Learn/Lecture Series/Philosophy

Commerce and Culture

Ten LecturesPaul A. CantorAuburn · July 2006

Marxists lost the argument about production, so they moved it to culture: capitalism makes more things more cheaply, they concede, but it corrupts the soul. Cantor takes the claim seriously and answers it across five centuries — Shakespeare’s theatre, Dickens’s serials, the studio picture, and the video game.

Paul A. Cantor

1945–2022 · Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English, University of Virginia

A Shakespeare scholar who sat in Mises’s New York seminars as a teenager and spent his career countering the Marxist account of culture that dominates the humanities. He won the Institute’s essay prize in 1992 for a paper on Thomas Mann and the German hyperinflation, which began a thirty-year association. More from Cantor →

The Lectures

Ten parts · in order