A New Economic Criticism

A review of Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism by Michael Rectenwald

Review of Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. Pg. xiii + 317. Edited by Jo Ann Cavallo.

Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism is a collection of essays edited by Professor Jo Ann Cavallo that applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to literature and media. The 14-essay volume begins with an introduction by Jo Ann Cavallo and continues with a series of essays arranged chronologically by topic, beginning roughly in the early modern period and ending in the twenty-first century. The volume includes essays on such diverse literary and cultural topics as plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a theory of comedy, the “transgenderism” of Mary Frith, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. It includes essays on media and popular culture, including installments on Carl Barks’s Scrooge McDuck, movies focused on the 2007-2008 financial crisis, science fiction TV, contemporary Westerns, and reality TV shows. The volume is dedicated to the work of the late Paul Cantor and concludes with an essay by Cantor himself.

This volume represents a significant and much needed intervention into literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies. One might refer to the paradigm that it represents as a New Economic Criticism. This volume remedies the lopsided and exclusive focus on capitalism as exploitative and degrading by bringing sound economic thinking to bear on interesting cultural artifacts. All these essays display originality, high-level scholarship, and insight.

Across these essays, the authors draw on principles from libertarian economic philosophy—particularly the Austrian School of economics—to explore economic issues in literary, cultural, and media works and their impacts on individuals and society. Key concepts include marginal utility, entrepreneurship, opportunity costs, subjective valuation, scarcity, autarchy, the division of labor, trade, protectionism, free-market versus state-controlled economies, and war and peace. Several contributions contrast free markets with planned economies, advocating for the superiority of libertarian theory over Marxist approaches. Most argue that libertarian philosophy, generally overlooked in studies of culture, not only illuminates the issues in these texts but also clarifies their relationships to the capitalist marketplace.

Following the introduction, the volume features several standout essays that exemplify this approach. For instance, David Gordon’s “Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Rome” examines Cantor’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra) as a commentary on the transition from republic to empire. Influenced by Leo Strauss, Cantor portrays the republic as fostering martial virtue and public spiritedness, with no separation between civic and religious life. On the other hand, empire erodes these traits through eros and private desires. Gordon’s analysis underscores how libertarian lenses reveal Shakespeare’s insights into regime types and human character, showing free republican structures as superior to imperial centralization in promoting individual agency and social vitality.

Stephen Cox’s “Why Do You Think That’s Funny? The Theory of Comedy and the Theory of Valuation” links humor to economic valuation, critiquing traditional theories of humor—like the superiority theory (laughter expresses feelings of superiority over other people or over a former state of ourselves), the incongruity theory (e.g., a frog talking in a joke), and Hobbes’s “sudden glory” theory—as insufficient. Instead, Cox proposes a subjective value theory of comedy: laughter arises from the subjective reevaluating of situations given new information, akin to market processes wherein individuals adjust their preferences based on newly available options and prices. This chapter brilliantly integrates Austrian economics, demonstrating how comedy reflects dynamic, personal valuations rather than fixed hierarchies, enriching our understanding of cultural phenomena through free-market principles.

In “A Perfect Ambodexter: The Roaring Girl and Commercial Self-fashioning,” Katharine Gillespie challenges Marxist depictions of capitalism as a vampiric monster by analyzing Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play about Mary Frith (a.k.a. Moll Cutpurse). Frith’s cross-dressing and entrepreneurial activities illustrate subjective value and self-fashioning through commerce, showing how the market empowered such marginalized figures as Frith. Gillespie’s libertarian reading counters Marxist and other exploitation narratives, portraying markets as sites of liberation and innovation, where individuals negotiate identities beyond rigid social norms. No matter what you think of Frith’s transvestism, the argument for individual self-expression via markets is a strong one.

Building on Cantor’s work, Peter Hufnagel’s “The Alchemy of the Free Market in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist” reevaluates Jonson’s satire as pro-market. In Hufnagel’s reading, the play shows con artists and victims cooperating across differences for mutual gain, mirroring how markets reduce conflict and foster cooperation. Hufnagel argues that this phenomenon anticipates Hayek’s spontaneous order, revealing Jonson’s play as ultimately affirming the civilizing effects of free exchange.

Edward Peter Stringham and Spencer D. Brown’s “War and Peace as an Important Contribution to Economics and Methodological Individualism” positions Tolstoy’s epic novel as an economic text rejecting both great-man and deterministic theories of history. According to Stringham and Brown, in War and Peace, outcomes stem from countless individual choices, not top-down commands, aligning with Austrian methodological individualism. This analysis highlights how literature can critique central planning, emphasizing personal agency in shaping society amid the chaos of war.

Salvatore Taibi’s “A Wooden Boy and a Lesson in Free Market Economics: How Pinocchio Becomes an Entrepreneur” uncovers capitalist themes in Carlo Collodi’s tale. Pinocchio evolves from a puppet (commodity) to an entrepreneur through trials involving scarcity, trade, and opportunity costs, transforming via market engagement. Taibi links this to Austrian ideas like Menger’s principles, showing children’s literature as a vehicle for economic education on independence and value creation.

Alberto Mingardi’s “Scrooge McDuck: Caricature or Manifesto of the American Capitalist?” defends Carl Barks’s character as a nuanced entrepreneur, not a miser. Stories like A Financial Fable teach that wealth comes from production, not mere accumulation. The story critiques inflation while celebrating thrift and innovation. Mingardi’s libertarian perspective redeems Scrooge as embodying American capitalist virtues, countering anti-wealth stereotypes rife in popular culture.

Finally, Paul Cantor’s “Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?” analyzes the reality TV show as portraying compassionate CEOs reconnecting with workers, challenging the Marxist class warfare figuration. Cantor critiques the Frankfurt School’s dismissal of popular culture as manipulative, arguing that the show humanizes capitalism by showing mutual interests and voluntary exchanges fostering harmony.

For well over a century, cultural criticism has been a criticism of capitalism, and a criticism of capitalism has nearly defined these disciplines (cultural studies, literary studies, media studies, film studies, etc.). Since the Romantic period, aesthetic and literary studies have been formalized as a reaction to the utilitarian ethics of a burgeoning commercialism. William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schiller, and Karl Marx provided critiques of this ethic. For Wordsworth and Schiller, culture was regarded as an anodyne to commodification, whereas for Marx, culture was seen as the superstructure, an excrescence and reflection of the economic base, embedding the ideological means for maintaining existing (capitalist) relations of production. By the middle of the twentieth century, an antagonism between cultural and economic production was received as a natural heritage. Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School realized modernism’s possible alignment with Marxism and a wholesale anti-capitalist cultural criticism was born.

This cultural criticism has transmogrified since the Frankfurt School days, and literature and mass culture have been re-envisioned by subsequent critics (Raymond Williams, John Fiske, Michel de Certeau, to name a few). They figure the consumers of literary and mass cultural products as active agents rather than mere dupes or “cultural dopes.” Yet literary and media critics have retained a glaring, prejudiced, and unwarranted antipathy to commerce and capitalism. Capitalism has been seen as a site for manipulation, exploitation, and/or degradation, and culture has been understood as the representation of these assumed features of capitalism.

Over one hundred years ago, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated the impossibility of socialism with his introduction of the calculation problem. Murray Rothbard later devoted extensive analysis to the calculation problem, arguing that even “market socialist” models (e.g., trial-and-error pricing) fail because they cannot generate true entrepreneurial discovery or reflect subjective valuations. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has demonstrated that socialism is unethical at base—derived as it is from theft and based on its refusal to acknowledge property in persons. He showed that the difference between workers’ wages and the full value of labor’s proceeds is not due to the extraction of surplus value at the point of production as Marx contended. Rather, Hoppe argues, the difference is explicable in terms of the shorter time preferences of workers. With the defeat of the labor theory of value (LTV) and its attendant exploitation thesis, Marxism falls. Meanwhile, economies based on Marxist thought have failed abysmally wherever they have been tried. It’s about time that cultural criticism caught up with advances in economic theory and real-world results.

In an era where anti-capitalist biases dominate academia and media, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism offers a refreshing, substantiated counterpoint, proving that libertarian analysis can unlock profound understandings of texts and societies. I strongly recommend it to scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersections of economics and culture.