Commerce and Culture: A Seminar with Paul Cantor
July 24-28, 2006
Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Are commerce and culture perennially at odds with each other? Does the marketplace inevitably corrupt artists? At most colleges and universities across the country, the answer to these questions would be "yes," but the Mises Institute offers another perspective.
Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a pioneer in literary criticism from an Austrian perspective. Having studied with Ludwig von Mises, he has been working to counter the Marxist understanding of culture that dominates in the humanities today.
Conceiving of culture as a form of spontaneous order, he argues that market principles such as free trade and competition are as beneficial in the artistic realm as they are in the economy as a whole. He shows that commercial culture is at least as vibrant and varied as the elite culture championed by Romantics and modernists.
In this week-long seminar, Cantor will discuss a variety of case studies of commercial culture, including Shakespeare's theater, classical music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the serialized novel in Victorian Britain, the Hollywood studio system, and the development of the Fox network on television. He will also consider the alternatives to commercial culture, from aristocratic and church patronage to totalitarianism and other forms of government support for the arts.
For more on his perspective, see his interview in the Austrian Economics Newsletter; hear his Mises Memorial Lecture: "Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism"; or his talk at the Trouble with Taxation Conference: "Taxation and Literary History, or Who Killed John Keats?"
The seminar will consist of two primary lectures per day for five days, July 24-July 28, 2006, and discussion time with the professor. Morning sessions are 10:00 - 11:30 Central Time, and afternoon sessions are 2:00 - 3:30, Monday through Friday, with a pizza party following Friday's closing session.
The Seminar is open to full-time students (no charge for qualifying students). Registration is $125 for Mises Institute Members (click HERE to join, or to update your membership) and faculty, and $195 for non-Members. Registration includes daily boxed lunches, refreshment breaks, closing pizza party, transportation between the dorm and the Institute each day, and the use of Mises Institute research libraries and computers. You may register online. Dormitory rooms are available for $35 per person per night double-occupancy or $45 per night single-occupancy. For other Auburn accommodations, go here. For Atlanta-Auburn airport shuttles, see Express85.
Students may apply for tuition scholarships by submitting the online application form along with a copy of student ID and an informal transcript copy. A limited number of travel scholarships are available. This information can be mailed to Cantor Scholarship Committee, Mises Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832, or faxed to 734-448-8148, or emailed to [email protected].
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