tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1071098089153600904.post7827700041164428119..comments2023-11-02T07:31:47.448-04:00Comments on Austrian Economics and Literature: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of the NovelTroy Camplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16515578686042143845noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1071098089153600904.post-28880989754133485512015-03-05T17:01:12.893-05:002015-03-05T17:01:12.893-05:00The author addresses Don Quijote. Historically, Do...The author addresses Don Quijote. Historically, Don Quijote was a satire of the then-popular romances. Milan Kundera points out that Don Quijote was only included into the history of the novel later, by those who were influenced by it. The author addresses the "Catholic" novel and points out that they have always tended toward being loose and baggy, much like Don Quijote and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. <br /><br />The author also points out that there have been "novels" prior to the modern European novel, but they are not really the same as what arose in the Modern Era. <br /><br />One can note that The Odyssey influenced James Joyce's Ullyses, but that doesn't make The Odyssey a novel. <br /><br />I will also note, though, that Murray Rothbard pointed out that Adam Smith was hardly the first to theorize about free markets, but that Catholic priests at Salamanca had written on them long before. Does that mean that Adam Smith is any less important as an originator of modern economics as a science? Does that mean capitalism didn't really take off in the Protestant countries first? Hardly. The same is true of the origins of the novel, I think. Spain has this weird outlier origins status on these two areas, but it was in the Protestant countries that both capitalism and the novel took off and took the forms we see today. Troy Camplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16515578686042143845noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1071098089153600904.post-76102625051373884612015-03-05T16:34:17.998-05:002015-03-05T16:34:17.998-05:00The first modern novel was Cervantes' Don Quij...The first modern novel was Cervantes' Don Quijote. It arose in the Catholic Spain of the Counterreformation. And his author was a devotee of the Virgin Mary who fought at Lepanto in defense of the Christian faith vs the Muslim Turks, a battle during which all Christian warriors prayed the Rosary before going into battle. And in his later years, the author of Don Quijote became a lay brother of the Franciscan order. He requested to be buried in the convent of the Trinitarian Friars, an order that had paid the ransom to rescue him from slavery to the Muslims of Algiers. Moreover, the pioneers in the development of Capitalism were the Catholic republics of Northern Italy during the late Middle Ages. And the pioneer theoreticians were the priests of the School of Salamanca, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain. And the picaresque novel, which led to Mark Twain, The Tin Drum, etc., began even earlier in Spain with Lazarillo de Tormes. For all this see Literature and the Economics of Liberty, ed. Paul Cantor land Stephen Fox. Sorry Max Weber. (BTW what does the above entry on Nepal have to do with Troy's post?) dario fernandez-morerahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13971387687186740043noreply@blogger.com