The Cost of Humanities Scholarship

Mark Bauerlein raises some interesting questions regarding the economics of literary scholarship. I'm not sure Google Scholar is the best way of gathering the data he does -- I know there is a scholarly citation index, which would have worked far better -- but the real issue involves the funding of research. In many ways, the issues he brings up are the same as those many conservatives bring up in regards to some scientific research.

Do we really need another article on the biophysics of nucleotide stacking in single-stranded hairpin DNA? How will such knowledge benefit mankind? Of course, we cannot know the answer to that, until it happens -- and there are some who insist that having the knowledge is, itself, of value.

Of course, the latter is probably the strongest argument for having yet another article or book on Shakespeare's Hamlet. How does it benefit mankind? Well . . . such things are far less tangible. Is not knowledge itself a benefit? Or understanding? Why does the transformation of knowledge into technology have to be the standard?

Of course, all of this skirts the issue of the source of the funding itself. A professor is being paid from money from tuition and from government funding. Who complains about research done with private funding? Few, if any. It is when the funding comes from taxes that people begin to question it. Those in favor of government funding of any sort of research have to learn to put up with the criticisms, or go find private funding.

Along these lines, I recently received a rejection letter for a position that was being paid for by an Australian government program that supported humanities research. The man in charge of the program told me that he was surprised -- and a little saddened -- by the sheer number of people who applied for the position from around the world, noting that many governments did not value humanities research. Of course, Australia is in much better financial shape than much of the rest of the world, which is one explanation. Another is that too many in the humanities over here (Stanley Fish particularly comes to mind) insist that the humanities have no value. Well, if people like Fish make that argument, we shouldn't be surprised that university presidents begin to think that, and begin cutting funding to humanities departments.

But there is also the point that in places like the U.S., government support for a humanities program would be immediately politicized. The conservatives would hate it because it would be dominated by progressives, and progressives would go out of their way to come up with the most offensive, ridiculous research agendas imaginable, just to insist that failing to fund them is a violation of their 1st Amendment rights (a position so absurd that only a postmodernist could make it, and believe it) and to annoy the conservatives. Libertarians, of course, would be against it because government is doing it -- and thus would align themselves with the conservatives, whose anti-cultural cultural wars are deeply offensive to libertarians.

It is a shame that there are not private humanities organizations out there providing jobs. I think it would answer some of the issues raised by Bauerlein. More, it would raise the value of the humanities. Libertarians in particular should be interested in such organizations, as those of us who are in the humanities feel like we have no real home. If we can get hired into a humanities department, we immediately feel marginalized in them. And, of course, if we want free markets, we need to cultivate a pro-market culture. That is the potential job of libertarian humanities scholars. It is what we try to do here. It is what I would do even more if I could get a full time position somewhere, where I could do more scholarly work.

Without the U.N. There Wouldn't Be Music, Art, Film, Dance, Theater and Books?

David Boaz at Cato takes on Herbie Hancock on whether or not we would have culture without the U.N. That may sound like an absurd argument to make (on the part of Hancock), but the fact that the Washington Post actually published such an argument suggests that there are some who do not think it to be. I suppose that one should not be too surprised that an artist mistakes symbols for reality (as we artists all deal in symbols), especially when we have people like Baudrillard arguing for the separation for symbol and reality, but nobody is going to like jazz because there is now an International Jazz Day. People are going to like jazz because people like Herbie Hancock are making music people want to hear -- rather than wasting their time talking about illusionary positive connections between government and culture.

Science Fiction and Liberty

Kosmos Online has collected all of their Science Fiction and Liberty podcasts.

Stuart Kauffman Likes Austrian Economics

After telling Stuart Kauffman in an email that I used his work in my own, including in some upcoming papers, I received the following reply:

"Glad to hear you are using my work with Austrian economics. They are not, I'm glad, so wedded to equations. Kind regards, Stu Kauffman"

Which answers one of the questions I have always had about the Santa Fe group when it comes to economics: why aren't they reading the Austrians?!? Well, apparently, at least Stu Kauffman is.

The Virtue of Work

Isaac Morehouse compares the poet Hesiod to the philosopher Aristotle.

Southern Literary Review

Our own Allen Mendenhall is now the editor of the Southern Literary Review. Submission guidelines are here.

Economics and Poetry

Now, you know you want your daily dose of Limericks Économiques.

Call for papers -- Economics and Literature: Beyond Praise and Disparagement

Deadline for submission: November 1st , 2012
Planed publication of the issue: 2013
Editors: Estrella Trincado Aznar, Jérôme Lallement

Since the nascent of political economy in 17th century, and even before, literature has been both a place for broadcasting and challenging economic ideas through idealizing fables and pastiches. In turn, economists could borrow from literature some ways to present their own ideas or to criticize alternative doctrines. The purpose of this special issue is to reflect on the transformations of the frontiers between economics and literature: to investigate how literature can reflect economic ideas and arguments and to see how economics and economists have dealt with literary presentations of economic ideas.

Regarding the complex links between economics and literature, it is quite certain that very different national traditions can be identified. For instance, it is sometimes said that the 1848 Revolution in France established a clear-cut divorce between economics and literature. Similar breaking points may have occurred at different times in different countries. Later on, economists that were against the use of mathematical symbolism and reasoning would be labeled “économistes littéraires”. From this last phrase, one is allowed to think that, from the marginalist revolution onward, not only literature had become of no use to the development of political economy but also that it was now something incompatible with its development as a science.

Things are probably not that simple, since the boundaries of literature itself have necessarily changed in parallel with the transformations of society, and that what could be expected from literature at the end of 19th century, after the burst of modernity, was quite different from what could be expected in the end of 17th century. Literature has always evolved in relation to the development of society and human knowledge, taking as its own raw material the representations of the world expressed in all fields of science and philosophy. Therefore, literature has always redefined its own boundaries as it was progressively facing the development of political economy, moral philosophy and political thought as organized discourses. Again, it would have to cope with the rise of other social sciences in the 19th century, and more largely with the institutionalization of the production of knowledge and the rise of disciplinary boundaries.

Therefore, the interplay between economics and literature is twofold. On the one hand, political economy progressively developed as an autonomous discourse, where arguments, ways of thinking, proofs, debates, contradictions, examples, commentaries, hypotheses, conclusions, have been progressively normalized in such a way that literature would no longer appear as an adequate means for broadcasting its own discourse and representations of the world. On the other hand, as political economy was progressively organizing itself as a discipline, literature would reflect in a different way upon the development of economics, either to ridicule its logical and abstract way of thinking, or to condemn its development as a « dismal » science, or possibly to make it a source for literary inventions and novelty.

OEconomia – History / Methodology / Philosophy plans to publish papers dealing with this subtle and moving links between economics and literature. It welcomes articles dealing with a particular work, author, national tradition, or providing a broader view of the relations between economics and literature through the study of specific genres and sub-genres (farces, comedies, pamphlets, fables, novels, philosophical novels, essays, utopias, etc.) and the way it is bound to reflect upon the transformations of economics. Articles dealing with original economic ideas from well-known writers are also welcome.

Authors are invited to submit an article (in English or in French) at:
http://www.editorialmanager/oec. For any complementary question, please contact us at info@weboeconomia.org

Editors should retain the right not to go ahead with the special issue if they do not receive enough papers of sufficient quality. If there are some strong papers, but not enough, then they could be published as stand‐alone papers.

HT: Peter Klein

Welcome Morgan Brown

I would like to officially welcome Morgan Brown to Austrian Economics and Literature. He is the author of the piece immediately below this one. I asked him to join us after reading the piece he wrote on Shakespeare, to which I linked. I must say that his first contribution here has not disappointed!

I think we have a very interesting, very diverse group here, made more interesting and more diverse with the addition of Morgan. I hope we can have the kinds of discussions like the recent back and forth on culture. It is excellent that we can disagree agreeably! More, I think the fact that there can be agreeable disagreements shows the strength of our position. Surely, if we can agreeably disagree amongst ourselves, we are in a good position to defend our position against those who disagree with our approach.

How College English and AE Go Hand-in-Hand

I recall what it was like to take introductory courses in college English during my undergraduate studies with the University of Georgia. We showed up to class, wrote on various topics, and received minimal grammar instruction--just enough to get by the Regent's Test. We read plenty of literature, we were introduced to MLA format, and we were taught principles of PC discourse. The grad students who taught the courses assured us that if we managed to handle these principles responsibly, avoiding plagiarism through superb parenthetical citations, we would be equipped for critical analysis and logical discourse.

This always struck me as a strange approach to argumentation. I had been much influenced by the more philsophical American Transcendentalists as a teenager, and had taken my first look at Kant during high school. I revisited the Critique of Pure Reason many times during my years at UGA, since I knew the principles of method and argumentation that Kant sketched out were at odds with nearly 99% of what I learned as an English major. By way of Kant I approached Mises, and have since seen what Austrian Economics has to offer both Logic and Literature: 1) Mises provides a brilliant method for a critique of reason (in many ways more like the Scottish Common Sense Realist, Thomas Reid, than Kant), and 2) Austrian Economics provides a safeguard against the erros of Historicism, Socialism, Postmodernism, Lacanian psychobabble, and nearly every other fallacious system of thought promoted by "English" academes.

The amount of time that introductory college courses dedicate to "formatting" is absolutely mind-boggling. Colleges routinely train students in the principles of citation drafted by the Modern (Menshevik) Language Association, yet the formal principles of logic and argumentation have been abandoned for experimentation with the infinitessimals of MS Word's "Paragraph" tab. I used to be embarrassed to admit that I learned nearly everything I learned about grammar and logic outside of the college classroom. After all, my college degree had equipped me with little more than routine indoctrination in multiculturalism (my sophomore year was the year that he college made multiculturalism a mainstay of the curriculum), an ability to arrange a superb Works Cited page, and ninety-nine ways to turn literature into an apology for welfare economics. But while working for a Master's Degree at Georgia State University, I learned pretty quickly that no other student of my generation had received any formal training in the two fields that justify the existence of English Departments: Grammar and Logic.

Anyone can read literature, and anyone can have an opinion concerning meaning. But how do we know where intellectual fallacies lie? Where do interpretive fallacies lie? For these questions, we require logical exercise.

Everything I learned of any lasting value was learned outside the classroom. When teaching my first English courses as a paid teacher, I nearly laughed out loud when looking at the quality of instruction provided by contemporary textbooks. Remedial students received heavy instruction in grammar, and ENGL 1101 students were simply assumed to have the skills necessary to engage in logical argumentation. They were instead given tips on how to develop a "critical attitude" or a "social outlook." Why should students develop any critical or social outlook if they cannot spot a fallacy at first glance or an error in verb agreement or pronoun agreement? What good is a fallacious theory, or a socially-sensitive apology for a fallacy?

I have been working as a teacher over the past couple of years to strike a balance between grammar and logic (working up from the Subject-Predicate standard to Universals/Particulars, and then onward into Bastiat's "That Which is Seen") which lends itself to a method of logic and argumentation fit for the college classroom. It is amazing to see what students are capable of achieiving if you simply place good materials in front of them. Logic, as Mises and Kant repeatedly urged in their works on human action and philosophy, is the only critical apparatus that man possesses to criticize society. And thanks to intellectual bankruptcy of college English departments, legions of literati and would-be college elites are exiting American "Institutes of Higher Learning" completely unarmed.

I would like to think that a new generation of teachers may be on the rise, which is jaded with the failures of the "Sixties" paradigm. My experience with peers tells me this. The daunting scholarship of the Austrian tradition is an assurance that we do not have to start from scratch if we want to make a change.