Academic

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons?

By propertyprof

It's summer, which means it's time for reruns.  This rerun of part of a post back at propertyprof last August is inspired by reading George Leef's article on Alan Kors' recent opinion piece.  Kors  reflects on his days as an undergraduate.  As I understand it based on Leef's article (Kors' piece is behind a wall over at the New Criterion website), Kors was brought into orbit around Frederick Hayek's Road to Serfdom by a left-wing Princeton prof who assigned it as a way of getting students to think more about and criticize more the professor's ideas.  I'm never sure how much books create ideology rather than confirm what's already there.  (I'll invoke the apt phrase of my colleague Anne Klinefelter who says "books don't __, people do.").  But that's really the subject for discussion at anyone time.  Right now I'm interested in cartoons....

William J. Aceves et al., "The Orthodoxy of Format: Some Sketches of Legal Scholarship,"56 Journal of Legal Education 636 (2006)) talks about how to use cartoons in legal scholarship. In fact, it's a cartoon. The most surprising piece of it all?  I didn't realize that there was a cartoon version of Hayek's Road to Serfdom, until I saw it cited in note 6!  Get this--it was published by GM in its "Thought Starter Series."  Now that's something I'd like to know more about; bet that's a great source for intellectual history of the U.S. around the time of the New Deal.  (In 1938 Time had  a riveting discussion of GM's marketing man, Henry Woodfin Grady, who developed the "Thought Starter Series.")

The illustration is from the Mises Institute's website.

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).