By Bruce Edward Walker Review of Literature & the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, ed. Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010). In recent decades, literary criticism has championed several schools that disavow common-sense economics in favor of more private and personal agendas. The “personal is political” formulation long ago crept into English Departments, at the expense of more traditional understandings of the warp and weave of Western Civilization. Beginning in the mid- to late-twentieth century, students were subjected to successive waves of New Criticism, Marxist Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory and Deconstructionism – all guilty of squeezing square pegs into round holes in order to further individual reputations and engineer social change rather than increase knowledge of the human condition through the arts. The human condition is, no matter how much theorists would prefer to believe otherwise, economic as well as spiritual, sexual and political. After all, even atheist transsexual Marxists need to trade something for food, clothing and shelter, do they not? A valid question for the creators and critics: What provides the best economic model to ensure the happiness of the seven billion inhabitants of this earth? And what of

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