1. The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism

¹In the introduction to his influential and widely used anthology, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), Simon During actually builds a left-wing orientation into his definition of Cultural Studies:

As a field, it accepts that studying culture is rarely value-free, and so, embracing clearly articulated, left-wing values, it seeks to extend and critique the relatively narrow range of norms, methods, and practices embedded in the traditional, past-fixated, canon-forming humanities. (p. 27)

Evidently for During, by definition, a centrist or a right-wing Cultural Studies could not exist.

²Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 63.

³This is obviously a vast generalization, and I do not have the space to document it fully. I think it is true, however, to anyone's experience of literary criticism today. (And let me stress that I am not claiming that all literary criticism today is Marxist; only that virtually all criticism that attempts to apply economics to literature is fundamentally Marxist in its assumptions.) For a good overview of the history of economic criticism, see Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An historical introduction” in the collection of essays they edited, The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the intersection of literature and economics (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3–50. Osteen and Woodmansee certainly succeed in showing the wide variety of approaches that have been taken in economic criticism, and yet somehow they all end up being, broadly speaking, on the left. Although mainly concerned with the past few decades, Osteen and Woodmansee concede that there is a long history of economic criticism: “Of course, economic criticism existed even before 1960 in, for example, the brand of Marxism practiced by Lukács, the Frankfurt school, and Left critics of the 1930s” (p. 13). As they turn to more recent work that “addresses the economic habits of individual authors,” they characterize it as “generally adhering to Left or Marxist ideology” (p. 14). When they discuss individual authors, they criticize F. Rossi-Landi, whose “work is flawed by adherence to an old-fashioned Marxism that emphasizes production at the expense of consumption” (p. 14). They then praise Jean-Joseph Goux for “synthesizing Marxism and post-structuralism” (p. 16). Even when they finally turn to a non-Marxist approach—what they call “the theoretics of gift exchange”—they characterize it as “a broad range of antibourgeois and anti-capitalist writing” (p. 28). They describe approvingly the most recent work in the field this way: “Although proceeding from a Left political stance, these studies have initiated a more sophisticated understanding of the power—and limits—of capitalist discourses” (p. 34). In sum, Osteen and Woodmansee have studied the field of economic criticism carefully and yet do not mention a single form of pro-capitalist criticism. Their own volume illustrates the point; it is indeed “new” in many respects, but not in offering any pro-capitalist criticism (with the possible exception of Paul Delany's essay). It may be hard to believe—and I may well be missing something—but I know of only two volumes of literary criticism that are openly pro-capitalist: Frederick Turner, Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Russell A. Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007). Anti-socialist criticism is more common; I would particularly recommend George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1998), and critics in the field of Slavics have generally been, for understandable reasons, less enamored of Marxism than their colleagues in other literatures (I discuss the case of Gary Saul Morson later in this essay). Two of the books of economic criticism that I have found most impressive are Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (London: Palgrave, 2002). These books are by no means programmatically pro-capitalist, but they do show an appreciation of how markets function in positive ways and, more generally, a fundamental grasp of economics. Erickson, for example, demonstrates that he understands the law of marginal utility (see Literary Form, pp. 9–10, 132–33). As for Delany, unlike all the other scholars in economic criticism I know of, he actually has a B.A. in economics from McGill and an M.A. from Stanford, and worked as an economist for the Bank of Canada in Ottawa and the International Labor Office in Geneva. He admits to having been taught by “Keynesian and Marxist” professors in economics, but his book shows that he has been heavily influenced by Richard Cobden, one of the great proponents of free trade in the nineteenth century (p. 234). That may explain why Delany says: “I want in this book to give commercial culture its due, and to respect the Cobdenite agenda that so closely anticipated the globalism of today” (p. 8). Another book of literary criticism that defends the market economy is Sharon O'Dair's Class, Critics and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines in the Culture Wars (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), which offers, paradoxically, a kind of left-wing critique of Marxism. O'Dair states clearly that “capitalism is routinely demonized in critical discourse” (p. 60) and analyzes at length the anti-capitalistic bias in literary studies (see especially p. 65). She presents Max Weber's sociology as superior to Marxism in its understanding of the phenomenon of class (see especially pp. 51–52).

⁴John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22.

⁵Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest,” Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis, ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 194.

⁶For critiques of Marxism in theoretical and practical terms, see David Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1987) and Yuri N. Maltsev, ed., Requiem for Marx (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993).

⁷For a comprehensive treatment of this subject, with a wealth of historical material, see Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

⁸On the peculiar survival of Marxism in the academy, see Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 137–78 and Darío Fernández-Morera, American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).

⁹For a collection of essays on the history of the Austrian School, including accounts by several Austrian economists themselves, see Bettina Bien Graves, ed., Austrian Economics: An Anthology (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996). See also Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith, eds., Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Backgrounds (New York: New York University Press, 1986), and Raimondo Cubeddu, The Philosophy of the Austrian School, Rachel M. Costa, née Barritt, trans. (London: Routledge, 1993). The great synoptic account of Austrian economics is Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949).

¹⁰For an account of Mises's life and thought, see Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007) and Israel M. Kirzner, Ludwig von Mises (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2001). Both volumes also serve as excellent introductions to Austrian economics in general. For accounts of Hayek's life and thought, see Chandran Kukathas, Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Alan O. Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (London: Palgrave, 2001) and Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (London: Palgrave, 2003), and Bruce Caldwell, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

¹¹See especially Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “The Exploitation Theory,” Capital and Interest, George D. Huncke and Hans F. Sennholz, trans. (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 241–321.

¹²On the socialist calculation debate, see Trygve J.B. Hoff, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society, M.A. Michael, trans. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981) and David Ramsay Steele, From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1992). The most famous statement associated with the vindication of Mises after the events of 1989 came from Robert Heilbroner, author of the widely read history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers. Surveying the collapse of socialist economies around the world, Heilbroner—no fan of laissez-faire capitalism, to say the least—proclaimed: “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right.” See his “After Communism,” The New Yorker, vol. 66, no. 30 (September 10, 1990), p. 92.

¹³For the classic exposition of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, see the chapter “Interest, Credit Expansion, and the Trade Cycle” in Mises, Human Action, pp. 535–83. For the application of the Austrian theory to perhaps the most famous example of the downturn in the business cycle, see Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1983).

¹⁴For a sense of the range of topics the Austrian School has dealt with, see Peter J. Boettke, ed., The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1994).

¹⁵I have found only one other extended attempt to apply Austrian economics to cultural issues: Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright, Culture and Enterprise: The Development, Representation and Morality of Business (London: Routledge, 2000). Although this book does not involve much literary criticism (it deals chiefly with cinema and television), it makes many of the observations we are making about the relevance of Austrian economics to understanding cultural phenomena.

¹⁶James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 310; see also p. 287. Foucault's comments on Hayek and Mises are available in English in the posthumously published volume Michael Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Graham Burchell, trans. (London: Palgrave, 2008).

¹⁷Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, eds. & trans., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 480. See also Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 43–44.

¹⁸On the issue of economic determinism in Marx's theory, see Conway, Farewell, pp. 52–81, Murray Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 372–76, and Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. 1, The Founders, pp. 335–75.

¹⁹From a letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21–22, 1890 (italics in the original), in Feuer, Basic Writings, pp. 397–98.

²⁰But note Kolakowski's critique—that Engels, in trying to salvage Marx and make his materialism sound plausible, ends up stripping his doctrine of anything that makes it distinctive:

It would seem that to say there is an interaction between the relations of production and the “superstructure” is to utter a truism which all would accept and which has nothing particularly Marxist about it.... That books and plays cannot be understood without knowledge of the historical circumstances and social conflicts of the time was known, long before Marx, to many French and other historians.... We must ask then, what exactly is historical materialism? If it means that every detail of the superstructure can be explained as in some way dictated by the demands of the “base,” it is an absurdity with nothing to recommend it to credence; while if, as Engels's remarks suggest, it does not involve absolute determinism in this sense, it is no more than a fact of common knowledge. (Main Currents, vol. 1, p. 364)

²¹For an early example (1929) within the context of Soviet Marxism, see V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 17–24. For perhaps the most important example of this rejection, see Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 75–82 and “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 31–49. On this subject, see Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, p. 376.

²²On this subject, see Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, p. 5. For a fuller discussion of New Historicism, see my essay “Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist Vision,” Academic Questions 6, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 21–36; for the specific issue of determinism, see pp. 34–36.

²³Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, in Feuer, Basic Writings, p. 398.

²⁴For the Marxist attack on the “great man” theory of history, see, for example, Engels, Letter to Heinz Starkenburg, January 25, 1894, in Feuer, Basic Writings, pp. 411–12.

²⁵See, for example, Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 8, 40, 42.

²⁶See, for example, Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, Geoffrey Wall, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), especially pp. 66–68, McGann, Textual Criticism, p. 48, and N.N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. x. Feltes's chapter on Dickens's Pickwick Papers (pp. 1–17) provides a good example of contemporary Marxist criticism. His explicit aim is to counter the common critical myth that “the publication of Pickwick Papers marks the explosion of Dickens's ‘genius’ upon the literary world” (p. 2; notice that Feltes places the word genius in scare quotes).

²⁷See F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (New York: Free Press, 1958), especially pp. 13–16.

²⁸See Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” in Feuer, Basic Writings, pp. 68–111.

²⁹Feuer, Basic Writings, p. 44.

³⁰Harold Bloom has dubbed contemporary criticism “The School of Resentment.” See The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 4.

³¹For a critique of contemporary race/class/gender criticism, see John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

³²See Carl Menger, Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, Francis J. Nock, trans. (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics, George Reisman, trans. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960), pp. 1–23 and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 115–33; and Hayek, Counter-Revolution, pp. 17–79.

³³The phrase “methodological individualism” was coined by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1908. On this subject, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 41–44, Epistemological Problems, pp. 40–44, and Ultimate Foundation, pp. 80–83. See also the article on “Methodological Individualism” by Gregory B. Christainsen in Boettke, Elgar Companion, pp. 11–16.

³⁴For a discussion of determinism, see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 73–93.

³⁵See, for example, the chapter on “Uncertainty” in Mises, Human Action, pp. 105–18. This issue offers a good illustration of how literary critics dealing with economics can be misled by their neglect of the Austrian School. Osteen and Woodmansee criticize the economics profession for its failure to appreciate the importance of uncertainty: “Other modernist economists—Frank Knight, J.M. Keynes, G.L.S. Shackle—similarly permit post-modern moments to seep into arguments by sometimes reluctantly recognizing the presence of uncertainty” (“Taking Account,” p. 27). If Osteen and Woodmansee were familiar with the writings of Mises and Hayek, they would never claim that economists do not appreciate the importance of uncertainty; clearly they have expanded their legitimate criticism of the neoclassical school into a false generalization about economics as such. Incidentally, Osteen and Woodmansee are even unfair to Knight and Schackle, who do more than merely “reluctantly recognize” the importance of uncertainty. Knight, for example, named his most famous book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971), a good emblem of the fact that “uncertainty” was a central concept in his economic thought.

³⁶See, for example, Israel M. Kirzner, How Markets Work: Disequilibrium, Entrepreneurship and Discovery (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997) and Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. and Mario J. Rizzo, The Economics of Time and Ignorance (London: Routledge, 1996).

³⁷See Kirzner, How Markets Work, pp. 33–34. For the rare literary critic who speaks of the “entrepreneurial visionary” and “imaginative entrepreneurship,” see Berman, Fiction Sets You Free, p. 188.

³⁸For Hayek's understanding of spontaneous order, see chapters 1 and 2, “Reason and Evolution” and “Cosmos and Taxis,” of the first volume, Rules and Order, of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty (London: Routledge, 1982), pp. 8–54. See also his essays “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” and “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design” in his Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), pp. 22–42, 96–105. For a brief but comprehensive survey of the development of the idea of spontaneous order, see Steven Horwitz, “From Smith to Menger to Hayek: Liberalism in the Spontaneous-Order Tradition,” The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy 6 (2001): 81–97.

³⁹See Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, pp. 9–10, 26–27 and The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 24. See also Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, J. Kahane, trans. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 296.

⁴⁰For a well-documented challenge to the widespread but mistaken view that the idea of the free market begins with Smith, see Darío Fernández-Morera's essay on Don Quijote in this volume.

⁴¹See John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds., The Invisible Hand (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), especially pp. 1–42.

⁴²On the development of this idea, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

⁴³For a treatment of Darwin in a larger intellectual and cultural context, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968).

⁴⁴See the introduction to Origin of Species, where Darwin writes: “This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom.” Quoted from the edition of Gillian Beer—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 6; see also p. 54. For the influence of Smith and classical economics on Darwin, see Mises, Socialism, p. 296 and Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, pp. 20–22, 152–53, n. 33 and Fatal Conceit, pp. 24–25, 146–47. If Mises and Hayek seem biased in favor of a fellow economist, the point is confirmed by a natural scientist— see Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 121–25, and especially p. 122: “the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith's economics transferred to nature.”

⁴⁵I introduce the subject of Darwinism here with some trepidation, but I hope that it will contribute to my argument. Darwin's theory of evolution is the form of spontaneous order thinking with which people generally are most familiar, and therefore it may help readers understand the distinctive thrust of Austrian economics. But I risk giving the impression that Austrian economics is a species of Darwinism (and, even worse, raising the specter of Social Darwinism—which in fact has nothing to do with Austrian economics; for Mises's explicit and emphatic rejection of Social Darwinism, see Human Action, p. 175). I want to stress, then, that Darwinism is only one form of spontaneous order thinking and has no claims to priority or preeminence over any of the others. All Darwinian orders are spontaneous, but not all spontaneous orders are Darwinian. Although Austrian economics and Darwinism have a good deal in common as forms of spontaneous order thinking, they also, as we will see, differ in fundamental respects, and economic order involves a higher level of complexity, unpredictability, and hence spontaneity than biological order. Let me say it again: Austrian economics is not a form of Darwinism; it is a parallel but entirely independent mode of spontaneous order thinking. To put it in biological terms: spontaneous order thinking is the genus; Darwinism and Austrian economics are two of its separate and distinct species.

⁴⁶I develop this point in my essay on H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man in this volume.

⁴⁷For an analysis and critique of utopian literature, see Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 257–60.

⁴⁸See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), where he defends “the proposition that every word in a poem plays its part” (p. 221; italics in the original). For a critical account of the New Criticism, see “What Was New Criticism?” in Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 129–49.

⁴⁹I realize that the New Critics often spoke of what they called “the intentional fallacy” and tried to divert attention from what was going on in the mind of the poet in creating a poem to the poem itself, its form and structure. See W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), pp. 4–18. In that sense, the New Critics generally did not speak about the conscious process of designing a poem. But they did always speak about poetry as if it had been consciously designed. Precisely because the New Critics wanted to concentrate on the divinely perfect design of a poem, they chose to bracket out what was going on in the mind of the mere mortal who wrote it. Thus, although the New Critics seldom spoke about the intentions of poets, they were always talking about the intentionality of poems. They in effect invoked Kant's idea of Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck (“purposiveness without purpose”). See his Critique of Judgment, “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Third Moment, section 10. For the significance of this turn to Kant in the New Criticism, see my essay “The Metaphysics of Botany: Rousseau and the New Criticism of Plants,” Southwest Review 70 (1983): 362–80, and especially p. 379.

⁵⁰For an account of developments out of and in reaction to the New Criticism, see Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

⁵¹For a manifesto of deconstructive criticism, featuring several of the most prominent figures in the movement, see Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979). For a generally sympathetic account of the movement, see Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982). For a more critical account, see John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

⁵²See “Plato's Pharmacy” in Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, Barbara Johnson, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 63–171.

⁵³See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, “Ariachne's Broken Woof,” Georgia Review 31 (1977): 44–60, where Miller makes an epistemological mountain out of a textual molehill. He starts from what most scholars have been content to dismiss as a mere printer's error in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: the appearance of the name Ariachne in one of Troilus's speeches, which seems to be a conflation of two names from Greek mythology, Ariadne and Arachne. The portmanteau word Ariachne launches Miller into a frenzy of deconstructive speculation:

Slip of the tongue or of the pen? Ignorance on Shakespeare's part? Error of the scribe or of the typesetter who has put in one letter too many? The extra i... produce[s] a gap in the meaning and call[s] attention to the material base of signs.... The little i in “Ariachnes” has the effect of a bit of sand in a salad or of a random sound in a symphony, the flautist dropping his flute, the snap of a breaking violin string.... The conflation in “Ariachnes” of two myths which are and are not congruent is precisely in agreement with what happens in Troilus’ speech, namely, an anguished confrontation with the subversive possibility of dialogue, reason divided hopelessly against itself.... The principle of identity is the basic assumption of monological metaphysics.... The “whole shebang” of Occidental metaphysics is, the reader can see, brought into question in Troilus’ experience and in his speech. (pp. 45–47)

All this from what amounts to a typo!

⁵⁴On the connection between the New Criticism and Deconstruction, see Graff, Literature Against Itself, pp. 145–46. See also Franco Moretti's characterization of literary criticism: “It is divided equitably between creationist faith (the text is a complete and perfect world, and the author is the watchmaker who foresees everything) and deconstructionist gnosis (at the slightest contradiction, the text collapses into total chaos)” (Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, Quintin Hoare, trans. [London: Verso, 1996], p. 22). Moretti is exactly right to see deconstruction as a kind of gnostic inversion of the New Criticism.

⁵⁵At the high point of his teleological rhetoric in Origin of Species, Darwin claims that Nature set out to offer proof of his theory of evolution: “Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal, by rudimentary organs and by homologous structure, her scheme of modification, which it seems that we wilfully will not understand” (p. 388). By comparison with this flight of anthropomorphic fantasy, Aristotle's view of nature's intentions seems positively sober and restrained.

⁵⁶The rhetoric of perfection is evident throughout the pages of Origin of Species; as just one example, see the section “Organs of extreme perfection and complication” in chapter VI.

⁵⁷For the importance of contingency in Darwinian biology, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), pp. 51, 283–91, 299–301, 317–318, and especially pp. 300–01 for the argument about imperfection of biological form.

⁵⁸Darwin calls them “rudimentary, atrophied, or aborted Organs” and discusses them in chap. XIII of Origin (pp. 364–69).

⁵⁹On this subject, see the section on “Mechanism and Teleology” in Himmelfarb, Darwin, pp. 337–52. For a contrary view—an Aristotelian reading of Darwin—see Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

⁶⁰Darwin's way of formulating this point is to distinguish relative from absolute perfection. See, for example, Origin, pp. 167–68:

Natural selection in each well-stocked country, must act chiefly through the competition of the inhabitants one with another, and consequently will produce perfection, or strength in the battle for life, only according to the standard of that country. Hence the inhabitants of one country, generally the smaller one, will often yield, as we see they do yield, to the inhabitants of another and generally larger country. For in the larger country there will have existed more individuals, and more diversified forms, and the competition will have been severer, and thus the standard of perfection will have been rendered higher. Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found.

For the same point about “absolute perfection,” see also p. 381.

⁶¹For Smith, see bk. I, chap. VII—“Of the natural and market Prices of Commodities”—in his Wealth of Nations, and for Ricardo, see chap. IV—“On Natural and Market Price”—in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. On this issue and its relation to neoclassical equilibrium theory, see Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 450–52 and Murray Milgate, “Equilibrium: development of the concept” in Eatwell, Invisible Hand, pp. 105–106.

⁶²See Mises, Human Action, pp. 697–98, 706–711, Kirzner, How Markets Work, p. 29, and Karen I. Vaughn, “Introduction” to Hoff, Economic Calculation, pp. xii–xiii, xviii–xix.

⁶³See Ulrich Fehl, “Spontaneous Order,” in Boettke, Elgar Companion, pp. 197–205. See also Mises, Human Action, p. 701:

We do not assert that the capitalist mode of economic calculation guarantees the absolutely best solution of the allocation of factors of production. Such absolutely perfect solutions of any problem are out of reach of mortal men.

Notice that, as Darwin does in the biological realm, Mises rejects the possibility of “absolute perfection” in the economic realm.

⁶⁴The socialist calculation debate began with Mises's essay “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung in sozialistischen Gemeinwesen,” published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 47 (1920). For an English translation by S. Adler of this essay, see Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Auburn, Ala.: Praxeology Press, 1990). For Mises's classic statement of his position, see chap. XXVI of Human Action, “The Impossibility of Economic Calculation Under Socialism” (pp. 694–711). For Hayek's key contribution on the problem of knowledge, see his “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in his Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). This volume also contains several other chapters on the socialist calculation debate (chaps. 7–9). For further contributions to the debate, see Mises, Socialism, especially the section “The Economics of an Isolated Socialist Community” (pp. 111–220), and volume 10 in The Collected Works of Friedrich Hayek, Socialism and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). For more on the socialist calculation debate, see the second section of Chandran Kukathas's essay on Ben Okri in this volume.

⁶⁵Austrian economists have debated whether Hayek's position in the socialist calculation argument merely develops out of Mises's argument or provides an alternative to it. See, for example, Joseph T. Salerno's postscript, “Why a Socialist Economy is ‘Impossible,’” in Mises, Economic Calculation, pp. 59–66. Salerno argues convincingly that Hayek's position should be distinguished from Mises's. Nevertheless, in the larger picture, clearly Mises and Hayek were allied in opposition to the socialist camp. For another attempt to distinguish their positions, see Kirzner, How Markets Work, pp. 16–19, but Kirzner concludes that their arguments “turn out to be two sides of the same coin” (p. 18).

⁶⁶See Mises, Human Action, p. 701.

⁶⁷On this point, see Peter Rutland, The Myth of the Plan: Lessons of Soviet planning experience (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985), especially p. 39:

Planned economies have an in-built tendency to reject the admission of error (although they all have to in the end), while market economies, by contrast, are built around the principle of uncertainty—one man's error is another man's entrepreneurial gain. (If anything, market economies face the problem of over-generation of failure.) Planned systems lack any mechanisms for the automatic registration of failure, such as bankruptcy or takeover, or, more indirectly, stock market quotations, transferable international currencies and so forth.

For further critique of Soviet economic planning, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 193–222.

⁶⁸See Kirzner, How Markets Work, p. 54:

Many features of real-world markets which appear, from a perfectly competitive-ideal perspective to be direct evidence of inefficiency, turn out to be wholesome features of a vigorously and dynamically competitive world. So-called “imperfections” of competition emerge as crucial elements in the market process of discovery and correction of earlier entrepreneurial errors.

⁶⁹See my essay “The Primacy of the Literary Imagination, or, Which Came First: The Critic or the Author?”, Literary Imagination 1 (1999): 133–37.

⁷⁰For many examples of this phenomenon, see Allan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992)—he shows how the mechanics of book production in the nineteenth century introduced all sorts of contingency into the final product. As he puts it in one case, “stereotype plates were subject to an insidious typographical entropy through which textual changes that nobody intended could occur” (p. 4). See also pp. 160, 164. For some specific examples of authors failing to spot textual changes introduced during the printing process by mistake, see p. 40 (William Makepeace Thackerary), p. 41 (Charles Dickens), and p. 48 (George Eliot).

⁷¹I am not setting up a classification of literature here based strictly on length—“short works are perfect in form; long works are imperfect.” Many long works of literature may be governed by a careful, overarching plan and achieve a remarkable consistency in structure, imagery, and other literary aspects—one thinks of Dante's Divine Comedy or Joyce's Ulysses. By the same token, it is perfectly possible that a brief lyric might contain inconsistencies. I am talking simply about a literary rule of thumb—the longer the work, the more likely that it will contain inconsistencies and imperfections.

⁷²In the case of Dickens, for example, a large amount of the working material for his novels has survived and it is available in facsimile reproduction and transcription in Harry Stone, ed., Dickens’ Working Notes for His Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In a note to Little Dorrit, for example, we can see Dickens planning how to structure his novel around parallel scenes: “A companion scene between father & daughter, to the old scene in the Marshalsea” (p. 293). On Dickens's planning of his novels, see Gary Saul Morson, “Contingency and the Literature of Process,” Bakhtin and the Classics, R. Bracht Branham, ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 254.

⁷³See Dooley, Author and Printer, pp. 94, 99:

a genuine second edition was guaranteed for most serialized works, when they came out in volume form after the last magazine installment or monthly part had appeared. Successful authors who regularly published their works initially as serials knew they would have a chance to revise their entire texts, and could plan accordingly. Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, Arnold, Trollope, and Hardy, for example, all at various times submitted work for serial publication already knowing that they would make changes for subsequent publication in book form.... Many Victorian authors seem to have taken a perfectabilitarian view of their texts, looking forward from the time of first publication to a series of editions and impressions, each affording an occasion to reduce errors, correct misstatements, add clarifications, or revise in response to criticism.

⁷⁴For an example in Dostoevsky's composition of The Idiot, see Morson, Narrative and Freedom, p. 137:

part I of The Idiot contains much stronger signs of a future conflict between Myshkin and Ganya—constant misunderstandings, insults, vague threats, and a blow—all of which seem to lay the groundwork for them to be significant enemies. When Ganya ominously (and eponymously) calls Myshkin an idiot, the full weight of the title seems to promise a dramatic clash. But in fact Ganya turns into a minor, though frequently present, character, and nothing significant or “fatal” takes place between him and Myshkin.... In the notebooks written after the publication of part I, [Dostoevsky] reminds himself to do something more with Ganya but never does.

⁷⁵Morson, Narrative and Freedom, p. 24, points out that authors often cover over the process by which their works were written:

the creative process typically traces not a single line to a goal but a series of false leads, missed opportunities, new possibilities, improvisations, visions, and revisions. It is constituted by an intention that evolves over time. To be sure, authors typically remove the traces of this process and present their work as if it were the product of a clear plan, known from the outset. By convention, works are usually offered as the expression of an intention that is essentially instantaneous even if it took time to execute and takes time to appreciate. After the work is complete, the authors remove the “scaffolding,” as Bakhtin liked to say.

⁷⁶See Pam Morris's introduction to her edition of Wives and Daughters (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. viii–ix:

For her contemporary readers, this last novel along with Cranford (1853) represented her greatest achievements. No less a figure than Henry James wrote of it: “... in ‘Wives and Daughters’ the late Mrs. Gaskell has added to the number of those works of fiction—of which we can not perhaps count more than a score as having been produced in our time—which will outlast the duration of their novelty and continue for years to come to be read and relished for a higher order of merits.... So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out.” Another contemporary reviewer praised the novel above the work of Jane Austen and George Eliot.

⁷⁷Pam Morris, “A Note on the Text,” Wives and Daughters, p. xxxiv.

⁷⁸Wives and Daughters, p. 96.

⁷⁹Ibid., p. 104.

⁸⁰Ibid., p. 108

⁸¹Ibid., p. 132.

⁸²Ibid., p. 663.

⁸³Ibid., p. 192.

⁸⁴Ibid., p. 258.

⁸⁵Ibid., p. 6.

⁸⁶Ibid., p. 648.

⁸⁷My point in discussing Wives and Daughters is indeed to offer an extreme case—to show that even when an author dies before finishing a novel and hence perfecting it, she may have finished enough for us still to be able to treat it as a (relatively) successful artistic whole. Just as Darwin does in the biological realm and Mises in the economic realm, we do not always have to speak of “absolute perfection” in the aesthetic realm. Darwin points the way with his criterion of biological sufficiency—just as an animal may be “perfect enough” to survive in a given environment without being absolutely perfect, we may say that a novel is “perfect enough” to provide a coherent aesthetic experience without being absolutely perfect.

⁸⁸See Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Patricia Ingham, ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. xxvii–xxviii; Ingram says of the second edition:

The edition also rightly removed the second occurrence of two paragraphs which appear erroneously in the first edition.... The repetition is evidently to be accounted for by the insertion of much additional material to the serial edition for the volume edition, immediately after their first occurrence. Gaskell then evidently overlooked this earlier use and repeated them at the end of the added material. In the second edition the second of these passages is deleted.... There were many other careful corrections.

⁸⁹See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

⁹⁰See my “Literary Imagination,” pp. 137–43.

⁹¹The theorist most closely associated with the position that the novel is the most complex of literary forms is Mikhail M. Bakhtin (especially in the way he contrasts the novel with the epic). See, for example, a collection of his essays entitled The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). For a discussion of Bakhtin's theory of the novel, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially pt. III, “Theories of the Novel,” pp. 272–470.

⁹²See Erickson, Literary Form, “Marketing the Novel, 1820–1850,” pp. 142–69.

⁹³For products connected to Dickens's first great commercial success, The Pickwick Papers, see Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 197. See also Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, & Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p.36: “after the publication of Pickwick, Weller cabs were plying the streets. Pickwick's name was written in gold: versions of it were soon affixed to the most popular penny cigars and a writing pen, and Pickwick toby mugs, Sawyer cough drops, Weller boot polish, and candy tins printed with Pickwickian revels began to be sold” (for products associated with other Dickens novels, see p. 52). In the Victorian period, Dickens was as merchandised as any celebrity is in the world today. Wicke discusses what may be the first example of a “product placement” in one of the original Pickwick illustrations:

Depicting Mr. Weller helping his son Samuel... the picture clearly shows a placard on the mantel... reading distinctly “Guinness Dublin Stout.” The placard was originally the wooden crate side of the box containing Guinness; by being replicated in the illustration for Pickwick, it became an ad peeping out over Weller's head. (p. 30)

⁹⁴For some examples of the amounts involved, see Erickson, Literary Form, p. 159.

⁹⁵For an extended study of the parallels, see Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

⁹⁶Angus Easson in his introduction to The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972) discusses Dickens's use of cliffhangers in that novel:

Dickens exploited these opportunities for keeping his readers in suspense: for example, at the close of Clock 30, Nell shrieks and faints at the sight of a figure ahead of them on the road leading out of the second industrial city. The reader had to restrain his impatience for a week—or a whole month, if he was relying only on the monthly parts— when the opening chapter of the next number would immediately identify the figure as.... Again, at the end of Clock 39, Dick Swiveller is suddenly “seized with an alarming illness, and in twenty-four hours was stricken with a raging fever.” Another week or month intervenes before his fate is known. (p. 15)

(Clock stands for Master Humphrey's Clock, the weekly magazine in which The Old Curiosity Shop first appeared.)

⁹⁷Erickson, Literary Form, p. 163, points out that “some authors..., such as Charles Lever, an Irish novelist..., found serial publication an artistic advantage because from the responses of readers that he received to installments he could judge ‘what characters & incidents tell best with readers’” (italics in the original). See also Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, “Textual/sexual Pleasure and Serial Production,” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, John O. Jordan and Robert I. Patten, eds. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 145.

⁹⁸For examples of Dickens expanding the role of his characters or killing them off in response to sales figures, see Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, pp. 58–59, 61; see especially p. 58: “he greatly expanded Sam Weller's role in Pickwick Papers, when sales jumped to forty thousand after Sam's first appearance.” Delany discusses the same phenomenon in Thackeray; see Literature, Money and the Market, p. 98 and especially p. 206, n. 3, where he notes Thackeray's “decision to ‘kill’ Mrs Proudie during the serialization of The Last Chronicle of Barset.”

⁹⁹Cf. Delany's comment:

This is not to say that the market always knows best.... But cultural critics should admit their ignorance of precisely why “art happens,” and should not assume that they can point the way to an alternative society whose art would be superior to that of the existing order. (Literature, Money and the Market, p. 122).

¹⁰⁰An extreme case is provided by The Old Curiosity Shop; Dickens did not originally intend this work to be a novel at all, but rather a sort of loose miscellany of tales and essays; only pressure from his public forced him to develop one of them at novel length. The character of Little Nell proved to be so popular, boosting sales from “60,000 of the first number” to “an unprecedented 100,000 copies” (Easson, Curiosity Shop, p. 13), that Dickens decided to devote a whole book to her story. But as Easson points out, Dickens paid a price in aesthetic imperfections in The Old Curiosity Shop for this midcourse change in plan:

The awkward results of this last-minute expansion of the little tale can be detected in the early part of the novel.... The malicious profligate Fred Trent is soon dropped as Dickens prefers to develop the far more spectacular malice of Quilp, and Dick Swiveller's engaging profligacy. The Sophie Wackles episode proves to be a hilarious irrelevancy. Kit, who is introduced as a harmless semi-idiot, occasioning some light relief in Chapter 1, by some twenty chapters later has become an earnest responsible young man. (p. 14)

¹⁰¹See Dooley, Author and Printer, p. 147 for Anthony Trollope's quarrel with the serial publication system:

Trollope did not wish to succumb to “this hurried publication of incompleted work.” He held that “the rushing mode of publication to which the system of serial stories had given rise, and by which small parts as they were written were sent hot to the press, was injurious to the work done.” To Trollope's eyes, the serial system, when it came to affect not only the publication but also the initial composition of a work, resulted in a loss of artistic control. His customary protection against pressure that might have led to hasty publication was to complete a novel and revise it thoroughly before sending any of it to a publisher. If serial issue was planned, he then metered out the manuscript to the printers while he went to work on his next book.

Erickson, Literary Form, pp. 162–63, quotes from Harriet Martineau's Autobiography to show how one Victorian author objected particularly to the cliffhanger convention of serial publication:

I could not conscientiously adopt any method so unprincipled in an artistic sense as piecemeal publication. Whatever other merits it may have, a work of fiction cannot possibly be good in an artistic sense which can be cut up into portions of an arbitrary length. The success of the portions requires that each should have some sort of effective close; and to provide a certain number of these at regular intervals, is like breaking up the broad lights and shadows of a great picture, and spoiling it as a composition. I might never do any thing to advance or sustain literary art; but I would never do nothing to corrupt it, by adopting a false principle of composition.

¹⁰²A good example is provided by the case of Gaskell's North and South, originally serialized in Dickens's periodical Household Words. As Patricia Ingham writes in her edition:

Thanks partly to miscalculation on [Dickens's] part, Gaskell found herself pressurized to make the work shorter than she intended. What from her viewpoint constituted the worst compression was that made in the last few chapters of the novel. Consequently for the first (two) volume edition... the narrative was considerably expanded. (p. xxvii)

For a detailed analysis of the conflict between Gaskell and Dickens over the text of North and South, see Hughes and Lund, “Textual-sexual Pleasure,” pp. 151–59. Gaskell was so upset by her experience with North and South that she did not allow any of her subsequent novels to be serialized until Wives and Daughters. In view of the problems Dickens created for Gaskell, it is ironic that early in his own career he himself found that serial publication inhibited him: “I was obliged to cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter. I hadn't room to turn” (quoted in Easson, Curiosity Shop, p. 15).

¹⁰³See, for example, Feltes, Modes of Production, p. 9:

Whether the commodity-text is to take the particular form of a series of books, a magazine serial, or a part-issue novel, series production, by allowing the bourgeois audience's ideological engagements to be sensed and expanded, allows as well the extraction of ever greater surplus value from the very production (or “creative”) process itself.

¹⁰⁴Gary Saul Morson, “The Prosaics of Process,” Literary Imagination 2 (2000): 378–79.

¹⁰⁵As Morson, following Bakhtin, formulates the point, Dostoevsky creates a kind of novel which “allows the hero to be truly free, capable of surprising not only other characters but also the author.... Strange as it may seem the Dostoevskian hero is not wholly the author's product; once created, he has a life of his own” (Narrative and Freedom, p. 91). Morson points out that other authors have had similar experiences with the “freedom” of their characters, but they usually revise their novels accordingly:

To be sure, other authors are often surprised by their characters, whose inner logic may invalidate an earlier plan. It is not unusual for an author to discover that a character “refuses to do” what the author has destined for him; that is, the author recognizes that the outcome he or she has in mind would be perceived as false and forced. But in such cases most authors revise so that their surprise is not visible to readers. They may rewrite earlier sections so that the desired outcome does not appear forced or they may recast the novel so that what turned out to be the better outcome is prepared for all along. In either case the surprise that altered the original plan is masked. (Narrative and Freedom, p. 98)

What strikes Morson about Dostoevsky is the degree to which he accepted the freedom of his characters and hence the open-endedness of his narratives:

The notebooks to The Idiot reveal conclusively that even after Dostoevsky had published the first part, he had little idea of how to continue. To mention just a few important questions of plot, he did not know whether Nastasya Filippovna would marry Rogozhin or Myshkin; whether she would kill herself, be killed, or die naturally, or whether Rogozhin would be damned or saved. (Narrative and Freedom, p. 136)

¹⁰⁶Morson, “Prosaics,” p. 385.

¹⁰⁷Ibid., pp. 380–81. See also Morson, Narrative and Freedom, pp. 169–70 and “Contingency,” pp. 266–67.

¹⁰⁸A critic might counter Morson's claims by insisting that the fact that “no overall design governs” in Tolstoy's novels is itself his overall design. To be sure, Tolstoy was ultimately responsible for the form his novels took and in that sense one can speak of intentionality being at work in his writing. Still, Morson is right to insist on the difference between novelists who plan out their works completely in advance and novelists who deliberately build an element of spontaneity into their creative process (with the understanding that there are all kinds of intermediate and borderline cases). As we have seen, the resulting novels look quite different, and, as Morson shows, they may embody distinct views of human existence. The central insight behind the concept of spontaneous order is that structure and form can be achieved without an “overall design.” The idea of spontaneous order is important precisely because it supplies a middle term between perfect design and pure chance.

¹⁰⁹Morson, Narrative and Freedom, pp. 170–72; see also Morson, “Contingency,” p. 268.

¹¹⁰Compare the way Kirzner contrasts the Austrian view of human action with that of neoclassical equilibrium theory:

It is impossible to imagine any real-world situation in which a decision-maker does not recognise that he must make his choices within an open-ended context. The decision-maker is not presented, as it were, with given resources. On the contrary, it is in the course of the decision itself that the human decision-maker determines what objectives are most important, and what resources are in fact available to him.... The inescapable and radical uncertainty faced by each human agent ensures the open-endedness of human choice. (How Markets Work, p. 26; italics in the original)

Morson and Kirzner are clearly describing the same world, one in literary terms, one in economic.

¹¹¹See especially Morson, Narrative Freedom, pp. 249–51, for the way he draws upon Stephen Jay Gould's interpretation of Darwinian evolution.

¹¹²Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 210. See also his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 146, n. 5 and his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 72–77.

¹¹³Moretti, “Slaughterhouse,” p. 209.

¹¹⁴Ibid., p. 211.

¹¹⁵Ibid., pp. 211, 215.

¹¹⁶Through a careful mode of empirical investigation written up in “Slaughterhouse,” Moretti shows that Doyle, in contrast to all his contemporaries, figured out by a process of trial and error the optimal use of the new fictional device of clues in detective stories (they should be necessary, visible, decodable, and so on).

¹¹⁷As Moretti puts it, “if it is perverse to believe that the market always rewards the better solution, it is just as perverse to believe that it always rewards the worse one!” (“Slaughterhouse,” p. 219, n. 12). In view of this pro-market statement, readers may be surprised to hear that Moretti generally describes himself as a Marxist; indeed he is very much embedded in the tradition of Marxist literary criticism, and often quotes Marx himself approvingly. Nevertheless, his empirical studies of literary history have led him to an understanding of how competitive markets function and contribute to the evolution of literary forms. Moretti seems more comfortable with the language of Darwin rather than that of Adam Smith, but whatever terms he chooses, he is in fact discussing the aesthetic benefits of capitalist competition.

¹¹⁸See Moretti, “Slaughterhouse,” p. 210 for the equivalent in the eighteenth century:

if one looks at the table of “the most popular novelists by editions printed 1750–1769,” it's quite clear that the interplay of readers and publishers in the marketplace had completely shaped the canon of the eighteenth-century novel many generations before any academic ever dreamed of teaching a course on the novel: on that list of editions, Sterne is first, Fielding second, Smollett fourth, Defoe fifth, Richardson sixth, Voltaire eleventh, Goldsmith fifteenth, Cervantes seventeenth, and Rousseau nineteenth. They are all there.

¹¹⁹Biological and cultural evolution both involve a process of variation and then selection from among the variants by some kind of feedback. But the process of selection in the two cases is fundamentally different. By founding his theory on the concept of natural selection, Darwin emphasized the fact that conscious choice by something resembling the human mind is nowhere involved in the process. In all forms of cultural evolution, including literary, the human mind of course does come into play and conscious selections must be made. Cultural evolution in fact resembles Darwin's chief analogy for natural selection—the domestic breeding of animals. The first chapter of The Origin of Species is entitled “Variation under Domestication” and shows how species change over time when human beings set out deliberately and consciously to alter them in line with ideas of how they might be improved. This chapter makes it clear that Darwin himself recognized that evolution can occur as a result of either conscious or unconscious processes. And he recognized how the processes differ; domestic breeding, for example, produces results much faster than the unconscious process of natural selection. So too does cultural evolution, because, unlike biological evolution, it is decidedly “Lamarckian”—in literary evolution, for example, acquired characteristics can be inherited (which is to say that literary developments and traditions are passed down to new generations directly). For further discussion of the important differences between biological and cultural evolution, see Hayek, Fatal Conceit, pp. 23–28. See also Moretti, Graphs, pp. 78–80 and his brief note, “Structure, Change, and Survival: A Response to Winthrop-Young,” Diacritics 29, no. 2 (1999): 41–42, where he discusses the “Lamarckian” implications of his theory of literary evolution. This is a point where Moretti would be better off using the language of economics instead of that of evolutionary biology.

¹²⁰See Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, p. 20. On p. 150, n. 19, Hayek quotes Ferguson's exact words from his An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767): “Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, p. 367, n. 7 argues that Hayek took Ferguson's words out of context and misinterpreted them as applying to the free market, rather than to God's providence in history, as Ferguson intended.

¹²¹For the classic account of the conflict between central planning and spontaneous order in the modern city, see Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1993). See also Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 102–46. The fact that the urban landscape offers an example of spontaneous order is profoundly relevant to our understanding of the novel. As many critics have noted, the development of the novel is intimately bound up with the development of the modern city. One might even say that the novel was developed in order to represent one of the principal forms of spontaneous order—the modern city. For the connection between the novel and the modern city, see Moretti, Atlas, pp. 77–140. At one point Moretti describes the way city dwellers in Balzac come together as a “sinister parody of Smith's invisible hand” (p. 95).

¹²²This is the crucial point at which we must remind ourselves that Austrian economics is not a species of Darwinism, but an independent form of thinking. Both the free market and biological evolution are forms of spontaneous order, but the mechanism that brings about the order is different in each case. The conscious human mind is very much involved in the economic realm, whereas it is barred from natural selection in Darwin's understanding. That is why the market economy is of a higher order of complexity than the biological realm—and why it is more “spontaneous”—faster moving and more unpredictable. Both Morson and Moretti gain insight into culture as a spontaneous order by invoking concepts from Darwin, but they would actually be able to describe the process of literary creation better if they employed the more relevant concepts of Austrian economics.

¹²³On the principle of consumer sovereignty, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 270–72.

¹²⁴Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Martin Nicolaus, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 94.

¹²⁵Marx's awe of the productive power of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie is clearly evident in his tributes to its industrial achievements in the Communist Manifesto; see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, English Edition of 1888, in Feuer, Basic Writings, pp. 8–13, and especially p. 12. See also Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, p. 374.

¹²⁶For a rethinking of the Industrial Revolution as driven by an earlier revolution in consumption, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), especially p. 9.

¹²⁷For a discussion of this aspect of the Soviet economy, particularly in the era of the five-year plans, see Rutland, Myth of the Plan, p. 109:

The 1930s growth model was built around the sheer expansion in the volume of factors of production set to work. Capital investments were jacked up to the highest bearable level (with a concomitant drop in the share of resources going to consumption).... The result is an extremely lopsided economy, in which a disproportionate amount of resources never actually leave the industrial sector.

Rutland points out that Michael Polanyi characterized this phenomenon “cleverly” as “conspicuous production” (p. 110). For further critique of overproduction of capital goods in the Soviet economy, see pp. 115, 135–36, 138.

¹²⁸For the classic statement of the Frankfurt School position, see “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1986), pp. 120–67. For a critique of this position, see Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright, Culture, p. 96. See also my essay, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School: America as Wasteland in Edgar Ulmer's Detour” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, Mark Conard, ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), pp. 139–61.

¹²⁹See the section “Why is it musical chairs in the Hollywood studio executive suite?” in Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 114–15. On Hollywood's inability to control its audience, see pp. 117–18:

A Hollywood blockbuster such as Independence Day can make over $200 million in North American box office, whereas another movie with similar costs can open at as many theatres and flop, taking in only one or two million.... The fallibility of even the Hollywood majors in predicting success is illustrated by the many industry hits turned down by various studios, including Star Wars, Back to the Future, Driving Miss Daisy, and Dances with Wolves.

For a detailed account of the rapid turnover of motion picture executives even in the golden age of the studio system studied by the Frankfurt School, see Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). For a treatment of the same phenomenon in the contemporary television industry, see Bill Carter, Desperate Networks (New York: Doubleday, 2006). For amusing accounts of some of the movie industry's most spectacular failures to predict—let alone create—demand, see James Robert Parish, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2006).

¹³⁰For a general discussion of these issues, see John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2003), especially pp. 48–62. For the turn in Cultural Studies to the idea of the active consumer, see Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright, Culture, pp. 19, 89–92. For the French theorist often credited with bringing about this turn, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendell, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), especially pp. 164–76. For some specific studies of the active cultural consumer, see, for example, Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Rout-ledge, 1994) and John Tullock and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Their Fans (London: Routledge, 1995). Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, offers extensive evidence of the way that fans of serial forms from the Victorian novel to the television soap opera have influenced the direction of popular culture. As she writes:

In the last two decades, critics working to reverse both the long-standing rejection of mass culture and the more insidious rejections of audience agency... have sought, in various ways, to assert the relative autonomy of the consumer.... Creators’ innovations, artistic power, and complexity work to increase the texts' value for audiences and arise not in spite of the pressure to catch and keep a mass audience but in many cases as a result of that pressure.... Serial fans contribute to the shaping of their narratives, and creators attest to the creative inspiration this interaction can provide; on the other hand, creators also have the power to resist fan pressure and often do resist to keep texts from becoming too predictable and thus lessen their ability to intrigue and involve their audiences. (pp. 10–12)

Or as De Certeau succinctly puts it: “it is always good to remind ourselves that we musn't take people for fools” (p. 176).

¹³¹As John Ellis observes: “The fantasy of the single, centralized, multinational corporate agenda is only the mirror image of Marxism's desire for conformity and control; neither does justice to the diversity of human life” (Literature Lost, pp. 131–32).

¹³²Feltes, Modes of Production, pp. 97–98.

¹³³In developing the idea that producers create demand, rather than responding to it, Feltes begins by rejecting any “assertion which arises out of ‘free market’ assumptions, based on the simple efficacy of ‘demand.’” He goes on to claim that “the publishers may be seen to have eventually so expanded net books as sophisticated ‘branded goods’ that ‘demand’ became a controlled effect of production.” Publishers thus succeeded, according to Feltes, in

creating a new audience, although ideologically it might be explained as “satisfying a demand.” Publishers were now in a position in the economic structure to undertake in a controlled way the creation of the kinds of mass audiences which the different careers of Charles Dickens and Charles Knight, seventy-five years earlier, had shown to be accessible to a new literary mode of production, by exploiting systematically the power of a commodity-text to interpellate an infinity of unknown subjects. (Modes of Production, pp. 87–88)

Because of Feltes's Marxist failure to see the link between consumption and production, he misinterprets the role of publishers. For a critique of the general idea that entrepreneurs create demand, see Kirzner, How Markets Work, pp. 54–58.

¹³⁴It is true that, as many critics have noted, books for the mass market are often produced according to a formula (the Harlequin romance plot, for example). But such books rarely become bestsellers. The bestseller is often precisely the book that breaks the mold—and then is imitated endlessly in later works. This is how all markets operate; the truly innovative product is then copied by competitors. It is also true that some bestselling authors in effect become brand names, and can continue to churn out bestsellers according to a proven formula (perhaps no longer even writing the books themselves but merely allowing their names to be attached to ghostwritten texts). But as any publisher will admit, no one's name on a cover can guarantee that the book will be a bestseller. As with all markets, the book business has some elements of predictability, and at any given moment publishers have some idea of what is likely to sell. But, on the whole, publishing remains maddeningly unpredictable for those actively engaged in the business. Marxist critics betray their Hegelian roots by ignoring the element of contingency in publishing history and continually showing that what happened in the book market somehow had to happen according to the iron laws of capitalism. On “the extraordinary degree of uncertainty about consumer demand” in any form of mass entertainment, see Hoskins, McFadyen, and Finn, Global Television, pp. 113–30, and especially their conclusion: “There is no magic formula that a producer can apply to consistently turn out successes” (p. 118). It is a sad commentary on the current state of culture critique when it now takes professors of business economics to remind us that “creativity is an extraordinarily elusive concept” (p. 113) and cannot be reduced to a mechanical formula.

¹³⁵See especially Graphs, p. 77:

when a new genre first arises, and no “central” convention has yet crystallized, its space-of-forms is usually open to the most varied experiments. And, then, there is the pressure of the market. The twenty-five authors of the Strand Magazine are all competing for the same, limited market niche, and their meanderings through morphospace have probably a lot to do with a keen desire to outdo each other's inventions: after all, when mystery writers come up with an “aeronaut” who kills a hiker with the anchor of his balloon, or a somnambulist painter who draws the face of the man he has murdered, or a chair that catapults its occupants into a neighboring park, they are clearly looking for the Great Idea that will seal their success. And yet, just as clearly, aeronauts and catapults are totally random attempts at innovation, in the sense in which evolutionary theory uses the term: they show no foreknowledge—no idea, really—of what may be good for literary survival. In making writers branch out in every direction, then, the market pushes them into all sorts of crazy blind alleys; and divergence becomes indeed, as Darwin had seen, inseparable from extinction.

¹³⁶Even Feltes has to concede that “trial and error” was involved in Victorian publishing; see Modes of Production, p. 85.

¹³⁷This is the economic theory behind convenience stores, and might be called the “Twinkie defense” of capitalism. A Twinkie locked up at midnight in a bargain supermarket is worthless at that moment to the consumer who wants his late-night snack. That is why the consumer is in fact willing to pay more for the Twinkie at night than he would during the day—“convenience” is part of the value of a good.

¹³⁸Marx does discuss “distribution,” but he is using the term in its sense in classical economics—the distribution of wealth in society. See, for example, Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 88–89, 95. Marx discusses the distribution of goods in a market under the term “circulation,” and does specifically raise the issue of transportation. Characteristically, he regards the transporting of goods as adding to their value only because it involves the additional labor of moving them. See Grundrisse, pp. 522, 524, 525, 534, and especially p. 548:

Circulation can create value only in so far as it requires fresh employment—of alien labor—in addition to that directly consumed in the production process. This is then the same as if more necessary labour were used in the direct production process. Only the actual circulation costs increase the value of the product. (italics in the original)

Typically, Marx views the transporting of goods as a physical (material) problem. He does not see that the real problem is entrepreneurial and hence mental—figuring out how to get the right goods to the right place at the right time. As he does throughout his economic thought, Marx neglects the distinctive role of the entrepreneur. Given his objective theory of value, Marx cannot conceive how a good can increase in value simply by changing hands. Hence he rejects the idea that middlemen contribute value to an economy: “This kind of circulation offers the dealers all manner of speculative opportunities; but while it enriches some, it ruins the others, and the nation's wealth gains nothing thereby” (Grundrisse, p. 636). Marx also discusses the issue of what he calls “circulation” in Das Kapital, and deals specifically with the “expenses of transportation” in vol. II, pt. I, chap. VI, sec. III, where he makes the same point: “The productive capital invested in this industry adds value to the transported products, partly by transferring value from the means of transportation, partly by adding value through the labor-power used in transportation.” See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Ernest Untermann, trans. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1933), vol. 2, p. 170.

¹³⁹For a thorough study of the development of the mass reading public in Britain, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). On philanthropic efforts to spread literacy, Altick reluctantly concludes:

The village libraries, the penny-a-day circulating libraries, the mutual improvement societies, the mechanics' institute libraries—all had, for one reason or another, failed to meet the needs of intellectually ambitious workmen who could not afford the outright purchase of new books. (p. 259)

Altick goes on to show that capitalism solved the problem of making books widely available in Victorian Britain through all the usual benefits of competition (lowering of costs, innovation of products, stimulating demand, and so on). Like most literary critics, Altick is no friend of capitalism and he would never formulate his thesis this way, but in fact his book is a great tribute to the positive power of capitalism as a cultural force.

¹⁴⁰For an excellent and concrete study of the contribution of commercial editors to literary masterpieces, see Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 139–62. For a more theoretical discussion of the collaborative role of editors and publishers in the writing process, see McGann, Textual Criticism, pp. 34–35, 42–44, 52–53, 75, 78–79.

¹⁴¹The firm Darnton discusses was headquartered in Switzerland but its principal market was in France, and as its name suggests, the books it published were generally in French. The fact that the firm was located just across the French border in Switzerland allowed it to publish books in French that could not be produced in France because of censorship.

¹⁴²See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 22: “[publishers and booksellers] made it their business to mediate between supply and demand.”

¹⁴³See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 198:

They were tough businessmen who produced anything that would sell. They took risks, broke traditions, and maximized profits by quantity instead of quality production. Rather than try to corner some segment of the market by a legal monopoly, they wanted to be left alone by the state and would even bribe it to do so. They were entrepreneurs who made a business of Enlightenment.

(When Darnton speaks of “quantity instead of quality” here, he is referring to the physical appearance of the books, not their quality as literature.)

¹⁴⁴See especially the chapter “Encylopedism, Capitalism, and Revolution” in Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 460–519.

¹⁴⁵In The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Elizabeth Eisenstein also views capitalist entrepreneurship in the publishing industry as a positive cultural force. Indeed, she argues that the commercial development of printing is what made both the Renaissance and the Reformation possible. As she puts it, “eager to expand markets and diversify production, the enterprising publisher was the natural enemy of narrow minds” (p. 177). Thus, Eisenstein sees Smith's invisible hand at work in the early modern publishing industry: “The important point is that selfishness and altruism could be served at the same time” (p. 77). Above all, Eisenstein, like Darnton, stresses the role of print publishers as middlemen, as cultural mediators: “a new communications network... coordinated diverse intellectual activities while producing tangible commodities to be marketed for profit.... The activities of early printers provide a natural connection between the movement of ideas, economic developments, and affairs of church and state” (p. 263). She concludes by characterizing the early modern print industry as “a kind of marvelous alchemy to transmute private interest into public good” (p. 274). Whereas literary critics have generally failed to appreciate the contribution of capitalism to culture, historians of the book have admirably filled in the gap in our understanding.

¹⁴⁶Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 112. This book contains an important essay called “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature” (pp. 136–53).

¹⁴⁷Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, p. 111.

¹⁴⁸Eisenstein similarly characterizes the printing revolution as introducing new forms of feedback into European culture: “After printing, large-scale data collection did become subject to new forms of feedback which had not been possible in the age of scribes” (Printing Revolution, p. 76).

¹⁴⁹For a similar study in the world of art, detailing and carefully analyzing the role of commercial art dealers as cultural middlemen, see Michael C. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996). Far from being hostile to the role of markets in art, Fitzgerald views “the artist as an entrepreneur in modern culture” (p. 268). Art historians seem more open than literary critics to the possibility that free enterprise is beneficial to culture. An excellent example is Svetlana Alpers's provocative book Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Alpers concludes:

The evidence is that Rembrandt took to the new marketplace economy not only because he wanted freedom from patrons, but also because he wanted freedom for himself.... Two different but reciprocal values—that established in the marketplace and that of the individual suited to that market—are juxtaposed. Taken together, they constitute that ideology of the free market and the free individual that modern society has inherited in great part from the example of Rembrandt's Holland. (pp. 113–14)

Alpers aptly characterizes Rembrandt as “an entrepreneur of the self” (p. 118).

¹⁵⁰Feltes, Modes of Production, p. 17.

¹⁵¹See Kirzner, How Markets Work, p. 56.

¹⁵²In analyzing culture, Marxists typically mistake a necessary for a sufficient condition; they jump from the legitimate principle that material conditions inevitably affect cultural production to the illegitimate conclusion that they determine it. Dickens could not have been as commercially successful as he was if the British publishing industry had not reached a certain level of development and sophistication in his day. But the fact remains that it was something about Pickwick Papers—and not any other work—that gave the great boost to the serialized novel as a market phenomenon in Victorian England, and Dickens in his artistic genius was primarily responsible for that mysterious, creative “something.” The Pickwick phenomenon was utterly unpredictable (and in fact unpredicted)—and hence spontaneous. Dickens's discovery of a mass audience for the serialized novel in turn spurred the further economic and technological development of the British publishing industry in a pattern familiar in all types of marketing. It is, then, true that Dickens could not have reached the heights he did without the British publishing industry, but it is equally true that the British publishing industry could not have reached the heights it did without Dickens. Even if this seems like a “chicken-and-egg” controversy, Dickens's creativity has a central role to play in any proper view of the story.

¹⁵³For the connection between Marxism and Romanticism, see Alvin W. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 39–41, 267–71. Gouldner argues that Marxism paradoxically managed to combine Romanticism and scientism.

¹⁵⁴For heuristic purposes, I have set up my discussion in terms of a contrast between the perfectly planned form of the lyric poem and the more spontaneously generated and open-ended form of the novel. Let me state clearly that I regard this opposition as an oversimplification. The contrast I have been drawing is not simply a matter of genre, and in fact cuts across conventional generic distinctions. Some novelists have aspired to achieve the formal perfection of lyric poetry; one thinks particularly of “art novels” of the modern period, such as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist (note that such novels were usually not created according to the process of serial publication). By the same token, some poetry has been created by a process that involves forms of feedback and trial-and-error, and even serial publication. In his Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, McGann discusses several such cases, including Tennyson (p. 48) and Byron (pp. 59–60). In particular, McGann shows that Byron's narrative poem The Giaour does not even exist in a single definitive or perfected form because of the poem's incredibly complicated genesis, including the fact that “the poem's readers and reviewers were another important influence upon the work's development and process of accretion” (p. 60). Morson's work in developing what he calls a prosaics as opposed to a poetics also cuts across the conventional distinction between the novel and the poem. He includes among the works he regards as “governed by a processual aesthetic” several examples of works written in poetry: Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Byron's Don Juan, and Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (“Prosaics,” p. 382). Don Juan is a particularly good example of a poem that was published in installments and that has an open-ended “novelistic” form (like Gaskell, Byron did not live to finish his masterpiece or to revise it for a single-volume edition). At the same time, Morson denies that all novels, even all serialized novels, are examples of the “processual aesthetic.” See for example “Contingency,” p. 268: “To be clear: processual works are typically published serially, but the converse is not true. As Middlemarch and Bleak House testify, serial works can, and usually are, written according to an advance plan.” Morson thus distinguishes between some novels, such as The Idiot and War and Peace, which are genuinely “processual” and the majority of novels, which are not. It seems to me that most novels, even if they do not meet Morson's standards for being “processual,” still embody more elements of contingency than most lyric poems do. These are obviously very complicated matters, and I do not have the space to explore them fully here, but I want to make it clear that I am aware of these complexities and that I am not simplistically identifying the poem with perfection of literary form and the novel with spontaneity of form.

¹⁵⁵To see why nineteenth-century authors needed the services of their publishers, one might consider the counterexample of William Blake. The very model of the solitary genius, Blake in true Romantic fashion scorned the whole world of commercial publishing (in which he was brought up as an apprentice engraver) and insisted on going his own way as an author. For much of his career, he printed his own books with no editorial intervention, illustrated them himself (with help from his wife), advertised them himself, and retailed them himself. The result of Blake's total autonomy as a self-published author was that he succeeded in producing books that presumably were exactly the way he wanted them to be. But Blake paid a great price for his autonomy in financial and—I would argue—aesthetic terms. The most he ever sold of any of his self-published books was 28 copies, and with several titles, he sold only one or two. In retrospect, we would have to say that he was lucky that his works survived at all to make him famous long after his death. And although it is heresy for me to say this as a Blake scholar, perhaps works such as Milton and Jerusalem might have benefitted from a little editorial intervention. Blake might have been more successful even in artistic terms if he had been willing to meet the reading public, if not halfway, at least part of the way. One hesitates to think of Blake selling out and “going commercial,” but some regard for his readers might have led him to avoid the obscurity that often cripples his works, especially the later ones. On Blake's career as an author-publisher, see Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

¹⁵⁶Moretti, Erickson, Berman, and Delany are among the exceptions to this generalization.

¹⁵⁷K.J. Fielding, ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 156.

¹⁵⁸Speeches of Dickens, p. 157.

¹⁵⁹For examples of articles in Household Words in support of free trade, see “Silk from the Punjab” (vol. I—New Series, no. 17, 1853), “A Picture of Merchandise” (no. 450, November 6, 1858) and “Trading in Fetters” (no. 455, December 11, 1858).

¹⁶⁰I hasten to add that this does not mean that commercial and artistic success are identical. For a wide-ranging and incisive defense of commercial culture, see Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

¹⁶¹Delany does in fact identify these elements (Literature, Money and the Market, p. 102). But, then again, he was trained as an economist before he went into literary criticism. Berman is one of the few other literary critics who is willing to consider the possibility that “the integration of the artistic production into a capitalist system may in fact be salutary and a source of its emancipatory substance” (Fiction Sets You Free, p. 183). Berman concisely lays out the advantages of a commercial market for art over the patronage system, and discusses the Romantic origins of aesthetic anti-commercialism (pp. 182–84).

¹⁶²For an application of the idea of spontaneous order to the broader area of Cultural Studies, see my essay “Popular Culture and Spontaneous Order, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube” in William Irwin and Jorge J.E. Gracia, eds., Philosophy and the Interpretation of Popular Culture (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 161–86.