Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha: Religious Beliefs, Feminism, Slavery, Politics, and Economics in the First Modern Unique
by Eric Clifford Graf
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021, 290 pp.
Abstract: Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha: Religion, Feminism, Slavery, Politics, and Economics in the First Modern Novel is Eric Clifford Graf’s argument that Don Quijote falls within the liberal tradition, advancing a clearly humanist vision of liberty and, sometimes, a sardonic critique of undue browbeating. Graf’s effort is one small deposit in a slowly growing stock of research that reevaluates literary texts with an eye towards liberty as a guiding excellent.
Allen Mendenhall (AllenMendenhall.com) is Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Teacher in the Sorrell College of Company at Troy University.
“A major thesis of this book,” Eric Clifford Graf states of Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha, “is that [Miguel de] Cervantes’s fantastic novel offers a realist bourgeois solution to the confusing maze of tyranny, bondage, and corruption” that identify early modern Europe (p. 3). Commonly recognized as the very first early contemporary book, Don Quijote advances “favorable themes like liberty, harmony, and development” that commerce and exchange enable (p. 3). It falls, arguably, within the liberal tradition, advancing a distinctly humanist vision of liberty and, sometimes, a sardonic critique of excessive coercion, consisting of “a significant set of advanced casuistic lessons about liberty as a financial science of unusual intricacy” (p. 180).
Don Quijote is a picaresque featuring the absurd nobleman Alonso Quixano, or Don Quijote, and his simple sidekick Sancho Panza. Their carnivalesque, unreasonable adventures– funny satires on medieval, romantic, knight-errand legends of gallantry and chivalry– result in paradox, hilarity, and, alas, catastrophe. Criticism in the way of wit rather than militant justification or strength is less most likely to invite violent reaction, and Cervantes deftly and wisely used the satirical mode to popular impact.
That Don Quijote is the very first modern-day novel is no minor truth. Compared to the high ecclesiastic writings of the Roman Catholic Church or the urgent tracts and polemics of the Protestant Reformers, the novel itself was, in the seventeenth century, a proto-liberal medium of expression that represented bourgeois worths: commerce, commercialism, trade, exchange, interaction, entertainment, and work. The internal form of novels, in truth, looked like (and looks like) the everyday hustle-bustle of their presumed audience. “The comprehensive and all [-] embracing character of the unique at its best may be purchased at the prices of a particular disunity and disparity by the standards of strict poetic kind,” Paul Cantor (2009, 49) alleges, “however this is a rate we are prepared to pay in return for the book’s greater ability to catch the texture of lived experience.” Graf points out, as well, that “regard for ladies on a cosmic scale” was important to “the unique type” (p. 55).
The point of a review such as this is to summarize and examine the subject author’s leading, seminal arguments. Components of Cervantes’s plot, which Graf examines with depth and breadth, will not appear here. Graf, not Cervantes, is my focus. He sets out to clarify Cervantes’s possible intents and choices for Don Quijote by supplying historical context to translate details from the text, compare scenes in which Cervantes renders economics broadly developed, and link Don Quijote to other works and thinkers who affected, or may have affected, Cervantes. To accomplish this goal, Graf arranges his case topically by styles that specify the liberal custom, particularly “religious tolerance,” “regard for ladies,” “abolition of slavery,” “resistance to tyranny,” and “financial flexibility” (p. 5). Each chapter of this book tracks one of these styles.
It is probably too much to call Cervantes a classical liberal, so Graf, at the outset, cautiously presumes that Cervantes anticipated and affected classical liberals such as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Mill, and certain American Creators– to state absolutely nothing of the many Hispanic liberals who valued financial liberty and individual rights to differing degrees. By the end of his book, nevertheless, Graf modifications his tune. His conclusion is surprising in its boldness: “So, am I saying Cervantes was a capitalist? An Austrian? A free-market Randian? A libertarian? An English classical liberal? In a general sense, yes, and most likely to a greater degree than the majority of readers recognize” (p. 189). Strong words, even if they are qualified by the adjective “basic.”
Graf calls his book an “anatomy,” the term Murray Rothbard utilized for his Anatomy of the State. Both texts “dissect” their topics, so to speak, as the researcher may probe the body in all its intricate particulars. Graf joins Darío Fernández-Morera (2009, 101) in dealing with Cervantes “as an author whose works present situations, statements, and concepts that brighten affectionately important elements of the market economy, while providing product for a review of collectivism, statism, and redistributionism.”
The School of Salamanca is amongst the influences that Graf identifies as main to Cervantes’s humanist style of religious tolerance. That is likewise the school, of course, from which Rothbard traced the origins of Austrian Economics. Graf sees in Cervantes Erasmus-like and quasi-Protestant sympathies, which, in his telling, seem more political (i.e., anti-monarchical) than theological or doctrinal. Protestantism thus understood put a primacy on the individual, resisted state monitoring and persecution, advocated mass literacy and knowing, and declined ecclesiastic power and orthodoxy. “Cervantes was himself excommunicated,” Graf adduces in assistance of his view (p. 32). Cervantes’s “Protestantism,” if that is the proper label, was historically and geographically contextual and in contradistinction to the organized coercion institutionalized by the Spanish Inquisition.
Graf connects spiritual flexibility with liberty of thought since they both concern “the limits of the state’s capability to manage the inner lives of its people” (p. 17). An unfavorable example of spiritual browbeating against which Cervantes wrote was the Expulsion of the Moriscos under Phillip III. Here, a monarch worked out state compulsion to implement spiritual conformity and oppress heretical individuals or groups. Graf notes that this spiritual and ethnic conflict happened between the publication of the first and second parts of Don Quijote. The truth that state-religious censors cut profane passages from Don Quijote before its 2nd edition appeared suggests the level to which flexibility of thought and religious beliefs are bound together. Cervantes’s strategic irreverence was “part of a considerably down-to-earth discourse targeted at subverting orthodoxy” (p. 23). One explanation for why Don Quijote continues to appeal is that light humor is more enjoyable than violent sanctimony. Comedy, succeeded, has remaining power.
Don Quijote “should be of terrific interest to feminists” (p. 55), according to Graf, for a number of reasons: (1) Since it “defends women characters against the type of brutality frequently practiced and allowed by the Islamic, Protestant, and Catholic males of his day” (p. 55); it “buffoons the extremes of male sexuality” (p. 56); it illustrates “funny, prosaic, and worthless performances of male fantasy” (p. 58); it depicts ladies “as no different from males when it pertains to their moral status” (p. 59); and it “acknowledges that since women get pregnant, their experience of sex is more consequential, both in terms of social stigma and material expense” (p. 59). Just a prolonged exposition beyond the scope of this evaluation might effectively resolve Graf’s account of the diverse “feminism” (an anachronistic designation for Cervantes) communicated by Don Quijote.
The same might be said of Graf’s account of slavery, which, he states, is “necessary to any severe understanding of Don Quijote” (p. 85) in light of Cervantes’s treble objections to human chains: that “slavery itself is wrong, the brand-new racial validation of it is ridiculous, and any product advantage it provides over a totally free labor market is likely an allusion” (p. 85). Relating slavery and skin color grew significantly common throughout the seventeenth century, when Spanish financial investment in the servant trade increased and Cervantes himself came across human chains in Algiers. That experience, integrated with his imprisonment for embezzlement, to name a few things, turned him versus slavery. Graf credits the School of Salamanca and principles of natural law for Cervantes’s gradual opposition to slavery and claims that Don Quijote belonged to a larger “Spanish development in early modern fiction” (e.g., Lazarillo de Tormes and El coloquio de los perros) that folded “the themes of race and slavery into a picaresque satire versus slavery” (p. 87).
Of the five chapters of Graf’s book, the fifth, concerning economics, is the most exciting, going great lengths to show the importance and usefulness of Austrian economics to literary theory and criticism. Those familiar with the Austrian School, however, may turn previous areas of this chapter that are addressed to an audience doing not have economics training. For example, Graf invests six pages explaining subjective theory of worth as articulated from Carl Menger to Rothbard. The wide variety of financial ideas that Graf discovers in Don Quijote— price theory, cash, markets, usury, interest, financial obligation, credit, inflation, counterfeiting, and more– testifies to Cervantes’s continual interest because topic, which interested future classical liberals.” [T] he essential attraction of Cervantes’s fantastic unique for the similarity Locke, Hume, Jefferson, and Bastiat, all of whom emphasized individualism, private property, steady cash, and free markets in lieu of market intervention and control,” was, Graf submits, Cervantes’s apparent proto-liberalism (p. 227).
Globalization, the “influx of gold and silver from the New World” (p. 175), financial treatises that Christianized organization and trade, fresh financial practices and active commerce in and around Spain– these and other aspects discuss the economics that figures in Don Quijote. “Throughout his life,” Graf asserts, Cervantes “got tangible micro- and macro-economic understanding about things like tax laws, the quality of different coins, and the gain, loss, and threat of a series of debt and credit plans” (p. 179). Graf preserves that Cervantes was economically sophisticated, understanding “abstract concepts like Gresham’s Law and the subjective theory of worth, which he grasped the recklessness and immorality of authoritarian decrees like price controls, penalties for usury, and compulsory currency exchange rate” (p. 180).
Due to the fact that of the time and place in which Cervantes wrote, Graf’s discussion of liberalism, which fixates Cervantes, seems to imply an incompatibility with, or opposition to, spiritual establishments and institutions. Yet there is a considerable difference between spiritual establishments and institutions– particularly those endowed with government or state power– and the movements and mentors of historic Christianity and those spiritual texts around which it established. Larry Seidentop’s Creating the Individual supplies a cogent case for Christianity as a motivation for individualism and liberalism in the West. Graf’s treatment of Christianity may have looked various had his subject matter been different.
Graf is a self-proclaimed independent scholar; he preserves no official affiliation with a university, research institute, think tank, or other scholarly company. That Lexington Books would release an author without such establishment ties recommends that it is dedicated, chiefly, to intellectual merit and not, state, credentialism. Too many university presses would hand down this book because its author does not grace the Ivory Tower. That is an error due to the fact that the quality and rigor of Graf’s arguments far go beyond that of numerous tenured professors in the hallowed halls of college.
Readers already acquainted with Cervantes and Don Quijote are the target audience for this book, which may be available in useful as a curricular supplement in a course on Cervantes or Don Quijote, the emergence of the unique as a literary type, Spanish literature, and so forth. The benefit of mentor Graf’s viewpoint in a college classroom involves his counteraction of Marxist or quasi-Marxist– or a minimum of anti-capitalist– exegeses and discourses that are plentiful in liberal arts disciplines. It has actually been over a years because Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature and the Economics of Liberty reached print, and optimism regarding an unexpected blooming of libertarian literary criticism has, no doubt, diminished. But Graf’s effort is one small deposit in a gradually growing stock of research study that reconsiders literary texts with an eye towards liberty as a guiding excellent. There is, undoubtedly, hope and promise for a more humane economics in literary theory and criticism. If we are client, it will come.