Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor
Edited by Jo Ann Cavallo
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 317 pp.
Though we corresponded, I never had the pleasure of meeting Paul Cantor, the American literary critic and Clifton Waller Barrett Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia. Paul died on February 26, 2022, at the age of 76. A fellow Brooklynite, Paul wrote on a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare and English Romanticism to pop culture. I was introduced to his work through our mutual friend, the late Stephen Cox, with whom he edited a fine 2010 anthology, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture.
I posted a remembrance of Paul at the time of his passing, only a few months after we had discussed a review essay that he was to submit to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Sadly, he died before being able to complete that assignment.
Paul admitted to being a “frustrated stand-up comedian,” who was looking into “booking a lounge in Vegas”—and his sense of humor was clearly fueled by his Brooklyn roots. As a native of the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, he attended P.S. 208, Meyer Levin Junior High School, and Samuel J. Tilden High School, where he became co-captain of the Math Team before going on to earn an A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard University in English literature.
He took long subway rides to see Ayn Rand lecture at Hunter College in the 1950s and remarked that it “was very exciting to see Rand speak. She had a real flare for the dramatic.” He also attended the NYC seminars of Ludwig von Mises.
Having written on literary figures as varied as Shakespeare and H. G. Wells, Paul also examined such TV series as “Gilligan’s Island,” “The X-Files,” and “Breaking Bad.”
So, I was elated to have received from editor Jo Ann Cavallo a copy of Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor (2025). A professor in the Columbia University Department of Italian since 1988, Cavallo’s own fields of specialization run the gamut from the Renaissance Romance epic to the development of Italian language, literature, and film. She has brought together a group of wonderful contributors to this formidable volume. Inspired by the interdisciplinary works of Paul Cantor and informed by libertarian philosophy and Austrian-school economics, the authors engage the fields of literature and media, from the sixteenth century to the contemporary era.
Cavallo sums up the—dare I say, “dialectical”—implications of this volume, insofar as it broadens the context that libertarian analysis must engage if it is to live up to its radical promise. She argues that
libertarian literary criticism offers a more sweeping analysis of political power structures, aimed at understanding literature and society in any time period and at any point on the globe. This interdisciplinary approach also shares with Marxist criticism the belief that politics and economics are relevant to an understanding of literary texts—as well as an underlying desire to improve the human condition—yet it offers a vastly different theoretical grounding. … The volume not only builds upon Cantor’s groundbreaking work but offers a range of directions for libertarian literary and media scholarship in the future. (3, 7)
First up, my friend and colleague, David Gordon, addresses Cantor’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, bringing to light provocative insights from personal correspondence with the author. Cantor argues that Aristotle’s notion that “man is a political animal”—that “man is that animal whose nature it is to live in a polis”—facilitates our understanding of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes whose embeddedness in their context shapes their possibilities. “A human being cannot fulfill his nature if he does not live in a city,” Cantor explains. “That is why Aristotle says that a being who by nature and not by accident lives without a city is either a beast or a god. The city gives the individual the means to fulfill himself” (20). Indeed, there is no individual that lives or flourishes outside the social, historical, and cultural context that they inhabit. This context “shapes human beings in a certain direction,” and it is “not neutral to the forms of human nature.” To this extent, Cantor observes that Shakespeare “was aligned with the ancients, especially Plato and Aristotle” (21).
In that letter to Gordon (dated January 5, 2022), Cantor views Shakespeare’s Roman trilogy (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Anthony and Cleopatra)
… as a critique of imperialism. The rise and fall of the Roman Republic show the self-defeating character of imperialism. By pursuing a policy of imperialism, Rome ended up subverting the republican character of its regime. That I think is the theme of the Roman trilogy. In teaching the book [Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy] to undergraduates, I have been known to bring up US foreign policy, and show that the US has subverted the nature of its democracy by pursuing its imperial projects abroad. You can see hints of the imperial blowback problem in the Roman plays. The US pursues an imperial project abroad—that leads foreign terrorists to attack the US; we create the Patriot Act to use against those foreigners; and pretty soon we’re being told to use it against suburban mothers at school board meetings. (22)
The remainder of Gordon’s chapter examines how Cantor’s interpretations of Hegel and Nietzsche impacted his analysis of Shakespeare. It’s a fascinating read.
Gordon’s chapter is followed by a contribution from Stephen Cox, who explores theories of comedy by using the Austrian concepts of agent-relative human action and valuation that Cantor championed. Cox’s own essay shows the same remarkable breadth that one finds in Cantor’s work, going from Aristophanes to the Mary Tyler Moore Show with ease—specifically that episode dealing with the death of Chuckles the Clown. As Cox puts it, “comedy is a sudden revaluation of the things that intimidate us, a moment of glory that we buy for ourselves at the expense of our normal array of values. You can call this the Intimidation Theory of comedy, because freedom from intimidation is what we find in laughter” (45).
There are so many other worthwhile essays in this collection. I really enjoyed Katharine Gillespie’s contribution on the “commercial self-fashioning” of the “Roaring Girl,” an early seventeenth-century public and literary figure who arose in the “context of the emergent market economy.” Known variously as Mary Frith (1589–1659) or Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl “was a cross-dressing, tobacco-smoking, hard-drinking, sword-fighting, viol-playing, ditty-singing, and unapologetically upwardly mobile businesswoman (including moneylending) of first ill and then less ill and then pretty good repute” (51). Against the backdrop of mercantilist monopolies, religious conformity, and royalist prerogative, the Roaring Girl became “a transversal force not because she subverts the errant fluxes and flows of desire that capitalism … unleashes. Rather, she is a transversal force precisely because she epitomizes it” (53). Gillespie sees Frith’s eccentric androgynous “self-fashioning as a man-woman and her embrace of commerce” as two sides of the same coin. Given the conniptions that some social conservatives have over anything that violates binary norms, Gillespie’s thesis is particularly gratifying.
Other essays examine, variously, the works of Tolstoy, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta. Even the Disney character developed by Carl Barks, Scrooge McDuck, gets central billing in a delightful chapter by Alberto Mingardi. Mingardi explores the various ways in which the character, traditionally portrayed in popular culture as the malevolent miser, is transformed into a thrifty business adventurer and treasure hunter. Mingardi points out that “Barks’s stories are a product of the 1950s, the era of de-colonization. They reflect a late, yet much felt, need to acknowledge the standing of cultures that were different from ‘the West’” (176).
Another cartoonist who contributed to the development of the Scrooge McDuck character was Don Rosa, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, whose Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck begins with the character’s Scottish immigrant roots. Rosa accomplishes “the historicization of Scrooge McDuck and the whole of the Ducks saga. … For Rosa, Scrooge is one of the millions of immigrants who reached the American shores with the goal of improving their lot and whose unflinching grit led him to face ever greater challenges until becoming the world’s richest duck” (180). This “much more complex biography” is a paean to the immigrant who “proves, over and over, to be the quintessential entrepreneur, both in his successes (he will ultimately be an astonishing success) and in his failures” (182). Moreover, Rosa’s portrait undergirds the character with virtues that are “valuable in a market society,” constituting “its cultural underpinnings.” Unlike the Dickens archetype, this Scrooge embodies what Deirdre McCloskey has called the ‘bourgeois virtues’ of “love, hope, courage, prudence, faith, justice, and temperance.” This Scrooge “care[s] about his family and also about strangers he meets in his adventures” (186-87).
Stefano Adamo takes a cinematic turn, examining the thematic content of such films as The Wolf of Wall Street and Too Big to Fail in the context of recent financial crises. These films “offer engaging perspectives,” illustrating the moral bankruptcy of their central characters. But their focus is not on “systemic critiques,” thereby “propagating a one-dimensional understanding of the crisis that ignores the complex interplay of market forces, regulatory policies, and human behavior that together wove the fabric of the financial meltdown” (210-11).
Matthew McCaffrey and Carmen-Elena Dorobat turn their attention to the realm of science fiction, while Matt Spivey explores the Yellowstone universe. The volume concludes with a Paul Cantor essay, “Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?”—the answer to which you’ll have to discover for yourself by picking up a copy of this terrific volume!
My deepest gratitude to Jo Ann Cavallo for bringing this collection to my attention. I heartily recommend it to my readers!
Notablog 