Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor (2025)

by PFS on July 31, 2026

The late, great¹—and former PFS member² —Paul Cantor was author of a number of great works, including Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, Paul A. Cantor and Stephen D. Cox (2009).³ Other works by Cantor include The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (University Press of Kentucky, 2012); Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2003); Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies (2019).

Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor, Jo Ann Cavallo, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025; landing page) was also recently published. Unfortunately it carries insane academic prices in all versions not meant to make it accessible to a wide audience.⁴ But it has gotten some good reviews, most recently Michael Rectenwald, “A New Economic Criticism: A review of Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism,” Rekt (Jul 31, 2026), which opens:

Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism is a collection of essays edited by Professor Jo Ann Cavallo that applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to literature and media. The 14-essay volume begins with an introduction by Jo Ann Cavallo and continues with a series of essays arranged chronologically by topic, beginning roughly in the early modern period and ending in the twenty-first century. The volume includes essays on such diverse literary and cultural topics as plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a theory of comedy, the “transgenderism” of Mary Frith, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. It includes essays on media and popular culture, including installments on Carl Barks’s Scrooge McDuck, movies focused on the 2007-2008 financial crisis, science fiction TV, contemporary Westerns, and reality TV shows. The volume is dedicated to the work of the late Paul Cantor and concludes with an essay by Cantor himself.

That final essay is Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?, also unfortunately not online. Le sigh. However, a version Cavallo’s introduction may be found at Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism.