Editor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article most of the others.

Here is a brief summary, however:

In light of then recently released books on Ayn Rand — Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made — Riggenbach discusses Rand’s role in the early libertarian movement. Along the way he highlights Heller’s defense of the quality of Rand’s writing against mainstream literary critics. He goes on to argue that Heller’s book is the better of the two and explains what mars Burns’s book. He plays a couple of clips of Rand herself explaining why she and her philosophy of Objectivism are not conservative, and challenges the coherence of Burns’s conception of the American Right.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and her importance in the libertarian tradition, this episode offers a good primer on the subject as well as on what differentiates libertarianism and conservatism.

Editor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article most of the others.

Here is a brief summary, however:

In light of then recently released books on Ayn Rand — Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made — Riggenbach goes on to chronicle Rand’s early life in Soviet Russia, how she got out and immigrated to the United States, her work in Hollywood and her Broadway play, Night of January 16th, and her marriage to Frank O’Connor.

Riggenbach then covers the publication of her four major works of fiction: We the Living, Anthem (a novella), The Fountainhead (adapted to film with a screenplay by Rand), and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. He also discusses Rand’s relationship with Nathaniel Branden, the formation of her inner circle, the publication of Rand’s nonfiction works, and the growth of the Objectivist community.

All that in 20 minutes! Phew!

If you’re unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and her work and life, this episode offers a good overview.

The July issue of Cato Unbound is on the topic of Liberty, Commerce, and Literature — more specifically, whether Western literature is anti-commerce, to what extent, and why.

Like Prometheus Unbound, Cato Unbound is an online magazine, unbound and free of the limits of the dead-tree format, although they maintain a regular monthly schedule while we do not. Each month they cover a different big topic and invite several eminent thinkers to discuss it.

Cato Unbound invites their readers to take part in the discussion on their own websites, blogs, social networks, and the like. Particularly good posts could be officially included in the issue.

Lead Essay

This month’s lead essayist is literary scholar Sarah Skwire. In “Birth of the Clichés,” she argues that — contrary to mainstream and libertarian perception — the evidence that Western literature is anti-commerce is actually thin. Instead, she presents a more nuanced view “in which critiques of the market stand side by side with favorable depictions and even sound, encouraging advice for would-be businessmen.”

Response Essays

The first response essay, “Three At-Risk Children of the Enlightenment,” is by William H. Patterson, Jr., the foremost scholar of the great libertarian science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and himself the author of the authorized biography Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century (Tor Books, 2010). Patterson argues that liberty, commerce, and literature have a common root in the European Enlightenment and that “the fortunes of all three have risen and fallen over time.” He hopes all three will flourish in the coming decades.

In “The Economics of Shakespeare… and His Critics,” Frederick Turner, an accomplished poet and literary theorist, “offers a structural explanation for why literary scholars have been so eager to supply anti-commercial readings to the western canon. Literary criticism began among gentlemen; it then passed to the anti-commercial meritocracy of the universities. But alternate readings exist, and Turner even offers a startlingly pro-commerical reading of The Merchant of Venice.”

In “Stranger in a Familiar Land,” Amy H. Sturgis, a libertarian, intellectual historian, and active member of the speculative fiction community, “argues that much of the apparent anti-market bias in literature stems from elitism. By excluding genre fiction, mainstream literary critics also exclude many thoughtful and provocative treatments of markets and their place in political economy. Often the excluded works are highly sympathetic to libertarian ideals. Fiction shapes public opinion, including public opinion about markets, and popular fiction by definition reaches more than any other kind.”

Related at Cato

Book Forum: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, discussion with the author, William H. Patterson, Jr., (video).

Essay: “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” by Robert Nozick.

Blog Post: “Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize” by Ian Và¡squez.

I’m finally getting around to writing about two short stories published late last year that were written by libertarian authors. Both are works of literary fiction.

One of the stories is by our very own Allen Mendenhall. “Communitas” was published in the online quarterly magazine of literary fiction, Full of Crow, in October 2011. You can read it online in full for free. The story is set in Okmulgee, Oklahoma and is told from the point of view of a nameless old man obsessing over a lost… loved one? It strikes me as a rather bleak tale about the modern breakdown of identity, social relationships, and moral decency.

Allen is a multi-talented writer, attorney, editor, and teacher. Visit his website to learn more about him. Also, check out his interview with Jeffrey Tucker.

The other story, “Pretty Citadel,” is by Kerry Howley and was published in The Paris Review, also an online quarterly magazine of literary fiction, in the Fall 2011 issue, No. 198. The first four paragraphs of the story can be read online for free, but you’ll have to purchase the issue for $12 in order to read it in full.

“Pretty Citadel” is set in Burma, in a local newspaper office, and is told from the point of view of a woman (I assume) who works there. Her boss talks of revolution, though it’s not clear it’s the political kind. There’s mention of most everything besides the newspaper being banned — it being an exception because it is censored before publication by a government bureaucrat — and of politically incorrect people being disappeared. I like the way the brief glimpses into the workings of the totalitarian Burmese regime are casually interspersed between cynical descriptions of Burma and the POV character’s work. But that’s about all I can tell you about this story, as I’m not about to pony up $12 for one short story, however good it may be.

Kerry Howley is a former editor of a Burmese newspaper (which would help explain the story’s setting, I suppose) and a senior editor of Defunct: A Literary Repository for the Ages. You may already know her from her work as a contributing editor for Reason Magazine as well as some tv news appearances. Visit Kerry’s website to learn more about her and for links to some of her articles online.

~*~

This post is the first in a new series in which we will highlight new and recent fiction publications by libertarian authors. If you think there are any we might have missed, please do let us know. If you’re interested in reviewing any of these stories, contact me.

It is written as the journal of a Frenchman who, in 1861, on the eve of our War for Southern Independence, comes to America as a war correspondent. Edouard de Grimouville is a minor noble whose House has lost most of its fortune. In the neutral state of Kentucky he finds political opinions of all stripes, a woman to fall in love with, and more adventure — and of an unforeseeable sort — than he was looking for.

Kerr writes with the prose of a bygone era, and does so convincingly, like a foreigner who has mastered a native accent. As a lover of that more sensuous, patient style, I was quite happy to immerse myself in it and would have gotten some enjoyment from the experience even if that had been the only appetizing aspect of the novel. There is, of course, much more to enjoy.

The first chapter is enough to give the reader a good taste of what is to come, and to allay any fears he might have as to whether or not he can trust himself in the hands of the author. It opens, “Fornication, whiskey and fiddle music. These are, if Mr. Graham is to be believed, the three pillars of true American society.” What reader could help but read on after such a start?

Mr. Graham turns out to be a libertarian in a time before the term was used for us. Picture Albert Nock with a dash or two of Henry Louis Mencken. In fact, Albert J. Nock is exactly who I imagined Graham looked like. Mr. Kerr describes him, but not in such detail — of the sort I have complained of before — as to rob the reader of his chance to fashion a part of the tale in his own mind. Absent is the bland, photographic depiction of a person and instead we are given something that, through judicious attention to certain details, actually helps create the character the way any wardrobe specialist and makeup artist assist a director and his actors.

I would have taken the old man for seventy or so (he is, in reality, somewhere over eighty — these people keep strangely casual track of their birth years), but a robust seventy (and a more robust octogenarian). His hair, yellowish-white, was longer even than the custom in these parts, but uncustomarily clean and tended. His clothes were worn but presentable and relatively à  la mode except for his hat, the wide brim of which drooped in the front and which was obviously an old favorite. He wore a coat, although most in the crowd did not in concession to the warm weather. Boots, well made, reached almost to his knees and had a coating of dried mud. His right hand rested on his knee, holding a cigar with a thumb’s width of ash.

Edouard himself is a well-conceived character, and the author displays such a thoughtful attention to detail that I am tempted to think he has conversed with more than a few French. At any rate, he is able to convince us that this is the diary of a foreigner by his reactions to things that we Americans take for granted but that do strike one, upon reading them, as something a Frenchman would likely notice. For instance, on page 72 he writes, “We shook hands. His grip was slightly too easy, albeit preferable to the competitive pumping one often gets from Americans.” On page 73 he continues, “I believe the word he used was “whipping.” Various forms of it were uttered in what followed, but the vowel never quite settled down.”

It is a testament to Mr. Kerr’s skill with character that I was not able, until near the end, to determine whether his own political opinions are those of Mr. Graham, whose motto might have been Our Enemy, the State; those of Edouard, who stands out more for what he opposes in Mr. Graham’s beliefs than for his own political philosophy; or something else entirely. The characters speak with voices and viewpoints that are wholly their own. Even now I cannot say it with certainty, but I imagine, based on the philosophical question posed to us after the science fiction element is introduced as well as the fact of Edouard’s slow conversion to something like Mr. Graham’s beliefs, that William Kerr is a libertarian.

Edouard, at the far end of his gradual conversion, gives us two very memorable lines that I intend to appropriate for my own use. While speaking of politics and warfare, he says on page 282, “To be honest, I am no longer certain that the grand accomplishments for which I wanted a monarch have ever been more than uniformed thuggery — butchery exalted by opera costumes.” On 295, “I have been brought to an appreciation of a jeu d’esprit of Mr. Graham that not all men are political animals, but too many are political livestock.”

As good as he is in creating characters, Kerr may be even better in portraying their interactions. Too many dramatists create nothing more than five basic emotions in a character and then proceed to have him interact with another character by means of straight declarations of what is on his mind. It leaves one about as satisfied as if Velàzquez had painted only in primary colors. Kerr’s characters behave more realistically, have subtle reactions, suppressed reactions, mild misunderstandings and misinterpretations, lack knowledge, disguise their intentions and, above all, remain true to their personalities and perspectives.

Though it may not seem like it through the first part of the book, the novel is a work of science fiction in addition to being historical fiction. The exact nature of this science fiction is revealed on the back cover of the book, but I believe this to be a mistake and shall not reveal it here. Suffice it to say that it is an ingenious invention and a marvelous way to give us a new perspective on the State.

Soon after the science fiction element is introduced, the war heats up in the state of Kentucky. The residents of Somerset and surrounding environs come into contact with both Union and Secessionist forces and discover them both to be brutal and dictatorial. It is here that I must register my only complaint of any significance. The struggle against one of the sides is delved into more, better developed. The struggle with the other side seems short and almost rushed by comparison. I would have preferred something a little more balanced.

Other than that, I can think of only nits to pick. Mr. Kerr has peppered his work with a few too many commas, for example. In chapter one we read in a parenthetical aside, “The rains were on, but, even now, two months later, in the warmest month, it is not hot.” This problem is not too frequent, and it never gets worse than the cited passage. There were also discussions of things that might be anachronistic. One character mentions that there is some debate as to whether light, being a wave, has a medium through which to propagate. My understanding is that it was not until 1887 that the existence of the luminiferous aether was seriously questioned. If I thought long enough I might be able to come up with some other petty grievance.

All in all, it is a fine work, one of the better novels I have read in the last couple years. A libertarian will find it especially interesting for the many political discussions that give a serious, honest voice to the anti-state side. This is Mr. Kerr’s first novel, so let us congratulate him even as we chastise him for waiting over half a century to publish. Don’t chastise too hard, though; just enough to get him writing another.

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.

I’ve got some ideas about what would happen after the end of Atlas Shrugged. I could just describe the basic plot here for you. I could say, “I think that after the world economy crashes and the governments collapse, the heroes emerge and help to rebuild. Dagny and Galt have a child, who ends up being a Randian Kwisatz Haderach, named Sarah. Then they get divorced when Dagny cheats on Galt with Eddie Willers. Sarah ends up running for President of a scaled back federal government. And there are lots of interesting sub-plots, such as [x, y, z].”

I could use this technique to highlight how some of Rand’s ideas were flawed, in my view, or builds on or extends them into other areas.

But I thought actually writing it up in novel-form might be a different way to present these ideas. So I spent the last four years on this. The novel is a doozy — 450 pages of great literature. My friends who’ve seen it think it’s amazing.

But I could not publish it. Rand’s estate would surely sue me for copyright infringement.

You see, putting my ideas down on paper this way is a derivative work. Only the author of the original work has the “right” to make derivative works. So even though Rand released the ideas about Atlas and the plot and characters into the world so that people are aware of them, we cannot integrate these into our own works in some ways. The estate of Rand could (and probably would) literally get a court order enjoining me, under penalty of being jailed for contempt of court, from publishing the book.

Think this is an exaggeration? It’s not. Shortly before his death, J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, convinced U.S. courts to ban the publication of a novel called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.” (See also my post Book Banning Courtesy of Copyright Law.) Susan Boyle was prevented from singing a song because of copyright. A grocery store in Canada mistakenly sold 14 copies of a new Harry Potter book a few days before its official release on Saturday, July 16, 2005; a British Columbia Supreme Court judge “ordered customers not to talk about the book, copy it, sell it or even read it before it is officially released at 12:01 a.m. July 16. (See also Kinsella, Copywrong.) There’s the case where the seminal German silent film “Nosferatu” was deemed a derivative work of “Dracula” and courts ordered all copies destroyed. There’s the creative “alternative ending” to the Yogi Bear movie that could well be enjoined by Warner Bros., though it might luck out and benefit from the “fair use” defense. But these others wouldn’t, nor would my Atlas sequel.

Of course, I didn’t really write it. Who would, knowing courts would ban it? Copyright is literally censorship. No surprise, given that copyright’s origins lie in censorship (see my How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism; also The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World; Masnick, The Cycle Of Copyright: Originally A Tool For Censorship, Attempted As A Tool For Incentives… Back To A Tool For Censorship). How any libertarian could support this is beyond me.

[Mises]