Early on in Exploring Capitalist Fiction, Edward W. Younkins sets out a pedagogical thesis: “Fiction, including novels, plays, and films, can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot” (p. ix). The 25 chapters that follow are primarily plot summaries of stories Younkins recommends in support of this thesis. In the front and back matter that carry the majority of the book’s light analytical weight, Younkins elaborates, explaining that stories “are richer and more likely to stay with the reader or viewer” (p. ix), supplement theory (p. ix), develop critical thinking (p. ix), cultivate character (p. ix), bridge theory and practice (p. 3), offer more realism than textbooks and case studies (p. 270), and provide a history lesson (p. 270).
As a heavy user of literature and film in my own teaching—students in my ethics and sustainability courses have read or watched seven of Younkins’s selections, among many more that do not make his list—I agree with his pedagogical thesis. His subproject of finding narratives that portray business and capitalism positively—even “heroically” —is worthwhile in view of his accurate claim that “the overall literary and cinematic treatment accorded capitalism, business, and businessmen has been unkind, hostile, and unflattering over the years” (p. 4). Yet even though his selections are reasonably balanced among those that, Younkins says transparently, “support my own pro-capitalist and pro-business free-market perspective, those that are in strong opposition to that view, and those that partially support it” (p. 4), his book begs the question: Which stories are the right stories? Not only does Younkins’s list suffer from a disappointingly provincial perspective on capitalism, but his commentary on that list is also short on insightful analysis, instead functioning ideologically to express another thesis: “Teachers can use this great novel [Atlas Shrugged] to promulgate the conceptual and moral foundations of a free society to their students” (p. 165).
The plot summaries of novels, plays, and films are arranged chronologically and selected according to Younkins’s experience that they “have had the most substantial influence, are the most relevant, and are the most interesting” (p. 3). They include acknowledged classics (e.g., Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Miller’s Death of a Salesman), modern critical favorites (e.g., Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Stone’s Wall Street films), controversial works (e.g., Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), and “underappreciated gems” (p. 3) (e.g., Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky and Garrett’s The Driver). The release dates of the stories range from 1885 to 2010, though his Conclusion contains a brief history of business in Western fiction dating back to Chaucer’s tradesman. This expedient history traces the depiction of business and businesspersons from “respectable and virtuous…to…objects of reprobation” (p. 272), showing how novels became tools that shaped social and political change. Although Younkins does not provide templates for using stories to effect social and political exploration in the classroom, he does offer perspectives on why stories should be so used. Younkins’s selections and summaries, along with appendices containing hundreds of other titles, will be convenient for scholars seeking to imbue their teaching—and their research—with perspectives on business and capitalism, especially from conventional American fiction.
More than anything, though, the book is an ideological project, an ode to Ayn Rand, funded by the Charles Koch Foundation—namesake of one of the controversial Koch brothers, who have lobbied extensively for libertarian causes consistent with Younkins’s market perspective—and the BB&T Charitable Foundation—which, in the image of BB&T bank’s retired CEO John Allison, funds higher education research and teaching that promulgates the teaching of Allison’s favorite author, Rand (Parnell & Dent Reference Parnell and Dent2009). Although Younkins is forthcoming about his ideological orientation and quite balanced in his selection of stories, he ironically provides too little analysis within his plot summaries in defense of his ideology. Instead, he occasionally injects convenient one-liners that lack enough substance to explore. For example, of Norris’s The Octopus, he concludes, “It is the entry of the state into the business realm that leads to favoritism and unfair advantages” (p. 54)—although it is not evident from the plot summary that government intervention is the primary culprit for misbehavior. He subtitles his fawning chapter on Atlas Shrugged, “An Epic Story of Heroic Businessmen.” He uses the longest digression from plot summary in any of the chapters, a description of the 2008 financial crisis, basically to conclude that government intervention did not work—without clarifying whether government should have intervened less, differently, or not at all.
I do not mean to suggest that a book should not reflect the opinions of its author or to deny that the stories one recommends inevitably reflect one’s own preferences. However, aside from this passing, yet insightful, comment, “Because literature is, in part, an expression of the culture within which it is produced, it can also supply a tool for examining the social history of that culture” (p. 267), Younkins seems unaware of the pressing critical question that his book hints at and that is raised in my second paragraph: Which stories are the right stories? Readers of this journal familiar with the debate about ethical relativism will identify with the parallel issue of whether there are right stories and analytical paths (aesthetic absolutism) or whether one is free to choose whatever stories and interpretations suit one’s ideological preferences and aims (aesthetic relativism). What is most frustrating about Younkins’s book to me is its failure to imply even the vaguest awareness of more influential, relevant, and interesting (to use Younkins’s selection criteria) stories to 21st-century global capitalism.
I wondered to myself whether my opinion of Younkins’s book would be much higher if I were his ideological kin. After all, there is a back cover full of blurbs of praise for it (leading with the aforementioned John Allison), a selection drawn from fully three pages inside (including a quote from Marshall Schminke, the BB&T Professor of Business Ethics) and representatives of NGOs with names like the Liberty Fund)—containing such compliments as “perceptive,” “insightful,” “unerring,” “indispensable,” and even evaluative claims that the book is “even-handed.” These people certainly seemed to like the book, which adds credence to the relativist claim that aesthetic value is a function of personal preferences potentially having more to do with ideological meaning than with such absolutist abstractions as, say, beauty.
Trying to put my ideological misgivings aside revealed that my dissatisfaction with the book was actually more a matter of aesthetic disagreement than ideological disagreement. It is not clear that Younkins’s criteria of influence, relevance, and interest are strictly aesthetic criteria, but I will use them to explain why we disagree. As for influence, Younkins does not specify influence on what: On the practice of capitalism? On literature? On business literature? Supposing that it is some combination of the three, it is not conclusive that the works he has chosen represent the most influential works of capitalism. For example, even his relatively solid choice of Silas Lapham has been questionably influential, as it is now more of a historical curiosity than a canonical classic. Yet he overstates the importance of it as “the first important realistic novel to focus on an American businessman” (p. 15). Immediately, counterexamples spring to mind, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Work (1873, not about a businessman, he might respond), Herman Melville’s Bartleby (1853, mentioned by Younkins in his historical interlude, but perhaps considered to be a short story or unrealistic), and even the whitewashing scene from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876, about a naughty kid, but nonetheless a brilliant treatise on marketing ethics).
These counterexamples provoke a question as to what relevance is, particularly what it means for a story to be “about” business. Does it have to be about a businessman? An American businessman? Can Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, by a British woman about a male scientist) be considered a business novel (as I have claimed it is about technology entrepreneurship in Michaelson (Reference Michaelson, Koehn and Elm2014))? Why not Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, about the ivory trade in the Congo River)? How about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996, mostly about tennis players and drug addicts, but set in a not-so-distant world so enamored of corporate sponsorship that years no longer have numbers but are sponsored by such consumer products as the Depend Adult Undergarment)? As for the American part, no fewer than 24 of the 25 works on Younkins’s main list were authored or directed by American citizens (including three born outside of the United States), and 24 were by men, which hardly seems to be relevant representations of global capitalism present and future, or, for that matter, of the past. Nowhere does Younkins state that he has intentionally narrowed his focus to American capitalism, which leaves the reader to wonder whether his conception of capitalism could possibly be so ethnocentric. The relevance of non-Americans and women, among others, to business is certainly not a new phenomenon, so it seems a glaring omission for Younkins’s lists to be so dominated by works by and about white American men. Of the last six chronological entries on Younkins’s list, only one is a novel, despite the fact that there have been many future-canon business-relevant novels written by non-Americans and women in recent years, including Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire (2013), Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia (2013). The list grows considerably with the addition of products of a film industry that has become as global as any in recent years—Up the Yangtze (2007) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008) come to mind—but in Younkins’s world, capitalist films belong to Americans, too.
Younkins is not likely to warm to all of my suggestions, nor might all of these artists consider their works to be about business. This potentially underscores a point that leans toward aesthetic relativism: that the choices we make reflect our preferences. It is implied in Younkins’s astute claim about novels and social history, and also explored by Edward Said (Reference Said1993), that stories “become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (p. xii). Novels—and other narratives, including plays and films—can and should be used instrumentally, as ideological clubs. Younkins’s book has a social history of its own, born and bred in American capitalism and hostile to regulatory and sentimental forces that would deign to intrude upon unfettered market dynamics. In that regard, Younkins has done a serviceable job of introducing stories that depict the promise of heroic business and even warning against overzealousness on the part of business and its would-be adversaries. However, he has completely missed a larger and perhaps even more important point that may lean toward aesthetic absolutism, to which many literary critics would both agree: A substantial part of the value of truly great stories is intrinsic, something money cannot motivate or buy. One of the greatest lessons from stories from which capitalists can learn is that much of what we—authors, directors, readers, viewers, and characters—do is motivated simply by the desire to produce, consume, and experience beauty, love, and other forms of intangible value. The downfall of Younkins’s book, along with most of his unhappy protagonists, from Loman to Levine, and from Lapham to Levinsky, is their failure to embrace that value.
