Nothing will come of nothing. Shakespeare, King Lear If, as we are often told, the aim of art is to shock the bourgeoisie, then the contemporary art scene has become positively electric of late. In the most recent aesthetic outrage, a Sardinian artist named Salvatore Garau managed to sell an invisible sculpture, known simply as “I am,” to an
The Free Market 16, no. 3 (March 1998) A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles , the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to “Elseworlds,” in which “heroes are taken from their usual settings
The Free Market 16, no. 8 (August 1998) How is capitalism being treated in American popular culture today? The signals are mixed, but generally the picture is bleak. Hollywood continues its unrelenting assault on the commercial society that is its own lifeblood. The latest filmmaker to criticize capitalism all the way to the bank is James
Was Percy Shelley, the great English Romantic poet, a socialist? This may sound like an odd question, since, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , the word socialist was not even coined until 1833, that is, 11 years after Shelley died. Yet, despite the fact that Shelley could not have been aware of what we normally think of as socialist
Paul A. Cantor received his BA (1966) and PhD (1971) in English from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard in both the English and the Government Departments. He is currently Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 1. What is a Professor of English doing involved with Austrian economics? In my youth, I was
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Paul Cantor About His New Book, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World. AM: Thanks for doing this interview, Paul. Your latest book is Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy , which analyzes three plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar , and Antony and Cleopatra . Could you speak to the themes of freedom and
Volume 7, No. 3 (Fall 2004) Quarter Notes and Banknotes is a genuinely interdisciplinary book and shows that an economic perspective can illuminate our understanding of the development of classical music. Unfortunately the book is not interdisciplinary enough. When Scherer wanders away from his chosen fields of economics and music, he
One may say that, apart from wars and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which compares in importance to [inflation]. The upheavals caused by inflations are so profound that people prefer to hush them up and conceal them. —Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power I. With the worldwide collapse of socialism as an economic system,
One may say that, apart from wars and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which compares in importance to [inflation]. The upheavals caused by inflations are so profound that people prefer to hush them up and conceal them. —Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power I have always regarded the German inflation as a kind of mirage, a
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
