 Good afternoon. My name is Paul Cantor, and it's a great pleasure to be speaking here. I thank Professor Hopper for inviting me. It's my first trip to the property and freedom society. It's my third trip to Turkey, the country I like very much, and it was an extra-added pleasure to be here. Now, in case any of you checked the internet and read today's Mises Daily article, I am the same Paul Cantor that writes about zombies in today's Mises Daily article. I've considered giving a speech on that because I do a lot of work on Austrian economics and popular culture, but I thought I'd be somewhat more elevated than usual today and talk about literature, especially since this is the announced topic, title of my talk. Now, I am a professor of English and some ways that pursued a conventional career as such. A lot of my writing is about Shakespeare and really doesn't have much to do with Austrian economics. But on the other hand, I have studied Austrian economics since my teenage years. I had the great privilege of attending a book of Mises' seminar in New York in 1961 to 1962, and it took a while for me to see how to put Austrian economics and literary study together, and I'm trying to give you some sense of that. Today, I'll be referring to work that appears in the book that I co-edited with Stephen Cox called Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which the Mises Institute published. I'm going to begin with really the differences between literature and economics and why there's, in fact, a gulf between them and especially it seems between literature, literary study on the one hand, and free market economics, but I'm going to move towards showing how they can work together and specifically around the idea of spontaneous order as Hayek and other Austrians have understood it, and I would say some ways the main contribution that the study of literature can make for economists is to help work towards a kind of higher order definition of spontaneous order to show that if literature is another example of spontaneous order, it can give us some more abstract or generalized sense of what constitutes a spontaneous order, but let me begin with the problem. Most people see economics and literature as very much at odds. More generally, there's a sense of the antithesis between commerce and culture. There's a prevailing idea that commerce can only corrupt culture, and this has led to a great deal of hostility on the part of authors and literary critics towards capitalism. And I'll try to explain that by beginning with a very common idea of literary order, which is the antithesis of the idea of spontaneous order. When many people conceptualize literary order, they think of an artistic perfection. They think that a great work of literature, as it's often said, forms an organic whole, and that means that every part of the work contributes to the whole, and if you remove any part of it, you would damage the whole. If you know the movie Amadeus, that's what Sardieri says of Mozart's music in that play and in that film, that is that remove one note and you've destroyed the work. And there's an analogous sense with literature that if you have a perfect poem, if you changed one word, you would change the whole poem. And this is a very powerful idea. I think it characterizes some of the greatest literature ever written, especially the great lyric poems. They are one of the great models of human perfection. When you see Shakespeare's sonnet, it's 14 glorious lines, you just feel he's chosen the exactly right word at every point. And the sense then is that a great artistic genius has created a single moment artistic perfection. It's as if the resulting poem exists outside of time. It's part of what we mean when we call great literature timeless. And this has interesting implications for economics in this sense, that the notion behind this kind of perfection is that the creator is solitary and acts in perfect autonomy and a kind of glorious isolation, that he has a total vision of the work of art and nothing must be allowed to interfere with the integrity of that vision. This is where a lot of artists and the critics that write about them develop their hostility to commercial culture. The idea is that all the commercial aspects of culture can only interfere with the great artist's perfect realization of his vision. And he must not have to make any compromises, must not have to meet his audience halfway. If in any way he takes into account his audience, he's catering to them and violating his integrity, this is why we get so many arguments for government support of the arts. That government must shield the artists from the demands of the marketplace, which would otherwise corrupt his work. The other negative effect of this attitude, and again it's a legitimate attitude and does characterize some of the greatest poetry ever written, some of the greatest works of art ever created, but still the other negative effect of it is that artists often carry around this idea of the perfect plan. And what happens is it spills over into their economic, social and political attitudes. They are used to planning out their works by themselves with no interference and they think the result is perfection, that they can design a perfect order. And lo and behold when they think about how society ought to be organized, they are often attracted to the same idea that what society needs is a perfect plan. And this explains the rather curious and annoying fact that so many artists and even great artists have been attracted to dictators. Famous example out of America would be the poet Ezra Pound and his love for Benito Mussolini. But it explains the attraction of many Latin American artists of Fidel Castro. It explains the way the Soviet regime attracted many artists in its view. It comes up in literature particularly in the genre of utopia. Many writers have created utopian visions in fiction and they have almost always been socialist utopias of one kind or another. And there's a kind of convergence between the act of writing the perfect book and the visioning of a perfect society that would be created similarly by a single organizing intellect. Orson, excuse me, H.G. Wells is a good example of this. He wrote many utopian books. It's funny, they're so, you read them now, you think they're dystopian because of the authoritarian society they portray. But he as an author was used to shaping his novels just the way he wanted them to be. And he shapes the novels to create a vision of society that has the similar organization, the similar sense of being designed and having a plan. In literature and the economics of liberty, I have an essay on Wells' novel The Invisible Man. Well, I noticed the curious fact that at one point Wells' narrator admits these, you'll excuse me, but he's lost sight of The Invisible Man. And he says that for several days nobody knew what this character was doing. It's a funny moment because Wells is the author and obviously he can say whatever he wants. But to me it showed something about Wells. He was a little frightened of his characters that maybe they wouldn't always obey him. Maybe they'd go off and do something on their own. And he didn't want to, as an author, he didn't want to allow freedom to his characters. They had to be part of the plan, part of the scheme, part of the authorization. And again, that's the way his mind worked when he thought about society. It's a very interesting book, The Invisible Man, because it shows that what Wells didn't want was invisible man, the underground economy, the shadow economy. He doesn't want human beings who can escape the all-seeing knowledge of the state just as he doesn't want his characters to escape his knowledge. So there is, again, there have been many authors who supported freedom and Steve Cox and I discussed them in our book. But if there's one reason for this nasty attraction of so many authors to socialism, I think it's almost an occupational hazard that they're so used to having their characters within their control that the vision of society is as if every human being should be part of the plan, part of the program. So, and for many years I operated with this understanding of literature myself. It is a very powerful pedagogical tool. If you want to understand the work of literature, you really ought to give it some credit and think it's perfectly planned and try to figure out what the plan is and try to see how each part fits into a whole. And, you know, I was as much captive of that idea of literature as the next guy. It took me a long time to think through to another conception of literature, which I'll now offer. And it began by my reflecting on the novel. When you have a 14-line sonnet, there is a plausibility to saying that every word is perfect and that if you changed one word, you would have changed the poem. In fact, that's probably not true. But one of my colleagues, E. D. Hirsch, once said to me, war and peace, if we changed one word, would it be another different novel? And, you know, that starts to sound impossible. And yet there is this literary critical dogma that, you know, changed one word in the work of art. And it's a different work. It's not perfect. It's not complete. And yet when you deal with novels, in fact, it turns out that if you check the publication history, a lot of novels, some editor changed one word or changed two words or took out a whole chapter. The author didn't even notice it. And again, that's not surprising if you think, you know, did Tolstoy remember every word he'd written. And in some ways that sounds like a trivial point, just a matter of the length of novels. But then I began to look more carefully, particularly at the 19th century novel and its mode of publication, which as some of you may know was called serial publication. That is, many of the great novels of the 19th century were published over time in installments, sometimes in issues, successive issues of magazines, sometimes in separate parts. They were often published on a two-week schedule or a one-month schedule, typically with Dickens, for example, three chapters at a time, roughly. A Dickens novel, one serialized, would take between a year and a year and a half to be completed. If you go, for example, to the Dickens house at London, they have collections and you can see how these novels originally came out. Now that method of production, which by the way was very much a commercial enterprise, resulted in the novels taking a different form than we would normally think of as the perfect 14-line poem. That is, we do, in Dickens' case and other cases, know that these novelists did plan the works in advance. In Dickens' case, we have his notes and we can see where he thought he was headed. But by that very fact, we also know that he changed his plans always in the course of writing the novel. We can see he's saying, one character is going to do this and turns out the character doesn't do that. And as a result, these novels are a bit messy by comparison with perfect brief poems. Sometimes, quite frankly, the authors end up contradicting themselves. They forget that one of the characters was married and chapters later he turns out he's a bachelor. Or they forget which political party a character was in. They forget the financial details they put in. And so many of these 19th century novels do not have that kind of perfection that is often so valued in literature. There are contradictions, there's forms of sloppiness. And some of this is carelessness and you could legitimately say it diminishes the aesthetic value of the novel. On the other hand, in many cases what we're looking at is a process in which in fact the author is improving the novel as it goes along. And what's particularly interesting in the case of serial publication is that what resulted was a process of feedback from the audience. That is that the novelists were able to monitor the periodic sales, bi-weekly or monthly sales and they were not immune to looking at what was selling or what wasn't selling. And what we find, what we study, the histories of individual novels is that some of these novelists would change their plans. The most extreme example is again with Dickens. I take Dickens because he was the most commercially successful novelist of the 19th century England but also acknowledged generally to be artistically the greatest novelist so he's a real test case. He started something called Master Humphrey's Clock which was supposed to be a new magazine and a kind of miscellaneous collection of stories and news items and suddenly he had this story about a character named Little Nail and circulation jumped from 60,000 to 100,000 in one installment. That's a lot of installments to be selling. And lo and behold the magazine Master Humphrey's Clock transformed into a novel called The Old Curiosity Shop. And some of you may know Little Nail was one of Dickens greatest triumphs. One of his most popular books resulted. As a result Old Curiosity Shop is against a bit of a mess. Artistically certain characters change nature, go from villain to good guy just because Dickens needs it for a new purpose. Now again I would say by certain aesthetic standards you can say there are problems with the Old Curiosity Shop. On the other hand it's typical of Dickens greatest power which is his power to create characters that audiences fall in love with and that move us to this day when we read about that. Now I would understand some predictor would say well look this is what we're talking about how commerce corrupts culture. Dickens was on his way to creating this great magazine Master Humphrey's Clock and we ended up with the Old Curiosity Shop. The fact is very few people would trade the Old Curiosity Shop for Master Humphrey's Clock. Most people would say Dickens discovered something as a result of following his audience. And this is what we see throughout the 19th century in fiction in England and elsewhere that is that these novelists were in a active relationship with their public. And they learned from their public. Now part of it was anticipatory. They were always imagining how their audience might react. In that sense they were not working in this aesthetic vacuum that many people hold up as the ideal for culture. But what I'm saying is that in many ways their work improved as a result of this. So the model now is not a model of the single let's say divine creator producing the perfect work of art in a single moment of inspiration and producing a work that is outside time. Instead we have something that's very much like a market process very much like spontaneous order. We have authors who are projecting a work but then looking at feedback and changing the work as they go along to perfect it in a sense of making it better without necessarily achieving this particular form of artistic perfection that people hold up when they say that the work has to be entirely perfect. Now it happens with these serialized novels that most often they were then issued in book form and the authors had a chance to clean them up, correct errors, sometimes write new endings, sometimes tighten them up and that we can definitely see that happening. On the other hand it's quite surprising to see how often authors just said okay collect it you know I've written all the chapters just publish it as is or made very minor changes or in curious cases actually introduce new errors into the work when they put them together as whole. But the point is what results is something that's very much alive and I think benefits from the interaction between the author and his public. Now there's a scholar of the Slavic literature named Gary Saul Morrison who is particularly interested in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and their method of serial production. He claims I think rightly that they truly exploited this method of publication as a way of representing human freedom in fiction. Morrison has a wonderful book called Shadows of Time, Narrative and Freedom and I think it's the best book I've ever seen that tries to correlate narrative form with a vision of freedom. What he says about both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in different ways is that they fully committed to this serialized form by saying I'm going to write the book as I write it and I will not change anything no matter what happens. Though you know maybe I'll look at what the audience is thinking but I'm not going to go back and rewrite the earlier chapters and he points out with some of their novels that you could actually see how intervening events change the novel that Dostoevsky is writing a novel and five months after he starts he reads a newspaper story and he catches his eye and he works it into his book. Clearly that was not pre-planned. It was chronologically impossible for Dostoevsky to have written those episodes, planned to write those episodes when the star Ryan had booked these events hadn't even happened yet and Morrison makes the particular striking claim that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy waited to see what their characters would do on their own. Now I know that sounds crazy because after all again we're talking about an author who's creating a novel and ought to be in full charge but what he points out and you can see in their comments that their characters would surprise them. You know you can see the narrative is setting up a marriage but at the last moment Dostoevsky understands well this character wouldn't marry that one so I got to change the story. Now that's the way in which Morrison sees these authors. Reflecting human freedom, Morrison makes a very strong argument that there are many novelists, he actually includes Dickens among them although I think he's wrong in that respect, but many novelists who really have an idea of fate in their stories they really present outcomes as fated or providential that two characters are meant for each other in marriage let's say at the beginning of the book. He sees again both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is having a very different view and at one point where when Morrison comes very much in line with Austro-Economist he's convinced that contingency is a basic element of human life and he feels that the best novels embody and reflect it. That's why Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are his heroes because here are two authors who in a crazy way let their characters work it out and they don't know ahead of time what's going to happen and very much see that as a negative view of life that they don't want their characters to be predictable. So when you put this all together you see that there is a vision of possible in literature that's much closer to the Austro-Economics vision of human life where central planning doesn't work, where you can't plan out everything ahead of time and where things develop over time and improve over time in a way as I try to argue in this introductory essay in our volume. The artist, literary artist, is like an entrepreneur. His characteristic is trying to envision what the public wants in that sense he is thinking ahead but he allows his vision to be corrected. Now again there are some artists who are extremely stubborn. Anthony Trollop for example did publish his novel serially but secretly wrote them all in advance. He would wait till he finished the novel and then approach a publisher and say you want to serialize this. That way he felt he wouldn't ever betray himself. He wouldn't change it. He would write it out all in advance but most of the novelists we think of as the greatest of the 19th century participate in a process in which the public played a role, the commercial public and also in which the publishing industry played a role. I make a great deal of that in this essay that there's a tendency to view everyone but the author as a negative force in the process and I don't like editors much myself. I don't like seeing my work edited but there are many examples where editors have done a great deal to improve works and the fact that authors were participating in a publishing process. A commercial publishing process made their works better. Helped shape them up, helped keep them at a reasonable length for example. There's a historian of France named Robert Darney who's done a great deal of work on the French publishing industry actually on a Swiss publishing firm that worked for the French market and he does a wonderful job of showing the cultural role as mediators that this publisher he studies perform that it it sent out agents to booksellers all over France basically asked what do people want so what books are selling what should we be publishing and at the same time the publisher firm would go to authors and say well this is what people want you write this kind of book we will publish it. Darden found this treasure trove of something like 50,000 letters this publishing firm had kept a very good archive. He was able to study the nuts and bolts of this publishing process and what he showed is that this publishing firm provided a real service to authors and readers. It served as a kind of cultural middleman and it's not an insignificant firm I mean they were publishing major French philosophers like Diderot they became instrumental in the publishing of French encyclopedia which actually was a huge commercial venture made a lot of money for a lot of publishers so this is the way in which I've gradually had to overcome the attitudes in which I was brought up where he taught a certain contempt for culture the idea that if an artist makes any concession to his public somehow that's violating his integrity. This is what has resulted I believe in so much of modern literature and its obscurity that's deliberate obscurantism authors now pride themselves on not being understood on having outright contempt for their readership and again governments and universities and other quasi-public institutions step in to give subsidies to artists so that they don't have to worry about the commercial public and that was supposed to create a new glorious era of literature and art in the 20th century I mean again I like the great deal of modern literature and modern art but it does not work out quite the way the theories anticipated and what I've gravitated towards working on popular culture because I think a lot of the greatest art in our world is coming out of motion pictures and television because they are commercial media and some of the very same principles are at work. When I was talking about the serial novel I don't know if any of you people are fans of television soap operas but it's a famous principle in television soap operas that if ratings go down when your character appears in the story watch out you're probably gonna meet an accident in a couple of weeks and be off the show and similarly if certain characters are popular with the audience they get their roles written large and I have studied this in film and television and often the same principles at work so that's the sense then in which I think literature can teach something to economics it shows us that the realms of culture and commerce are not simply antithetical again I will grant that there are moments when they don't work together and read stories of artists frustrated by the demands of their publishers and the demands of their public but that story has been overtold and oversold I believe by literary critics and I've been trying to tell the other story where an artist actually flourishes because of getting feedback from the audience and flourishes by working in a very commercial enterprise now again the the 19th century novel was an extremely commercialized enterprise Shakespeare worked in an extremely commercial theater other examples Italian opera in the 19th century very commercial actually when you look at the history of art I would say it turns out that more great art has come out of commercial situations than have come out of the alternative certainly out of state support art I think aristocratic patronage worked pretty well in the Renaissance and I wouldn't diminish its control so anyway that's that's my point and I think we can we don't have to turn to literature or culture in general and enter an extremely strange different world for us as Austrian economists in fact if we turn that into that world we can see many of the same principles we understand from Austrian economics operating culture especially the idea of spontaneous order orders where things are not pre-planned perfectly by solitary geniuses but a world in which there's a process in which the market creates a form of cooperation between authors and readers and often publishers and editors that actually works to improve culture and literature thank you