In economics, Marx has been relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic doom and a political disaster. Yet Marxist-influenced literary criticism is the dominant form of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that English professors are Marxists, it’s that even non-Marxists reach for Marxian concepts—class, theory, classification, material conditions, synthesis—when analyzing texts. These concepts may be useful in analyzing the Victorian novel of the slaughtered classes but they have become the default economy of all literature. That default is weird. Class analysis predates Marx and society can be divided into more than one set of classes; physical conditions do not transcend all artistic agency; and capitalism consists of figures—entrepreneurs, speculators, consultants, innovators, discoverers—who are excellent art subjects but do not fit well with Marxist moral geometry. It is no wonder that Marxism treats capitalist characters so badly.
Is Marxian economics the only economic lens one can apply to literature? What does Hayek’s literary criticism look like? A good place to start is Paul Cantor’s pioneering essay on Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” a seemingly trivial story set in Weimar Germany during the Depression. Cantor points out that when one reads a novel by Hayek and Mises rather than Marx, the story opens up.
Start with inflationary psychology and its effects. Inflation shortens time horizons. When money loses value by the hour, saving is foolish and the logical move is to spend as fast as you earn—Mises’ “escape from real goods.” Intelligence, discipline, and respect for the past are bad. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, and a certain irresponsibility of youth become survival factors.
So, Cantor/Mann tells us that inflation changes the mind and changes the authority of the old over the young. Seniors are set on their means and often live on a fixed income deflated by inflation; they can’t adapt. The young know nothing but instability and go with the flow of inflation effortlessly. So the virtues that once gave respect diminish while the recklessness of youth begins to look like skill. Thus, Mann’s world is “mad in the worship of youth”: children call their father by his name, youth are “great people,” and Professor Cornelius literally crouches at the height of his children as the authorities fall around him.
Money is an important treasure of society, so Cantor/Mann says that if you shake people’s faith in their money, you shake their other religions. So Cantor links Cornelius’ innocent skepticism—and the broader Weimar nihilism and inequality that helped fuel Nazism—to financial inequality.
In short, inflation transforms economic disorder into moral, social, psychological, and ultimately ontological disorder. Prices are unstable, then prices, then identity, then authenticity. The modern sense of absurdity and authenticity that critics pin on capitalism, Cantor/Mann says, is due to government-induced inflation and paper money.
A follower of Marx could read the same story and find the inevitable contradiction of capitalism. Cantor reads it and finds the effects of the regime debasing the currency. Both are economic readings of literature. Only one of them has proper economics.
Cantor is a good place to start but Hayek’s literary criticism can go further. Atavism, the impossibility of social justice, the products of human action but not of human design, automatic order, fatal pride, subjectivism, the order of the senses—there are many Hayekian ideas from which literary interpretation can be drawn.
A Hayekian critique would ask questions such as how do actors acquire and process information? Which institutions transmit information effectively, and which pollute it? How do money, law, language, and culture function as means of connecting society? Why do some rational redesign efforts end in disaster? Learn War and Peace as a critique of the theory of the great man of history, Brazil again The Lives of Others like deadly pride grows ignorance, fear, and stupidity. The phone as a Hayekian epic of automatic order that shows the illusion of social justice. Cantor’s essay on Mann shows how, the broader project remains undeveloped.
Hat tip: Hollis Robbins for the interview.
Addendum: Don’t forget my previous WSJ piece, Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain that offers an economic, one might say Marxist, explanation for why film directors in particular hate capitalism.
