Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of . He is the author, most recently, of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo (2010) and It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes (2011). The former editorial vice president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, he is an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research fellow with the Acton Institute, and a faculty member of Acton University.

Allen Mendenhall: Jeff, this interview is exciting for me. It’s something of a reversal of the interview that we did together in January 2011. This time, I’m interviewing you. I’d like to start off by asking about your two recent books, Bourbon for Breakfast and It’s a Jetsons World. Tell the readers of this site a little about both books.

Jeffrey Tucker: Both books cover the unconventional side of private life as governed by the market and human volition. I guess you could say that this is my beat. I’m interested in the myriad ways in which the government’s central plan — and there is such a thing — has distorted and changed our lives, and also interested in the ways we can get around this plan and still live fulfilling lives. I take it as a given that everything that government does is either useless or destructive or both. The government does a tremendous number of things, so this is a huge area. Bourbon is more focused on the rottenness of the state and its harm, while Jetsons is more the marvelous things that markets do for us. Neither subject gets the attention they deserve.

AM: These books are available for free online in PDF and EPUB formats. Explain why you’ve chosen to make your work freely and widely available.

JT: Every writer wants to be read, so it only makes sense for all writers to post their material. Of course publishers tend to intervene here with promises of royalties in exchange for which you become their slave for the rest of your life plus 70 years (that’s when they dance on your grave). This is the essence of copyright. It is a bad deal for writers. Those who go along with it these days nearly always regret it later. If they actually earn royalties — and very few actually do — it is likely they would have earned more had the material not been withheld pending payment. The bestselling books of 2012 — the Hunger Games series — are posted by pirates everywhere, even against publisher wishes. But, you know, this is starting to change. Publishers are gradually seeing the point to posting material online. Sadly, they aren’t budging on the copyright issue, which is really pathetic. No libertarian should ever publish anything with any institution that is not willing to embrace a very liberal policy on reprints, and one that is likely enforceable such as Creative Commons — Attribution. Meanwhile, the government is using copyright, a phony form of property rights, to step up its despotic control over the digital age. The situation is extremely dangerous. One hundred years from now, they will be laughing at our times and poking fun at how the anachronistic state tried its best to thwart progress.

AM: You strike me as an optimist. Is that true?

JT: Not as a matter of principle but there are certain rational reasons to be very hopeful about the future. The future is always uncertain except in this one sense: it will be different from today. The state is very bad at managing change. Freedom is very good at managing change. Freedom is a form of play, a relentless process of adaptation, trial and error, of testing and pushing out the boundaries. Freedom is really marvelous at implementing an infinite world of ideas, whereas the state pretty much has only one idea: push people around. This is why freedom always ends up outrunning the ability of the state to manage it. Freedom is smarter, and connects more closely with human ambitions and dreams, and this is especially true in a digital age. For this reason, I think we have reason to be full of confidence and hope.  

AM: After a long tenure at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, you recently became publisher and executive editor of . A lot of people are anxious to see what you’re going to do with that enterprise. What can you tell them at this point?

JT: Well, I’m glad to report that we are selling books and that’s fantastic. We also have some two dozen books in the process toward publication. I’m being pretty fussy with the books overall, commissioning excellent introductions and writing all sorts of editorial prefaces and things. As we approach summer, you will see many more wonderful things happen, things that have never been done before, but I think I’ll let the details be a surprise.

AM: What is ? Many readers of this site are probably unfamiliar with it.

JT: The company has this brilliant history that traces to 1972. Murray Rothbard was in many ways at the center of its founding but there were also many Randians involved. Between that point and the digital age, it was the main way that people received libertarian literature. Oddly, one thing I’ve noticed since coming to work here is that the “curator” role is still something that Laissez Faire can play. If we can guarantee a certain number of sales on a particular book, we can make the difference as to whether it is published or not. Much to my surprise, this seems to be happening already.

I’m extremely pleased that Agora Financial took over LFB in 2011. Agora is a for-profit company with offices all over the world, and the firm has a dynamic ethos that embraces commerce, change, and progress. The past is just data in a company like this, while all the energy/action is in the future. As you might imagine, I like this environment. It is a natural home for me.

AM: Thank you so much for taking the time, Jeff. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we conclude?

JT: I have a strong sense these days that libertarianism, broadly considered, is undergoing huge changes in strategic outlook, and I’m happy about that. We are moving away from the “movement” mentality of the analog age and into a broader sense of the global universe of ideas. This means taking more risks, exploring more areas, and generally having more fun than ever. It’s a good time to love liberty.

AM: Thank you so much.  This was really great, and I hope we can do it again.

Editor’s Note: currently has some science fiction books in stock, including what looks to be some old editions as well as some stories I’d never heard of. It is my hope that LFB, under Jeffrey Tucker’s leadership, will not only continue to sell libertarian genre fiction but will also (at some point) create an imprint for publishing original libertarian fiction.

[The Literary Lawyer]

AM:  Right off the bat, it strikes me that I don’t know what to call you.  Will Neil work?

JNS:  Sure. It’s J. Neil Schulman in credits, and Neil in person.

AM:  Anyway, thank you for doing this interview, Neil.  You’ve had a fascinating and unique career.  You’ve written novels, short fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and other works.  Which of your works is your favorite and why?

JNS:  Every artist gets asked this question sooner or later. I asked it of Robert A. Heinlein when I interviewed him in 1973, and his answer was, “The latest one I’ve been working on.”

I’ve only completed one movie so far — Lady Magdalene’s — so it’s a Hobson’s Choice on that one. Ask me again when I’ve made two! But a lot of people also seem to like the script I wrote for The Twilight Zone, “Profile in Silver.”

I’ve written three novels. My first, Alongside Night [editor's note: free in pdf], seems to be my most accessible and popular. I consider my second novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to be my most layered, literary, and richest in explicit philosophy. My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is my favorite. It may not be as timely as my first novel or literary as my second novel, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart…both the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and the one which is most deceptively simple. It appears to be a lightweight piece of comic fantasy, but it’s full of ideas that if examined more closely turn both traditional theology and rationalist philosophy on their heads.

Short stories? I’ll pick a few: “The Musician,” “Day of Atonement,” and “When Freemen Shall Stand” — all in my collection Nasty. Brutish, and Short Stories — and my latest short story, “The Laughskeller,” published on my blog, J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.

AM:  Your worldview is, in a word, libertarian.  Why is that?  How does libertarianism come across in your writing?

JNS:  In my nonfiction essays it comes across explicitly. In fiction, drama, and comedy, I try to examine libertarian themes without preaching. I was probably most subtle doing this in The Rainbow Cadenza. The utilitarian politics advocated by the chief villain, Burke Filcher, is so self-consistent that a lot of readers have thought this character speaks for the author. In fact, I wrote the novel to attack utilitarianism as a nullification of the natural individual rights I believe in. The novel reduces utilitarianism to absurdity — it’s a formal satire of it.

Alongside Night is less subtle, though I’m probably more successful in the new movie script than the 1970s novel when it comes to letting the audience make up its own mind. I have learned some refinements of my craft in the last three decades.

AM:  I recently noticed that you commented on a post at the Austrian Economics and Literature blog edited by my good friend Troy Camplin.  Tell me about the influence that Austrian economics has had on you.

JNS:  I would say that Austrian economics — and more fundamentally, the analytical tools of praxeology and games theory — have been fundamental to my work for my entire professional career. They’re not the only tools in my kit, but they get shopworn as much as any of them. Austrian economics is most explicit in Alongside Night, projecting the social and political consequences of fiat money hyperinflation — but I used games theory in plotting “Profile in Silver” and applied praxeology to the afterlife in Escape from Heaven.

AM:  What are some of your latest projects?  Is there anything you’re working on that our readers should be anticipating?

JNS:  That’s the easiest question you’ve asked me. I’m in production on the movie I adapted from Alongside Night, and won’t be working on much of anything else until it’s done. I’m the screenwriter, the producer, and the director. I’m even acting in one of the supporting roles. I’ll be supervising every phase of post-production and making the plans and deals for distribution.

AM:  You’ve written in a variety of genres?  Do you prefer one above the others?

JNS:  I never write within a genre. I consider genres to be artificial marketing categories designed to make writers imitate past successes. I use Louis Sullivan’s architectural principle of “form follows function.” So it’s my goal to let the internal logic of characters and story determine “what happens next” — no matter what premises this requires and where it takes me. I have within my unwritten-stories file a multigenerational saga that starts in the past as historical fiction, continues in present day as “mainstream,” and concludes in the future as science fiction. How could I ever write that if I believed in the limits of genre?

AM:  Okay, to end, I want to ask, what are you reading right now?  What does a guy like you read for pleasure on a day-to-day basis?

JNS:  I have tons of news and related text I need to read on a daily basis simply to stay current.

Reading for pleasure? I’ve promised my daughter that I’ll finish the Harry Potter series before I get on to anything else — but I do have a movie to finish first!

AM:  Thank you so much, Neil, for taking the time.  I want to make sure we do this again soon.  There are other things I want to ask, but I’ll have to hold off for another day.

JNS:  My pleasure.

In part because of his longstanding support for free market economics, scholars of literature have overlooked Hazlitt’s literary criticism; and Austrian economists — perhaps for lack of interest, perhaps for other reasons — have done little to restore Hazlitt’s place among the pantheon of twentieth-century literary critics. Yet Hazlitt deserves that honor. He may not have been a Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, or Kenneth Burke, but Hazlitt’s criticism is valuable in negative terms: he offers a corrective to much that is wrong with literary criticism, both then and now. His positive contributions to literary criticism seem slight when compared to those of the figures named in the previous sentence. But Hazlitt is striking in his ability to anticipate problems with contemporary criticism, especially the tendency to judge authors by their identity. Hazlitt’s contributions to literary criticism were not many, but they were entertaining and erudite, rivaling as they did the literary fashions of the day and packing as much material into a few works as other critics packed into their entire oeuvres.

Hazlitt became literary editor of The Nation — a position once held by Paul Elmer More — in 1930. At that time, formalism was the dominant school of literary analysis in Russia, and the New Criticism was in its nascent stages in America. The former scrutinized supposedly invariant linguistic patterns or grammars of poetry and sought to divorce authorial biography from textual criticism. Formalism also sought to break down literature into its constituent elements: form, irony, meter, voice, plot, point of view, and so forth. Proponents of Russian formalism included Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobson. Each of these men produced idiosyncratic works that have in common a certain attention to the manifest structure of language. Each considered syntactical systems as imperative to the organization and meaning of artistic works. In 1930, the same year in which Hazlitt assumed his position at The Nation, Shklovsky renounced formalism, which had come under assault by socialist and communist ideologues who insisted that criticism tow party lines and tolerate no dissent. It would be another three decades at least before Russian formalism received extensive critical treatment in America — except among small Slavicist academic circles — but the commonalities shared by formalism and the New Criticism reveal something (what, exactly, is debatable) about the global trajectory of literary criticism during a topsy-turvy era.

Spearheaded mostly by conservative Southern gentlemen who maintained traditional literary and aesthetic values and who recognized the self-referential unity of texts, the New Criticism sought to preserve the integrity of writing by isolating works of literature from sociological and historical externalities. The New Criticism championed close reading and rigorous explication and identified the importance of textual structure to meaning. For this reason, the New Criticism was principally pedagogical. It achieved its fullest realization in the works of Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, Allen Tate, William K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley (the latter two together coined the term “intentional fallacy” to refer to interpretive assumptions about authorial intent). During Hazlitt’s tenure at The Nation, only Richards and William Empson had published works that would later fall within the ambit of the New Criticism, which drew its name from the title of Ransom’s 1941 work bearing those words as its title. Only the New Humanists — most notably, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More — had gained similar widespread recognition as public intellectuals and distinguished litterateurs in the classical tradition, although a number of rhetoricians, philosophers, linguists, and thinkers — Kenneth Burke in America, Martin Heidegger in Germany, Wittgenstein in Austria and England, Sartre in France — had gathered notable followers for their less traditional methods and practices.

Hazlitt published The Anatomy of Criticism in 1933, not long before he would succeed H.L. Mencken as editor of The American Mercury. The book does not fit neatly within established critical paradigms. Its ability to circumvent totalizing labels and to defy reductive classification is arguably its most stunning achievement. That same year, Babbit died, having recently seen the publication of On Being Creative (1932), a collection of penetrating essays on culture and education. Also that year, George Santayana, now living in Europe, came out with Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy; T.S. Eliot held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard University; Robert Frost published The Lone Striker; the once notorious Bloomsbury Group began to lose its luster and novelty; Gertrude Stein released The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; James Joyce’s Ulysses found print in the United States; the Harlem Renaissance reached its zenith; and notable poets — William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound — blessed us with memorable and powerful verse. In short, Hazlitt’s book of criticism appeared during a flowering age for literature (although not for politics!) across the English-speaking world. These various works and movements reflect differing attitudes and literary standards from place to place, but their simultaneous production and proliferation bespeak of the prominence that literature, then a cultural touchstone, once enjoyed.

The Anatomy of Criticism unfortunately lacks the Austrian perspective that eventually set Hazlitt apart from fashionable thinkers and commentators on economics. Its themes, arguably old-fashioned, recall such eighteenth-century writings as David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” Hazlitt questions, for instance, whether there are universal criteria for taste. He uses the term “criticism” to signify the evaluation of works of literature according to definite standards. If this approach seems dated, perhaps snobbish, it is because few critics besides Harold Bloom — who made a name for himself by evaluating works based on style, suggestive value, distinctiveness, permanence, and artistry — still deal in these debates.

The Anatomy of Criticism opens with an apology. “Somehow I feel that I ought to apologize for having cast the present volume in dialogue,” Hazlitt submits, adding, “I do not know precisely why one should feel obliged to offer excuses for employing a form that goes back at least to Plato, that has been used by Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Landor, and, in our own day, by Lowes Dickinson and Santayana.” This apology seems like an appropriate opening, not because an apology was in order but because the apology as a medium calls attention to the dualities at work in a writer’s mind. By employing dialogue, Hazlitt shows that he isn’t cocksure or unreflective about his positions, which he apparently arrives at only after challenging himself (or his alter egos). That spirit of inquiry informs Hazlitt’s methodology throughout; for he claims not to attempt to prove that one side or another is true, but “by trying to get at the difficulty and determining in what respect and to what extent each side is justified.” This measured approach stood in contradistinction to the emerging Marxist criticism that took as its starting point particular essentialized assumptions about the nature of man and class relations, and that presupposed answers to questions without so much as testing or validating the logical — or practical — links between those answers and questions.

Hazlitt divided The Anatomy of Criticism into ten dialogues and appended the book with two short essays: “Literature and the Class War” and “Marxism or Tolstoyism?” Hazlitt’s most prescient piece in this volume — and the only one written in the first person — is “Literature and the ‘Class War,’” which picks away at various Marxist routines of literary criticism. Some sixty years before contemporary literary Marxists like Terry Eagleton or Fredric Jameson underwent pointed reproach for their reductionist and determinist class/culture critiques, Hazlitt wrote, quite prophetically,

One feels that few of the writers whose [Marxist] theories are being examined will trouble to weigh on their merits any of the specific objections offered. For most of the nouveau-Marxists know all the answers in advance. They know that any critic who questions any item in the Marxian ideology is a ‘bourgeois’ critic, and that his objections are ‘bourgeois’ criticisms, and from that terrible and crushing adjective there is no appeal. For the bourgeois critic, if I understand the nouveau-Marxists rightly, has less free will than a parrot. He is mere phonography, who can only repeat the phrases and opinions with which he has been stuffed from his reading of bourgeois literature and his contacts with bourgeois science and bourgeois art. All these make up bourgeois culture, which is a mere class culture, i.e., an elaborate and colossal system of apologetics; worse, an instrument for class dominance and class oppression.

The irony, or paradox, was that the Marxist critics who recycled and re-inscribed tired attacks on bourgeois culture were many of them from the privileged classes. Hazlitt points to the fact that Marx and Lenin were highly literate, even immersed in the artistic and aesthetic tastes of the bourgeois culture, to suggest that “a work literature is not necessarily to be dismissed as inferior because it grows out of a society in which social injustice prevails, even if it is the product of an oppressing class or of a slave-holding class.” Qualifying this statement, Hazlitt adds, “To call a work of literature ‘bourgeois’ … would not have meant for Marx that it was necessarily not a great work. And as a corollary, to call a work of art ‘proletarian’ would not have meant for him that it was necessarily admirable.” If I am reading this right, Hazlitt’s point is that the shared knowledge and vocabularies of communities — what Michel Foucault would later call “discourse” — do not determine the thoughts of authors or the nature of aesthetic output. Marx’s ideas were no more a product of class than were, and are, the great literature of the great authors.

Hazlitt seems to suggest that writers are influenced though not determined by culture:

Shakespeare, as a seventeenth-century writer, was naturally limited by the lack of knowledge and many of the prejudices of his age; his age colors his work. Does that mean that he is of little value to the twentieth-century reader? Because Dreiser is a man, does he lose his value for women readers? Does Willa Cather lose hers for men readers? The answers to these questions are so obvious that it seems almost childish to ask them. The great writer with great imaginative gifts may universalize himself. If not in a literal sense, then certainly in a functional sense, he can transcend the barriers of nationality, age, and sex. And certainly he can, in the same functional sense and to the same degree, transcend the barrier of class.

What Hazlitt takes to task here is the Marxist denial of human agency, the totalizing view of humans as trapped within determinant positions in uninterrupted modes of production. For Hazlitt, writers and artists are more than merely inscribed in the materialist conception of history or trapped at the nexus of base and superstructure. Writers do far more than transform the mode of production into an aestheticized object validating the status quo. Great writers and artists can and do transcend their historical moment — is it too much to say, à  la Russell Kirk, that they tap into the permanent things? — even if, like Shakespeare or Dreiser or Cather or anyone, they are limited by a lack of knowledge and by the prejudices of their age. By way of analogy, the American founders could not help but hold views that transgress contemporary sensitivities and standards — just as we cannot help but hold views that later generations will find offensive or silly — yet the American founders did not simply reproduce and recite the discourses in which they were immersed. On this score, Hazlitt appears to have anticipated Paul Cantor’s celebration of Austrian economists, who, Cantor says, “do not accept the idea of a master science, one method of knowing that provides the key to understanding all phenomena.”

The personae of The Anatomy of Criticism are Elder, an essayist and professor of English literature; Arthur, a popular novelist; Middleton, a highbrow pedant and editor of a monthly philosophical and literary journal; and Young, a youthful book reviewer. These aptronymic figures converse in playful, Victorian language of the Oxbridge dinner party variety. Naysayers might accuse Hazlitt, in light of his elevated diction and lively, ostentatious syntax, of elitism or anachronism; they might also find his dialogue format equivocal and unserious. But that is a matter of taste. And as Hazlitt’s character Elder submits, “Taste is not an infallible guide even in the domain of food; as in literature, it must be supplemented by knowledge.” In any case, no one can accuse Hazlitt of wanting in literary knowledge, for his characters refer to countless critics and their theories and also reference several of what have been called “the Great Books,” as well as a few of the not-so-great ones (the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim or Temple Bailey come to mind).

In the chapter called “Criticism’s Right to Exist,” Elder has arranged for Arthur and Young to debate the baffling subject of criticism. Arthur proposes discontinuing criticism altogether, whereas Young, not to be outdone, thinks it is the critic’s duty “to render an honest report to the reading public.” The title of the chapter betrays Hazlitt’s stance on the matter. (He believes in the qualified value of criticism.) Other chapters undertake equally pressing literary matters — the meaning of an aesthetic register, the function of the critic, the effects of culture upon authors, the periodization of the canon, the politics of interpretation, the authority of our impressions, market demand as an indicator of quality, and on and on — but the explication of these chapters would require far more space than is permissible in a short article. Elsewhere, I intend to say more. For the purposes of this profiling piece, though, it will suffice to say that Hazlitt’s criticism is no less incisive for being witty and conversational. To read Hazlitt’s criticism is to come under the allure of a man who conveys complicated ideas through the clear if pompous speech of likeable, fictional authorities. Middleton, for instance, offers this insight that goes some length toward resolving the aforementioned dispute about Marxist determinism and free will of the author: “[Literature] is an expression of the age, surely: a great work of literature both helps to make the age, by being an influence in it and a part of it, and is made by the age, because itself influenced by the works that preceded it.” (On this subject, Middleton later remarks that “I should not go so far as to assert, with some of the followers of Karl Marx, that it is the economic conditions under which the great masses of men live and work that fundamentally determine what the age shall think — in other words, that this time-spirit is a mere passive ideological mirror of those conditions.”)

Austrian economics and literature have become paired terms lately, due in large part to the tenacious efforts of Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox, but also to enthusiasts and scholars like Troy Camplin, whose blog Austrian Economics and Literature has earned a large and loyal following. Because of this emerging trend in literary-cum-economic theory, the legacy and criticism of Hazlitt will only grow in importance. The most important literary developments over the last century have, I would argue, taken place outside the academy; and the escalating attention to Austrian economics and literature, and accordingly to Hazlitt, would seem to indicate a fundamental change in literary study from the outside, a change that frees criticism and theory from monopolistic and propagandistic restraints imposed by too many humanities professors. Studying Hazlitt will only energize and authorize this movement that counteracts the degeneration of English departments into a comfortable podium for experts in literature to cherry-pick from economic ideas that other disciplines have mostly discredited. If only Hazlitt had integrated his economic and literary theory, we might have had more to say about him. He didn’t make many novel contributions to the interpretation of literature, but those of us who admire him might join his Austrian economics with his literary criticism to reconsider various texts and undo the effects of bad literary-economic theory.

Nothing is exempt from the principles and teachings of economics; everything, for instance, is subject to supply and demand. Likewise, nothing is outside the reach of literature or the imagination. It would seem that the economic and literary enterprises are mutually illuminating and interactive — that the one enterprise is done better when considered alongside the other. Since my recent interview with Jeffrey Tucker about the state of literary study and the humanities, I have received several emails from both undergraduate and graduate students wanting to know more about Austrian economics and literature, and wanting to get involved in the AE&L movement, if such an acronym may be employed. These are exciting times for those who love literature and liberty, and who think that literature generates more liberty, just as liberty generates more literature.

Twain, or Samuel L. Clemens, compiled this autobiography over the course of 35 years. The manuscript began in fits and starts. Twain, while establishing his legacy as a beloved humorist and man of letters, dashed off brief episodes here and there, assigning chapter numbers to some and simply shelving others. In 1906, he began making efforts to turn these cobbled-together passages into a coherent narrative. He even met daily with a stenographer to dictate various reflections and then to compile them into a single, albeit muddled, document. The result was a 5,000 page, unedited stack of papers that, per Twain’s strict handwritten instructions, could not be published until 100 years after his death.

To say that we’ve waited a century to view this manuscript is only partially accurate because pieces of the manuscript appeared in 1924, 1940, and 1959. But this edition, handsomely bound by the University of California Press, and edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and others of the Mark Twain Project, is the first full compilation of the autobiographical dictations and extracts to reach print. The editors, noting that “the goal of the present edition [is] to publish the complete text as nearly as possible in the way Mark Twain intended it to be published before his death,” explain that “no text of the Autobiography so far published is even remotely complete, much less completely authorial.” The contents of this much-awaited beast of a book, then, are virtually priceless, and no doubt many of the previously unread or unconsidered Twain passages will become part of the American canon.

Stark photographs of the manuscript drafts and of Twain and his subjects — including family members and residences — accompany this fragmentary work. The lively and at times comical prose is in keeping with the rambling style of this rambling man whom readers have come to know and appreciate for generations. Would we have expected any less?

Perhaps the best part of this work is that one can pick it up and, with a few quick page flips, enjoy entire stories replete with Twain’s delightful quips and puns. Because the narrative, as it were, remains a collection of disconnected anecdotes, readers easily can pick up and put down the book as necessary — read a passage or two before bed, say, or sneak in some satire during the lunch break.

That does not mean this book is not scholarly. It is. The editors have taken pains to footnote and cross-reference, to contextualize and explain. One wonders whether Twain would have appreciated the academic flavor the editors have given the book, but then again, Twain probably would’ve been happy just knowing that he’s still in the limelight, still drawing chuckles from the masses and bashful blushes from the smug and pious.

The chummy yet cantankerous Twain would have appealed to contemporary libertarians in many respects — Jeffrey Tucker, for instance, has written on Twain’s radical liberalism — although that appeal would depend on who’s defining libertarianism, why, and how. Twain decried American military interventions abroad, in particular in the Philippines and Cuba, and his autobiography expresses exasperation over Washington’s war policy. Twain sympathizes with a “tribe of Moros,” for instance, that is “bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them.”

Twain cloaks his account of the Moros with sarcasm: “The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.” This account leads Twain to refer to the American troops as “Christian butchers,” and to bark that the victory “would not have been a brilliant feat of arms . . . even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets.”

One thing, libertarians, is for sure: Twain did not share a Kinsellaesque disdain for intellectual property rights, as made clear by the 100 year freeze on the publication of this autobiography. IP notwithstanding, perhaps the most libertarian thing we can say of Twain is that he was a rugged individualist whose political inconsistencies reflect freethinking rather than commitment to groupthink or sycophancy. There is, I think, much wisdom to be had in Twain’s go-it-alone style.

Twain, like Ayn Rand, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London, is one of those figures that the intelligentsia cannot seem to bury or dismiss despite concerted efforts to do so. Many a critic has condescended to Twain’s work only to make himself look, well, foolish. That’s because the homespun and folksy Twain packs quite the intellectual punch with his powerful and conversational prose. And because, even in death, Twain speaks to us like a redneck rascal who is, despite himself, smarter than us all.

In an age when canonicity is considered dubious, Twain persists in the American imagination as a literary giant. Faulkner called Twain the “father of American literature.” If Faulkner was right, then we owe a great deal of thanks to the editors of this volume, which tells us much about our father — who probably ain’t in heaven — that we did not know before. Kudos to the editors, and thanks above all to you, Mr. Twain. Wherever you are. It was well worth the wait.

Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective.

– Edward Said, Orientalism

When I asked Dr. Plauché what I should review for my first contribution to Prometheus Unbound, he suggested that I elaborate on my recent Libertarian Papers article: “The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role of District Collector in A Passage to India.”  Would I, he asked, be willing to present a trimmed-down version of my argument about the role of district collectors in colonial India, a role both clarified and complicated by E.M. Forster’s portrayal of Mr. Turton, the want-to-please-all character and the district collector in Forster’s most famous novel, A Passage to India.  I agreed.  And happily.

For those who haven’t read the novel, here, briefly, is a spoiler-free rundown of the plot.  A young and not particularly attractive British lady, Adela Quested, travels to India with Mrs. Moore, whose son, Ronny, intends to marry Adela.  Not long into the trip, Mrs. Moore meets Dr. Aziz, a Muslim physician, in a mosque, and instantly the two hit it off.  Mr. Turton hosts a bridge party — a party meant to bridge relations between East and West — for Adela and Mrs. Moore.  At the party, Adela meets Mr. Fielding, the local schoolmaster and a stock character of the Good British Liberal.  Fielding invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to tea with him and Professor Godbole, a Brahman Hindu.  Dr. Aziz joins the tea party and there offers to show Adela and Mrs. Moore the famous Marabar Caves.

When Aziz and the women later set out to the cavea — Fielding and Godbole are supposed to join, but they just miss the train — something goes terribly wrong.  Adela offends Aziz, who ducks into a cave only to discover that Adela has gone missing.  Aziz eventually sees Adela speaking to Fielding and another Englishwoman, both of whom have driven up together, but by the time he reaches Fielding the two women have left.  Aziz heads back to Chandrapore (the fictional city where the novel is set) with Fielding, but when he arrives he is arrested for sexually assaulting Adela.  A trial ensues, and the novel becomes increasingly saturated with Brahman Hindu themes.  (Forster is not the only Western writer to be intrigued by Brahman Hinduism.  Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake, among many others, shared this fascination.)  The arrest and trial call attention to the double-standards and arbitrariness of the British legal system in India.

Rule of law was the ideological currency of the British Raj, and Forster attempts to undercut this ideology using Brahman Hindu scenes and signifiers.  Rule of law seeks to eliminate double-standards and arbitrariness, but it does the opposite in Chandrapore.  Some jurisprudents think of rule of law as a fiction.  John Hasnas calls rule of law a myth.  Whatever its designation, rule of law is not an absolute reality outside discourse.  Like everything, its meaning is constructed through language and cultural understanding.  Rule of law is a phrase that validates increased governmental control over phenomena that government and its agents describe as needing control.  When politicians and other officials lobby for consolidation or centralization of power, they often do so by invoking rule of law.  Rule of law means nothing if not compulsion and coercion.  It is merely an attractive packaging of those terms.

British administrators in India, as well as British commentators on Indian matters, adhered in large numbers to utilitarianism.  Following in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham, the founding father of utilitarianism, these administrators reduced legal and social policy to calculations about happiness and pleasure.  Utilitarianism holds, in short, that actions are good if they maximize utility, which enhances the general welfare.  Utilitarianism rejects first principles, most ethical schools, and natural law.  Rather than couch their policymaking in terms of happiness and pleasure, British administrators in India, among other interested parties such as the East India Company, invoked rule of law.  Rule of law manifested itself as a concerted British effort to discipline Indians into docile subjects accountable to a British sovereign and dependent upon a London-centered economy.  The logic underpinning rule of law was that Indians were backward and therefore needed civilizing.  The effects of rule of law were foreign occupation, increased bureaucratic networks across India, and imperial arrogance.

Murray Rothbard was highly critical of some utilitarians, but especially of Bentham (see here and here for Rothbard’s insights into the East India Company).  In Classical Economics, he criticized Bentham’s opinions about fiat currency, inflationism, usury, maximum price controls on bread, and ad hoc empiricism.  Bentham’s utilitarianism and rule of law mantras became justifications for British imperialism, and not just in India.  A detailed study of Hasnas’s critique of rule of law in conjunction with Rothbard’s critique of Bentham could, in the context of colonial India, lead to an engaging and insightful study of imperialism generally.  My article is not that ambitious.  My article focuses exclusively on A Passage to India while attempting to synthesize Hasnas with Rothbard.  Forster was no libertarian, but his motifs and metaphors seem to support the Hasnasian and Rothbardian take on rule of law rhetoric and utilitarianism, respectively.  These motifs and metaphors are steeped in Brahman Hindu themes and philosophy.

Forster wrote A Passage to India over the course of several years.  He visited India twice.  His trips there were long and formative.  While in India, Forster developed a certain fondness for Brahman Hinduism and its emphases on unity and transcendence.  These emphases, perhaps misinterpreted by Forster, found their way into the novel where they stood — and stand — in contradistinction to rule of law.  Forster’s understanding of Brahman Hinduism may not have been sophisticated, but his understanding informs the novel and calls into question the underlying assumptions of rule of law rhetoric.

It would do little good to insist that Forster was a libertarian or that his novel promotes libertarianism.  But it is useful to consider how his novel sheds light on libertarian ideas and shares the libertarian disdain for imperialism and economic nationalism.  Mr. Turton is pivotal to this consideration because of his position as a cultural mediator.  As a district collector, he is supposed to be the linchpin holding British and Indian societies together.  Yet because of cultural and philosophical incompatibility, the British and Indian characters cannot get along — that may be an understatement — and Turton fails in his efforts to treat British and Indian characters equally.  Turton is, despite himself, always a partisan of British interests.

A Passage to India suggests that government intervention or takeover of foreign peoples will lead to an unsustainable system — or else a system that can only be sustained through violence, as the Amritsar Massacre, a true event that probably influenced Forster, indicates.  The book also shows that rule of law, bound up in utilitarianism, is a fictional construct leading down the road to cruelty.  And cruelty is never a good thing.