Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism

Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor

Jo Ann Cavallo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031810015
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031810022
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to both literature and media, from early modern drama to novels to comic books, cinema, and television series. Several chapters contrast capitalism with statism, focusing on the market economy versus central planning, freedom versus government coercion. Not surprisingly, the economic theories of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek run through several essays. Contributors also engage with other theorists and writers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and Judith Butler.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Rome
• 3. Why Do You Think That’s Funny? The Theory of Comedy and the Theory of Valuation
• 4. “A Perfect Ambodexter”: The Roaring Girl and Commercial Self-fashioning
• 5. The Alchemy of the Free Market in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist
• 6. War and Peace as an Important Contribution to Economics and Methodological Individualism
• 7. A Wooden Boy and a Lesson in Free Market Economics: How Pinocchio Becomes an Entrepreneur
• 8. “This moral monster state”: Modern Utopianism, Emergent Order, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
• 9. The Nearly Invisible Hand: An Austrian Approach to Teaching Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha
• 10. Scrooge McDuck: Caricature or Manifesto of the American Capitalist?
• 11. The Big Screen Takes on the Financial Crisis: An Exploration of Four Films (2011–2015)
• 12. First Principles on the Final Frontier: Economic Foundations of Science Fiction Television
• 13. The Big Sky on the Small Screen: Austrian Economics in the Yellowstone Universe
• 14. Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?
• Back Matter