Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Talk at Liberty Fund on art and free markets

Earlier this week I gave a talk in Indianapolis at the excellent Liberty Fund on whether free-market capitalism is good or bad for art.

The question matters in today’s intellectual context because thinkers on both left and right argue regularly that art suffers under free market systems. Traditional conservatives such as Robert Bork and neo-conservatives such as Irving Kristol believe that capitalism’s freedom allows and encourages us to indulge our basest impulses, which means irrational and immoral work comes to dominate the art world. Meanwhile leftish thinkers such as Benjamin Barber and Richard Brustein believe that capitalism’s mass market means that middlebrow taste is where the money is, which seduces true artists to sell out for the lowest common denominator.

My view is that both left and right are badly wrong on this issue. The talk I gave at Liberty Fund comes out of my current documentary and book project with the working title The Fate of Art under Capitalism. In the talk I focused mostly on one strand of my overall argument — the historical thesis that the outstanding eras in art history have all arisen in cultures that had relatively free markets and democratic or republican politics. Classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, the Dutch Golden Age, and nineteenth-century Paris all fit this pattern.

The question-and-answer session after my talk was a lively discussion of a wide variety of examples of cultures — ancient Egypt, Naples in the Renaissance, Elizabethan England, China — and whether their art achievements supported or contradicted my thesis. Great fun, for which I thank the participants. Thanks also to philosopher Douglas Den Uyl for the invitation.

Liberty Fund, in case you are not familiar with it, is an organization that sponsors a wide variety of conferences for academics. It also hosts the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, a widely-used resource, especially for students, in economics, business, political science, and public policy; Econlog, the web log of three very smart and clear-writing economists, Bryan Caplan, David Henderson, and Arnold Kling; and Russ Roberts’s EconTalk, an ongoing series of podcasts devoted to interviews with a wide range of economists on timely subjects. Liberty Fund’s site also hosts an astounding free online collection of books and essays from the history of economics, history, political theory, and philosophy. Over the past few years I’ve used many of them in my courses.

[Images: The statue is the Riace Warrior (c. 450 BCE). The symbol, which Liberty Fund uses as its logo, is the ancient Sumerian cuneiform "amagi," which is thought to be first written reference to the concept of liberty.]

Fascinated by history [Section 1 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 1 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History

1. Fascinated by history

Think about why we are fascinated by history. All of those outstanding individuals and exotic peoples. The rise and fall of civilizations—and wondering why that happens. How did classical Greece achieve its Golden Age—the age of Socrates and Pericles, Euripides and Hippocrates? What explains the remarkable confluence of so many outstanding individuals in one era?

Why, almost two thousand years later, did the Italian Renaissance happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Raphael—again an incredible outpouring of genius in the arts, sciences, and politics.

Jumping ahead three centuries: What made possible the Industrial Revolution and its awesome outpouring of productivity? The ancient Chinese and the ancient Romans made impressive technological advancements—but nothing on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Why did the Industrial Revolution first take root initially in England and Scotland? Why not in Burma or Botswana?

Or what, by contrast, explains major historical declines? Why did the Roman Empire collapse? The most powerful civilization of the ancient world imploded and became defenseless before successive waves of barbarian invasion. And before the Romans, the powerful military empires of the Hittites, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians also collapsed. Is there a common pattern at work here?

Why did the French Revolution go so horribly wrong, descending in a reign of paranoia, fratricide, and terror? Why, by contrast, did the American Revolution, in many ways fighting the same kind of battle and subject to the same desperate pressures, not go the same self-destructive route? How, a century and a half later, could the most educated nation in Europe become a Nazi dictatorship?

All these questions raise issues of dramatic historical change, for better or worse. But we can also ask questions about long periods during which no dramatic changes took place. Consider the San people of the Kalahari area in Southern Africa, sometimes called Bushmen. Experts estimate that for 10,000 years the San have lived the same way for generation after generation. Let us put that in perspective. If a generation is twenty-five years or so, then 10,000 years means 400 generations of sameness. By contrast, it has been only about twenty generations since Columbus crossed the Atlantic—and consider how much has changed in Europe and the Americas since then.

Yet even the 10,000 years of the San people is dwarfed by the estimated 35,000 years that the Aborigines of Australia have existed in essentially the same way generation after generation. 35,000 years ago is approximately when Neanderthal Man was becoming extinct. Why did the cultures of the San and the Aborigines not change for such unimaginably long stretches of time?

[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

Is capitalism bad for art?

I will be giving a talk with that title at California State University, East Bay, on October 14. Thanks to Professor Stephen Schmanske and the Smith Center for inviting me.

My theme will be the relationship between art and liberal cultures, focusing on economically free cultures especially.

One part of my talk will discuss how economic liberalism is empowering for artists both materially and psychologically, and part of my evidence for that will be historical: Why were the greatest of the great eras in art history classical Athens, Renaissance Florence and Venice, the Dutch Golden Age, Paris in the late nineteenth century. Why not, say, Sparta in the 5th century BCE? Or Milan in the 15th century? Or Denmark in the 17th? Or Portugal in the 19th?

Another part of my talk will take up the perplexing question of why, since the late 19th century, so many artists have taken anti-business and anti-capitalist stances. Pablo Picasso is representative here, having said, famously, “The merchant — there’s the enemy.” A fascinating set of adversarial (and self-destructive) issues there.

The lecture is based on my current book project, The Fate of Art under Capitalism, which I discussed in an earlier post.