Regular commenter Prateek Sanjay notes that he's also enjoyed all my Lovecraft posts this year. These posts have definitely added some diversity to F&OST readers and commenters. You can find all of them (at least the ones I bothered to tag - which should be most of them) here.Prateek specifically writes: "If Lovecraft actually met Hayek, he'd find they both had much in common with each of their versions of "limitations of knowledge"!"
Clearly both saw limitations to human knowledge, although they were obviously of much different scope. One theme I've thought of writing on (and maybe submitting to one of a couple literary journals that often feature articles on Lovecraft) is comparing Lovecraft's views on "the unknown" during his fertile period in the early 1920s to the views of Keynes and Frank Knight, who both published important books on how humans grapple with "the unknown" in 1921.
I think there's a fundamental asymmetry between the way Lovecraft talks about fear of the unknown in his essay Supernatural Horror In Literature, and the way he talks about it in his tales. His tales seem to me to actually invert the argument he makes in the essay (although I haven't surveyed them widely - I've mostly thought about the contrast between what Lovecraft writes in Supernatural Horror in Literature and what Lovecraft writes in Call of Cthulu). Thoughts on any of this are much appreciated.
Prateek might be interested in this particular Lovecraft post... Lovecraft was certainly aware of the existence of F.A. Hayek, and wrote about him in at least one of his letters.
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Interesting, interesting.
ReplyDeleteLovecraft wrote, "Nobody is going to "destroy the system" - for it has been destroying itself ever since it evolved out of the old agrarian-handicraft economy a century and a half ago."" That's very Marxian, although it says he thought Marxists dangerous.
His complaint about "old agrarian-handicraft economy a century and a half ago" makes him look like an agrarian of the style of Gandhi or Dostoyovsky. He was very nostalgic about the old days of America, when it was still a British colony of farmers. I guess that old life of a socially homogenous agricultural America was his ideal view of the world, but he was forward-looking and not backward-looking in solutions.
All a small glimpse into views permeating into people's minds then.
It is hard to find Lovecraft saying a kind word for Marx, but one he does cite favorably all the time with these views is Jefferson.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where later Marxists shook out on this question, but my impression was that Marx himself embraced industrialism over earlier stages - he just wanted to push on to the next stage.