The economic theories of Karl Marx and his disciples continue to be
anthologized in books of literary theory and criticism and taught
in humanities classrooms to the exclusion of other, competing
economic paradigms. Marxism is collectivist, predictable,
monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive - in short, wholly
inadequate as an instrument for good in an era when we know better
than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic
formulae. A person's creative and intellectual energies are never
completely the products of culture or class. People are rational
agents who choose between different courses of action based on
their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person's choices affect
lives, circumstances, and communities. Even literary scholars who
reject pure Marxism are still motivated by it, because nearly all
economic literary theory derives from Marxism or advocates for vast
economic interventionism as a solution to social problems. Such
interventionism, however, has a track-record of mass murder, war,
taxation, colonization, pollution, imprisonment, espionage, and
enslavement - things most scholars of imaginative literature
deplore. Yet most scholars of imaginative literature remain
interventionists. Literature and Liberty offers these scholars an
alternative economic paradigm, one that over the course of human
history has eliminated more generic bads than any other system. It
argues that free market or libertarian literary theory is more
humane than any variety of Marxism or interventionism. Just as
Marxist historiography can be identified in the use of
structuralism and materialist literary theory, so should
free-market libertarianism be identifiable in all sorts of literary
theory. Literature and Liberty disrupts the near monopolistic
control of economic ideas in literary studies and offers a new mode
of thinking for those who believe that arts and literature should
play a role in discussions about law, politics, government, and
economics. Drawing from authors as wide-ranging as Emerson,
Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry Hazlitt, and
Mark Twain, Literature and Liberty is a significant contribution to
libertarianism and literary studies.
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