Literature & the Economics of Liberty

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com At the heart of Austrian economics is the concept of "spontaneous order." What appears to be chaotic in the social interaction of vast numbers of individuals in the marketplace in fact reflects a deeper order, what Adam Smith calls "the invisible hand." The free market produces more rational results than any form of central planning because markets use self-correcting mechanisms to adapt to perpetually changing economic conditions.This book explores the idea that spontaneous order is the concept that can bridge the economic and cultural realms. Austrian economics and literature deal with the same world - the concrete human world of open-ended and infinite possibility. In both Austrian economics and literature, human beings reveal their natures only in concrete acts of choice - the deepest expression of their freedom.In addition to developing a new framework for understanding and interpreting literature, this book offers rich new readings of a wide range of literary classics from many different nations. Drawing upon years of interdisciplinary experience in literature and economics, the contributors open up fresh perspectives on works as traditional as Cervantes's Don Quijote and as contemporary as Okri's The Famished Road.