Having been through media criticism courses in college, this comes as an interesting development. Seaton writes, concerning Canton and Cox’s Literature and the Economics of Liberty
Free markets, like languages, thus exemplify not anarchy but “spontaneous order.” Well-written poems, plays, and novels, on the other hand, are typically the result of a single individual who sees to it that each part of the work contributes to the overall design. It is not surprising, then, that those who derive their notion of excellence from works of literature would find it hard to appreciate the workings of the market, where everybody tries to satisfy his own needs, and nobody seems to be concerned about the whole. A socialist economy, where planners organize all economic activity in the interests of the whole, seems much more intellectually and aesthetically satisfying than the market, even if the latter generates wealth and the former poverty.
From the book summary on Amazon:
Literary critics particularly those influenced by Marxism often turn texts and the characters they represent into predictable products of their environments. They view literature as the product of determinate economic and social circumstances, and authors as captives of class consciousness.
This book pursues economic interpretations of literature while respecting the freedom and creativity of authors. To do so, it draws upon a form of economics the Austrian School that places freedom and creativity at the center of its understanding of human action.
Marxist thought is pretty much thoroughly inescapable in public education, more so at the university level (just tally up the disciplines that hold the premise that human behavior is predictable and humans are a “product of their environment”). You would think that among such a seemingly diverse set of modes of literary criticism — gender, feminist, ethnic, semiotic, etc. — there would be room to stick in something that hints at praxeology. But given the comprehensiveness of the Marxist religious belief system (yeah, it’s a religion), anything approaching libertarianism is strictly verboten, bourgeois. Those few academics that would propose those ideas would be quickly beset with class-speak from their peers.
Perhaps if the whole of academia was less dependent on the state they wouldn’t be so inclined towards educational fundamentalism and thus reconsider libertarian thought without the strawmen and social stigma.