the day and packing as much material into a few works as other critics packed into their entire oeuvres. Read the rest of this entry »

▶ View 1 Comment

Academic Freedom, Ayn Rand, Birchers, Carl T. Bogus, Cold War, Communism, Conservatism, Conservative, Fox News, fusionism, H. L. Mencken, Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist, James Burnham, Libertarian, Libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, National Review, neoconservatism, Objectivists, paleoconservatives, religious conservatism, Robert Welch, Rush Limbaugh, Russell Kirk, Senator Robert Taft, The American Mercury, William F. Buckley Jr., William Howard Taft

Bogus on Buckley

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communism, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Libertarianism, Politics, Writing on February 9, 2012 at 8:34 am

It was customary practice in my family to gather at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner after church. Loyal to our Southern traditions, we would, after eating, divide company: men into the living room, women into the kitchen or den. My brother and I, still children, would sit silently, for the most part, while my grandfather, father and uncles bandied about the names of politicians and discussed the day’s sermon or newspaper headlines.

I first learned of William F. Buckley Jr. during these Sunday afternoons, as he was often the topic of conversation. I was too young to know much, but young enough to learn a lot quickly, so I began to follow this man, this Buckley, to the extent that I could, from those days until the day that he died in February 2008.

Overcommitted to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, Buckley was not my kind of conservative. He could be tactless and cruel, as when he violated the ancient maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, speak no evil”) in an obituary to Murray Rothbard wherein he wrote that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle moral priorities.” Buckley then trumpeted some unflattering anecdotes about Rothbard before likening Rothbard to David Koresh.

Despite such tantrums and vendettas, I always liked Buckley. Something in the way he conducted himself—his showy decorum, flaunted manners and sophisticated rhetoric—appealed to me.

Carl T. Bogus, an American law professor and author of the biography Buckley, seems to share my qualified respect for Buckley, despite disagreeing with Buckley on important political and theoretical issues. “I should tell the reader up front,” Bogus warns, “that I am a liberal and thus critical—in some instances, highly critical—of Buckley’s ideology.” Yet, adds Bogus, “I admire William F. Buckley Jr. enormously.”

Unlike bobble-headed television personalities and think tank sycophants, Bogus does justice to his subject, treating Buckley’s ideas evenhandedly on the grounds that he (Bogus) is “disheartened by the present state of partisan animosity,” one solution to which, he says, “is to take opposing ideas seriously.” Bogus not only takes Buckley’s ideas seriously, but credits them for changing America’s political realities. Read the rest of this entry »