Literature, Film, and Human Flourishing—Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor

Professor Cavallo’s introduction orients readers by describing Cantor’s work as a “renaissance man”: he combined literary analysis with libertarian philosophy, analyzing television shows such as Breaking Bad with the same gusto he applied to Shakespeare’s plays. Along with Stephen Cox, Cantor also edited a groundbreaking volume of literary analysis, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (2009), that provided a model for later writers. That volume drew especially upon the works of economists of the Austrian School. Cavallo identifies key figures in that school—Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek—and key concepts, such as the theory of subjective value, methodological individualism, and resistance to central planning. In so doing, Cavallo renders the following essays accessible to a wider audience.

Cavallo frames the first three essays as “a reflection and further development of the methodology in different ways.” David Gordon’s “Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Rome” incorporates letters from Cantor that provide a unique window into his thoughts: “Not content with portraying Shakespeare as a political philosopher, Cantor argued that he also presents an interpretation of the rise of Christianity that bears a striking affinity with Nietzsche’s view,” and Cantor also was “much influenced by Leo Strauss” (17). Chapter 3 shifts direction with Stephen Cox’s original “Why Do You Think That’s Funny? The Theory of Comedy and the Theory of Valuation,” arguing, “the comic response is an act of personal valuation, not an emanation of intrinsically ‘proper’ values” (31). Readers will also appreciate the incisive analysis of chapter 4, Katharine Gillespie’s “ ‘A Perfect Ambodexter’: The Roaring Girl and Commercial Self-​Fashioning.” In this superb essay, Gillespie challenges feminist critics’ insistence that women are victims of capitalism, “subjects” programmed by “neoliberal governmentality.” She analyzes the career of Mary Frith (1589–1659), also known as “Moll Cutpurse,” a “cross-​dressing, tobacco-​smoking, hard-​drinking, sword-​fighting, viol-​playing, ditty-​singing, and unapologetically upwardly mobile businesswoman (including moneylending) of first ill and then less ill and then pretty good repute” (51). Gillespie’s smackdown of feminist critiques of the free market is alone worth the price of this book.

The rest of the essays are organized in roughly chronological order according to the texts analyzed, thereby demonstrating how Cantor’s approach applies across time and evolving genres. Chapters 5 and 6 reevaluate classics to underscore their overlooked contributions to economics.

Peter Hufnagel’s “The Alchemy of the Free Market in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist” resists a dominant critical interpretation: “that Jonson’s plays were written to show the corrupt and sinister side of the market economy” (75). Hufnagel praises Paul Cantor’s prior work showing Jonson’s more positive attitude toward markets in Bartholomew Fair, and he takes that insight further by a close reading illuminating how “Jonson was already beginning to view the free market as a positive force in society in The Alchemist,” particularly through the character of Drugger (75–76). In chapter 6, “War and Peace as an Important Contribution to Economics and Methodological Individualism,” Edward Peter Stringham and Spencer D. Brown revisit another classic. They encourage readers to see how Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece goes beyond the subjects of humanity and pacifism, and they take seriously Tolstoy’s critique of the great-​man theory, arguing that War and Peace shows how individuals can affect the fate of a nation.

Two chapters offer nuanced readings of books by authors who rejected free markets and libertarian ideals yet unwittingly undermined their own positions. In chapter 8, Michael Valdez Moses, a former student of Professor Cantor, tackles H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. He argues, “While a tension between ‘ecological’ and ‘constructivist’ rationality contributes to the imaginative success of Wells’s scientific romance, it nonetheless marks Wells’s social theories and political prophecies as intellectually incoherent” (128). This fine essay is followed by Jo Ann Skousen’s “The Nearly Invisible Hand: An Austrian Approach to Teaching Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.” Skousen cleverly pinpoints a central irony in Siddhartha: “Hesse’s own biases and contempt for worldly wealth prevent him from seeing the economic truths embedded in his own story, and his readers may therefore overlook … the book’s most significant unintended contributions: Siddhartha’s success in business” (160). She invites libertarian teachers to draw students’ attention to this point.

Teachers and readers may also be charmed by two chapters that reconsider iconic characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In chapter 7, “A Wooden Boy and a Lesson in Free Market Economics: How Pinocchio Becomes an Entrepreneur,” Salvatore Taibi details how the protagonist of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) learns essential economic lessons. He suggests that this novel “spotlights the necessity of engaging economically with fellow human beings in a capitalist system becoming increasingly prevalent in late nineteenth-​century Italy” (103). In fact, he links Pinocchio’s transformation into a boy with free market capitalism and entrepreneurship. Taibi supports this argument with brilliant close readings from the novel paired with apt quotations from economists such as Adam Smith, thereby resisting Marxist interpretations of this as a novel about duty. Likewise, chapter 10, Alberto Mingardi’s “Scrooge McDuck: Caricature or Manifesto of the American Capitalist?” is an engaging analysis of what seems to be a silly character. Mingardi traces how Scrooge McDuck grew more multidimensional in the later twentieth century, becoming a “Schumpeterian entrepreneur” and developing the bourgeois virtues that Deirdre McCloskey has argued are important to our commercial society. Mingardi’s analysis is especially astute in relation to Don Rosa’s Scrooge McDuck, which draws upon Rosa’s understanding of the history of successful businessmen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Later chapters pay tribute to Cantor’s analysis of popular media by examining how films and television series depict economic principles and crises. These chapters are not only smart but accessible. Chapter 11, Stefano Adamo’s “The Big Screen Takes on the Financial Crisis: An Exploration of Four Films (2011–2015)” focuses on the 2008 global crisis as depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Big Short (2015), Too Big to Fail (2011), and Margin Call (2011). Adamo examines their narrative strategies and highlights strengths and weaknesses in each film. For instance, Too Big to Fail “serves as a valuable resource for those seeking to understand the factors that pushed the global economy to the edge of collapse,” but it is “a one-​dimensional representation of the US government’s role in the Global Financial Crisis” (207). His chapter could provide an excellent starting point for helping students understand what happened and how media affects our understanding of it.

Sometimes, however, economic principles are best learned from a greater distance of time or even space. In chapter 12, “First Principles on the Final Frontier: Economic Foundations of Science Fiction Television,” Matthew McCaffrey and Carmen-​Elena Dorobat examine how popular television series such as Andor, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and The Expanse convey economic principles in plots about “scarcity, the division of labor and autarky, trade and prices, protectionism and war, and the role of international organizations and governance” (219). For instance, in the section “Scarcity: The Original Frontier,” they note that Battlestar Galactica frequently incorporates narratives about the scarcity of essentials such as water, food, and fuel. And in chapter 13, “The Big Sky on the Small Screen: Austrian Economics in the Yellowstone Universe,” Matt Spivey evokes Paul Cantor’s interest in the Western genre—especially Deadwood and Justified—before turning to Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and its prequels, 1883 and 1923. This is a particularly smart, nuanced analysis of how these connected series examine gun rights, property rights, eminent domain, the role of the state, and the necessity for entrepreneurs constantly to adapt to changing conditions.

The final chapter—Paul Cantor’s own “Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?”—displays his wit and critical acumen in analyzing two reality television shows about business. In the first, Undercover Boss, a CEO of a company goes undercover to work among his employees, thereby revealing his ineptitude at low-​level jobs such as flipping hamburgers even as the boss discovers the struggles of employees and weaknesses in the company. Each episode ends with the unmasking of the CEO, who helps employees with a gift such as a new car. While Cantor celebrates the empathy shown by the CEO, he questions whether this is an effective use of the CEO’s time and suggests that the show reinforces a modern-​day feudalism: the caring master sees to the needs of his suitably grateful workers. Conversely, Shark Tank depicts the competition for funding by entrepreneurs, who must make their case to win an investment. This is not feudalism but capitalism, and it is all the better for it: one’s fortunes don’t depend upon noblesse oblige but upon an impersonal market.

Although Cantor’s essay is the final chapter, he does not get the last word: an editor’s note and Appendix of Tributes remind us of the depth and breadth of his influence. The essays gathered in this volume celebrate his achievements and make libertarian literary and media criticism accessible to a wide audience. This superb volume is essential reading for anyone interested in how literature and film can illuminate the principles that enable human flourishing.