Letter & Spirit

Literature and Justice for All
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  • Allen Mendenhall

Harold Bloom’s American Sublime Aug 3, 2015

What can be said about Harold Bloom that hasn’t been said already? The Yale professor is a controversial visionary, a polarizing seer who has been recycling and reformulating parallel theories of creativity and influence, with slightly different foci and inflections, for his entire career, never seeming tiresome or repetitive. He demonstrates what is manifestly true about the best literary critics: they are as much artists as the subjects they undertake. Bloom’s criticism is characterized by sonorous, cadenced, almost haunting prose, by an exacting judgment and expansive imagination, and by a painful, sagacious sensitivity to the complexities of human behavior and...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote2 1

Boswell Gets His Due Jul 7, 2015

What is Enlightenment? The title of Immanuel Kant’s most famous essay asks that question. Kant suggests that the historical Enlightenment was mankind’s release from his self-incurred tutelage, an intellectual awakening that opened up new freedoms by challenging implanted prejudices and ingrained presuppositions. “Sapere aude!” Kant declared. “Dare to be wise!” Tradition maintains that the Enlightenment was an 18th-century social and cultural phenomenon emanating from Paris salons, an Age of Reason that championed the primacy of the individual, the individual’s competence to pursue knowledge through rational and empirical methods, though skepticism and the scientific method. Discourse, debate, experimentation, and economic liberalism...

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Paul Cantor: Model Mentor Jun 4, 2015

I once called Paul Cantor “the incomparable Cantor.” Another apt, alliterative sobriquet would have been “model mentor.” When others weren’t, Paul was there for me. He helped me. He taught me. He guided me. He’s the type of scholar I’d like to become. I first met Paul at an Austrian Scholars Conference at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He and I had been corresponding for a few years and had spoken over the phone, but we’d never met in person. Quite by accident, I bumped into someone in a tweed jacket shortly after I delivered a Rothbardian paper on the...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote7 0

Phantoms of Terror May 19, 2015

Phantom Terror, by Adam Zamoyski (Basic Books, 2015). Born in America and raised in Britain, Adam Zamoyski is not a tenured university professor devoted to obscure subjects that appeal only to audiences of academic guilds. Nor does he write for a small readership. That’s why his books sell and his prose excites; he can narrate a compelling account while carrying an insightful thesis. His latest book, Phantom Terror, bears a subtitle that will cause libertarian ears to perk up: “Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848.” Challenging the validity of modern states and their various arms and...

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Hayek, Statistics, and Trade-Cycle Theory May 12, 2015

Does Hayek’s early work on trade-cycle theory complicate stereotypes about the methods of Austrian economics?

By Allen Mendenhall Vote2 2

Getting Conned by CONs May 5, 2015

In the healthcare industry, a certificate of need, also known by the acronym CON, is an anticompetitive licensing restriction allegedly designed to promote fair competition by requiring hospitals to demonstrate the need for certain projects and services in order to receive governmental permission for those projects and services. Under a CON scheme, a hospital–-let’s call it Hospital X–-that wishes to expand its facilities applies to a state health planning agency for a CON. Nearby hospitals–perhaps Hospital X’s competitors, Hospital Y and Hospital Z–may oppose Hospital X’s CON application. An administrative law judge (ALJ) reviews Hospital X’s CON application and supporting...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote3 0

Razing the Bar Apr 30, 2015

The bar exam protects a cartel of lawyers, not their clients   The bar exam was designed and continues to operate as a mechanism for excluding the lower classes from participation in the legal services market. Elizabeth Olson of the New York Times reports that the bar exam as a professional standard “is facing a new round of scrutiny — not just from the test takers but from law school deans and some state legal establishments.” This is a welcome development. Testing what, exactly? The dean of the University of San Diego School of Law, Stephen C. Ferrulo, complains to...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote5 1

Henry Hazlitt, Literary Critic Feb 9, 2015

In part because of his longstanding support for free-market economics, scholars of literature have overlooked Hazlitt’s literary criticism; and Austrian economists — perhaps for lack of interest, perhaps for other reasons — have done little to restore Hazlitt’s place among the pantheon of 20th century literary critics. Yet Hazlitt deserves that honor.

By Allen Mendenhall Vote9 1
classical liberalism

The Classical Liberalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson Jan 31, 2015

“The less government we have, the better.”[1] So declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man not usually treated as a classical liberal. Yet this man—the Sage of Concord—held views that cannot be described as anything but classical liberal or libertarian. His is a pastoral libertarianism that glorifies nature as a source of insight and inspiration for those with a poetical sense and a prophetic vision. None other than Cornel West, no friend of the free market, has said that “Emerson is neither a liberal nor a conservative and certainly not a socialist or even a civic republican. Rather he is a...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote26 5
Jesus

Sanctifying the Individual: Does the West owe its individualism to Christianity? Jan 25, 2015

Academics often write for themselves. Chasing tenure, promotion, and the fleeting approval of their peers, they author books that no one reads. Hyperspecialized and boring, jargon-laden and politically ineffectual, these works fail to account for the big questions that interest the educated public and inspire young students. Larry Siedentop, an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford, is not so insular or pedantic. In Inventing the Individual, he advances a grand concept of “the West,” a totalizing signifier that has lost currency in recent decades because it implies a monolithic territory with a shared culture and linear history at odds with...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote19 2

You Are Perfectly Free to Say Nice Things Nov 27, 2014

Continuing in its fifth year, the Broadsides series published by Encounter Books consists of paperback pamphlets modeled on 18th-century political pamphlets such as The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Short and accessible, polemical and jargon-free, speedily produced and mass-marketed, these pamphlets examine any number of policy issues from immigration and climate change to gun control and Obamacare. Published this year, the 39th book in the series is Greg Lukianoff's Freedom From Speech, a vigorous and cogent refutation of the increasingly popular notion that people have a right not to be offended. Lukianoff is an attorney and the president...

By Allen Mendenhall Vote3 0

The Lawyers’ Guild Aug 18, 2014

Last month, thousands of recent law school graduates sat for a bar examination in their chosen state of practice. They were not undertaking a harmless rite of passage but overcoming a malicious obstacle: an artificial barrier to entry in the form of occupational licensure. Barriers to entry are restrictions on access to, or participation in, markets or vocations. Occupational licensure is a type of barrier to entry that regulates professions by requiring certification and licensing in the manner of medieval guilds. Medicine and law are perhaps the most recognizable professions to require their practitioners to obtain and maintain licenses. The...

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