The economic theories of Karl Marx and his disciples continue to be anthologized in books of literary theory and criticism and taught in humanities classrooms to the exclusion of other, competing economic paradigms. Marxism is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive — in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an era when we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely the products of culture or class. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices affect lives, circumstances, and communities. Even literary scholars who reject pure Marxism are still motivated by it, because nearly all economic literary theory derives from Marxism or advocates for vast economic interventionism as a solution to social problems. Such interventionism, however, has a track-record of mass murder, war, taxation, colonization, pollution, imprisonment, espionage, and enslavement — things most scholars of imaginative literature deplore. Yet most scholars of imaginative literature remain interventionists. Literature and Liberty offers these scholars an alternative economic paradigm, one that over the course of human history has eliminated more generic bads than any other system. It argues that free market or libertarian literary theory is more humane than any variety of Marxism or interventionism. Just as Marxist historiography can be identified in the use of structuralism and materialist literary theory, so should free-market libertarianism be identifiable in all sorts of literary theory. Literature and Liberty disrupts the near monopolistic control of economic ideas in literary studies and offers a new mode of thinking for those who believe that arts and literature should play a role in discussions about law, politics, government, and economics. Drawing from authors as wide-ranging as Emerson, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry Hazlitt, and Mark Twain, Literature and Liberty is a significant contribution to libertarianism and literary studies.

This volume shows how modern political theory can be enriched through an engagement with works of literature. It uses the resources of literature to explore issues such as nationalism, liberal philosophy, utopiansim, narrative and the role of theory in political thought. A variety of approaches are adopted and the aim is to show some of the many and diverse ways in which literature may enrich political theorising, as well as considering some of the problems to which this may give rise. The theorists discussed include Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. There are literary references from Greek tradegy, Jonathan Swift, Brian Moore, Elizabeth Bowen and contemporary feminist utopian fiction. All the contributors have a long-standing interest in the relations between literature and moral and political thought. They are concerned not to be restricted by conventional academic boundaries and are not united by any party-line or uniformity of intellectual commitments. This volume will be of great interest to all students engaged in the study of politics and literature.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

Available in paperback for the first time, Gareth Griffith's book provides a comprehensive critical account of the political ideas of one of the most influential commentators of the twentieth century. With close reference to a range of Shaw's texts, from the Fabian tracts to the plays, Gareth Griffith draws out the central theoretical messages of Shaw's engagement with politics. The first part of the book provides an intellectual biography, while at the same time analysing Shaw's key concerns in relation to his Fabianism, arguments for equality of income and ideas on democracy and education. Part Two looks at those areas which Shaw approached as long-standing historical problems or dramas requiring immediate thought or action; sexual equality, the Irish question, war, fascism and sovietism. The book is directed to the general reader as well as to specialists. It will be central reading for anyone seeking to understand Shaw's life, and literary and political writings, or the development of political thinking in this century, or the problems and potential inherent in socialism.

Maureen Whitebrook argues that literature, through both its form and its content, can expose and criticize liberal theory and point beyond it to a new political theory. She describes how 'literary political criticism' might be done, and demonstrates such criticism in four essays that expose the connections between specific political and literary texts. Fiction, Whitebrook concludes, does a better job than liberal political theory of examining the relationship between the individual and the State.

Richard Hoggart has been one of the leading cultural commentators of the last sixty years. He was the first literary critic to take the working class seriously and to extend the parameters of literary criticism to include popular culture. Hoggart put the working class on the cultural map. He differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers” (media, popular fiction, advertisements) and the resilient culture of working-class people themselves. Hoggart’s most famous work is the seminal The Uses of Literacy. Part II (written first) offers a searing indictment of the specious populism and banality of popular newspapers and magazines, the fake “pally patter” of the tabloids and of adverts aimed at ordinary people, and the literary flatness and moral emptiness of much popular fiction. Part I celebrates the resilient culture of working-class people themselves and offers a basis for the argument that working-class people deserve better than what passes for popular culture. Though best known for The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart has been a prolific writer, publishing twenty-seven books, including two in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven. These range from works of cultural analysis such as The Way We Live Now, to works of personal reflection such as First and Last Things and Promises to Keep, and to collections of essays on a wide variety of topics, such as the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other, Between Two Worlds and An English Temper. One of his most important contributions to the transformation of perceptions of class and culture was the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the early 1960s. For Hoggart, public service is a duty of the intellectual. Therefore he has not lived in the ivory tower but has engaged in society, striving for change from within. He worked for five years as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO and has undertaken many activities in arts, culture, broadcasting and education, including: the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, Reith Lecturer, Chair of the Broadcasting Research Unit, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council, Chair of the Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, Chair of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education and member of the British Board of Film Classification Appeals Committee. Hoggart was a leading witness for the defence in the trial at the Old Bailey in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His evidence is widely acknowledged to have been central in leading to the acquittal, which marked a watershed in public perception and shifted cultural parameters. Hoggart was also the first British critic to take TV and radio seriously. He made a number of critical interventions: his Reith lectures, his contributions to the report of the Pilkington Committee and his works on media, including Only Connect: on the Nature and Quality of Mass Communications, The Mass Media: A New Colonialism, and Mass Media in Mass Society. Hated by Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, Hoggart nevertheless, strove to serve culture in the public sphere, as an important extension of his ideas about the need for cultural quality. This volume affirms the importance of Richard Hoggart, focusing, in particular, on new understandings of his life, of the importance of literature and literary criticism to his method, and of his significant role in literary, cultural and educational shifts from the fifties onwards. It locates Hoggart’s work and identifies his influence within multiple contexts: the working-class and “angry young man” novels of the fifties and sixties; the Lady Chatterley trial and resulting literary and cultural change; the shift from the “new criticism” to a broader field of cultural enquiry; the rise of cultural studies; and educational reforms from the fifties onwards.

Stephen Ingle is Professor at the Politics Department, University of Stirling. His main academic interests are in the relationship between politics and literature and in adversarial (two party) politics, especially in the UK.

The first detailed reconstruction of the late work of John Rawls, further developing his ideas of 'justice-as-fairness'.