Economics and Literature

19 October 2006 at 11:56 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

Lest the “Pomo Periscope” series below make you think we at O&M are anti-literary or anti-narrative, let me tell you about one of my favorite literary scholars, University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor. A specialist in Shakespeare and English Romanticism, Cantor has recently begun writing about the relationship between literature and economic theory (and, in his Gilligan Unbound, the relationship between economics and pop culture).

Cantor burst on the (economics) scene with a 1994 article in the Review of Austrian Economics, “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics.” Focusing on Mann’s 1925 short story “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” set in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Cantor explores the parallels between hyperinflation and “hyperreality,” the condition of being unable to distinguish fact from fiction. “If modernity is characterized by a loss of the sense of the real,” writes Cantor, “this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century.” Mann’s story, as interpreted by Cantor, illustrates how closely the commercial and cultural worlds are linked. (Cantor has also written about the economic views of such diverse literary and cultural figures as Percy Bysshe Shelley and W. C. Fields.)

Here is a series of Cantor lectures from a July 2006 seminar on “Commerce and Culture.” Topics include “The Economic Basis of Culture”; “The Economics of Painting: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Classical Music: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Modernism”; and “Totalitarianism and the Arts in the 20th Century.” All are well worth watching.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Cultural Conservatism, Ephemera.

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2 Comments Add your own

1. Jung-Chin Shen | 20 October 2006 at 12:44 am

And Deirdre (Donald) McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics is, of course, an interesting read as well.
2. ln | 20 October 2006 at 11:47 am

Thanks for the pointer to Cantor’s paper, which I read and enjoyed. I do not want to push the discussion on literature too far, but I think my basic point is an old one of mine, namely that logic is a discipline in both mathematics and philosophy. If we as management scholars wish to search for logic we can in principle look in both places. Where economics is of course an obvious place to look, I think we have to complement it every once in a while, if it is to make sense to differentiate between management and economics.

I never thought of O&M as anti-literary, but perhaps a bit sceptical to post-modernism and the FMS-movement. I agree in such scepticism and as Cantor’s paper shows, so do at least some literary authors and scholars of literature.