Free to Write

Literature and the
Economics of Liberty

Gustavo Tomsich / Corbis

Spontaneous Order in Culture

edited by Paul A. Cantor
and Stephen Cox

Von Mises Institute, 509 pp., $25

The last few decades have taught the rulers of the People’s Republic of China that their most effective poverty-reducing tool is the market, while Arab countries now fear a nuclear Iran far more than they ever did Israel. But capitalism remains the source of the world’s ills, according to the leading theorists in the new superdiscipline of cultural studies, which on many campuses has supplanted the study of literary works.

Once books like René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature had chapter titles like “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art.” Today the most recent additions to the prestigious Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism include titles like “Sex in Public” and “Empire.” (“Sex in Public” has nothing to say about literature but does opinionate about economics as well as sexuality: Its coauthors reject what they call “free-market ideology” while buttressing their condemnation of bourgeois “heteronormative forms” by claiming that such “forms” are somehow “central to the accumulation of capital.”) Meanwhile, in “Empire,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri oppose “the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market” and call for a new perspective on the regime in Iran, asserting that “insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution.”