This volume applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to both literature and media, from early modern drama to novels to comic books, cinema, and television series. Several chapters contrast capitalism with statism, focusing on the market economy versus central planning, freedom versus government coercion. Not surprisingly, the economic theories of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek run through several essays. Contributors also engage with other theorists and writers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and Judith Butler.
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Paul Cantor on Shakespeare's Rome.- Chapter 3: Why Do You Think That's Funny?: The Theory of Comedy and the Theory of Valuation.- Chapter 4: A Perfect Ambodexter": The Roaring Girl and Commercial Self-Fashioning.- Chapter 5: The Alchemy of the Free Market in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.- Chapter 6: War and Peace as an Important Contribution to Economics and Methodological Individualism.- Chapter 7: A Wooden Boy and a Lesson in Free Market Economics: How Pinocchio Becomes an Entrepreneur.- Chapter 8: This moral monster state": Modern Utopianism, Emergent Order, and H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds .- Chapter 9: The Nearly Invisible Hand: An Austrian Approach to Teaching Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.- Chapter 10: Scrooge McDuck: Caricature or Manifesto of the American Capitalist?.- Chapter 11: The Big Screen Takes on the Financial Crisis: An Exploration of Four Films (2011-2015).- Chapter 12: First Principles on the Final Frontier: Economic Foundations of Science
Fiction Television.- Chapter 13: The Big Sky on the Small Screen: Austrian Economics in the Yellowstone Universe.- Chapter 14: Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?.
Jo Ann Cavallo is Professor of Italian at Columbia University, USA. She has published widely on Italian literature and culture, especially Renaissance chivalric epic and popular performance traditions. For the past decade, she has also brought a libertarian perspective to Italian studies through her publications on Marco Polo, Machiavelli, Renaissance fiction, chivalric epic, and Sicilian puppet theater.
Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism is a welcome addition to a field long starved for alternatives to Marxist approaches. It is heartening to see that Paul Cantor s scholarship has continued to inspire and inform scholars across disciplinary boundaries and attract them to literary and media criticism. It is to be hoped that this volume will help inaugurate a new trend of market-friendly analysis in this area. (Jason Jewell, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 29 (1), 2025)
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. (Caroline Breashears, libertarianism.org, August 25, 2025)
With Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor, Jo Ann Cavallo has achieved something increasingly rare in our splintered intellectual landscape The reader who approaches Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism expecting either elementary economic cheerleading or literary dilettantism will be disappointed. What Cavallo has gathered instead is something better: genuine intellectual adventure the kind that enlarges our understanding. In an age of ideological calcification, such work is at once dangerous, necessary, and irreplaceable. (Allen Mendenhall, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 28 (3), October, 2025)
The essays is an extended argument for why Cantor s approach is not just important, but portable; young scholars can use this approach to ensure their own scholarly flourishing and success. (Michael C. Munger, The Independent Review, Vol. 30 (2), 2025)
Many of the great stories take on renewed life Shakespeare s plays, especially, but also Jonson s Alchemist, Tolstoy s War and Peace, Pinocchio, H. G. Wells War of the Worlds (which gets a rather sinister undertone of the Technostate), and even, with astonishing effrontery, Hesse s Siddhartha. Likewise, pop culture gets rousing re-readings . Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism may be the seed of a more liberal and humane movement in literary and humanistic studies. (Frederick Turner, Cosmos and Taxis, cosmosandtaxis.org, Vol. 13 (7-8), 2025)
My deepest gratitude to Jo Ann Cavallo for bringing this collection to my attention. I heartily recommend it to my readers! (Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Notablog, notablog.net, May 16, 2025)
