Bound Voices #002 — A Conversation with Henry Oliver
On literature, liberalism, and the imagination’s economics.
When we speak about poetry and freedom, we usually mean something abstract — the free play of the mind, the imagination unbound. But for Henry Oliver, editor of The Common Reader and research fellow at the Mercatus Center, freedom is also a moral and civic idea — one that literature itself helps preserve.
Through his Substack essays, Henry has become one of the most articulate public critics writing today, known for his clarity, erudition, and refusal to treat literature as mere ornament or ideology. His writing restores the faith that books still matter — that they shape not only our private selves, but the character of civilization itself.
In this conversation, Henry discusses the moral roots of taste, the legacy of liberalism in literature, and why sincerity in poetry might still be the most radical act.
G. K. Allum: You’ve written that great literature is the heart of a civilization. That’s a striking, almost moral statement. Where did that conviction begin for you? Was there a moment when literature first felt like more than just words on a page?
Henry Oliver:
In the sense that I mean it seriously—as a historical statement—I can’t have really meant it until fairly recently, but the conviction that literature is the pride of a great nation was part of my temperament from a young age, early teenager perhaps. Of course, normal intellectual development entails realising that you were once presumptuous in your opinions, or it did in my case, so I had to learn what it really meant later on.
Personally, literature meant something to me as literature when I was thirteen or so. That was when I started to love poetry in a significant way. Before that I was a reader of all sorts of things, and I had some appreciation of language for its own sake. But I wasn’t one of those people reading Blake in my kindergarten. There is something reflexive about the nature of literature: everything about a poem relates to everything about the poem. That was what struck me at thirteen or so. (Though honestly how people remember their lives in this sort of detail is beyond me and I may well be wrong about the age.)
G. K: Your Substack, The Common Reader, champions clarity and accessibility in literary criticism. What do you think has caused the widening gap between academic criticism and the kind of public literary conversation you’re trying to revive?
Henry:
Why can’t academics write like A.C. Bradley anymore, you mean? Well I suppose some of them can, but there’s certainly something different about what I am doing and what the scholars are doing. Many of them are writing works of scholarship that are trying to add to our knowledge or improve on our understanding of a topic, as part of an ongoing professional discussion. So why would they write for the public? Often when they write for the LRB or whatever those same academics are clear and accessible. Think of Colin Burrow. Now, it’s true that Burrow’s father wrote very clear, accessible academic books, which are still worth reading, but his own books are pretty impressively readable.
I think the real issue here is that the audience for these books changed. How many copies would Shakespearean Tragedy sell today? People want Literary Theory and political and cultural criticism.
G. K: You’ve recently joined the Mercatus Center, an institution often associated with economics and policy. How do you see your literary work intersecting with ideas of markets, value, or freedom? Is there a connection between the marketplace of ideas and the way we value art and poetry?
Henry:
Mercatus is concerned with liberal ideas in many forms—mainline political economy, institutions, pluralism, flourishing and so on. My work at Mercatus is about classical liberal ideas: how great literature cultivates the liberal values of individual flourishing and pluralism.
This is the philosophical tradition of Smith, Mill, Berlin and so on. These thinkers have been important to me for a long time. When I graduated, I realised I needed to give myself a fuller education. I was already devoted to Mill, but I read my way into being a liberal pluralist through Berlin’s work, came to understand the world as being polycentric and Hayekian, and learned, though I wouldn’t have called it this, the importance of methodological individualism, and generally immersed myself in basic economic education. I was reading about the steady state economy, worrying about climate change, thinking about Keynes, the Great Depression, and so on. These were the ideas I came to agree with. It was a tremendously exciting period for me. I used to get up early before work and watch lectures or read history.
What I am doing now is thinking about the relationship between classical liberal ideas and literature. In a broad sense, literature is part of human flourishing—both in the sense that reading is a flourishing activity, and in the sense that literature has specific things to say about flourishing—this is a crucial part of the liberal idea. (Smith and Mill were both impressive literary critics.) I am also looking at some specific things such as the way Adam Smith’s ideas affect Austen’s narrative techniques. Liberalism’s biggest commitment is to the pre-political idea of the individual and literature is a very important part of that.
As for the marketplace of ideas, I hate that phrase! Presumably we are talking about free speech and the clash of truth and falsehood and all that? I don’t think it is a marketplace because there is no purchase involved, though you might say there is trade, I suppose.
Mill talked about this in On Liberty, which is what gets quoted all the time, but also in the “Coleridge” and I think that is a better account of this idea. Mill said that intellectuals had to learn from their opponents. Even though he was not on the same side of Coleridge (Mill being an Enlightenment figure, Coleridge being the opposite, in blunt terms), Mill saw much value in the way Coleridge thought. Scientists can learn from each other’s experiments, he said, and so can thinkers. The history of “social philosophy” was that of both sides of any debate being “right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.” Or, as Mill put it in a letter, intellectuals tell the truth, they just don’t tell the whole truth. This is the clashing ideas of the so-called marketplace, which Mill described as oscillating towards a center over time.
Literature is obviously part of this oscillation. Perhaps more so in the past than today, but that’s a whole different argument. The essential point is that we have a lot to learn from poetry and novels and essays and so on, even if, like Mill, we are not in agreement with those writers. Here’s how he phrased this idea in “Bentham.”
“Human nature and human life are wide subjects, and whoever would embark in an enterprise requiring a thorough knowledge of them, has need both of large stores of his own, and of all aids and appliances from elsewhere. His qualifications for success will be proportional to two things,—the degree in which his own nature and circumstances furnish them with a correct and complete picture of man’s nature and circumstances; and his capacity of deriving light from other minds.”
G. K: The word “neoliberalism” tends to carry a lot of emotional and ideological baggage. From your vantage point, how might poetry, or the humanities more broadly, serve as a counterbalance to the purely economic framing of human life? And conversely, what might economists learn from poets?
Henry:
If neoliberalism means people who think free markets are important, it’s a good enough term, but it is often used, especially by literary critics to mean a whole range of policies—private markets in the welfare state, the encroachment of economics into non economic areas of life, and so on—in ways that I think are incoherent. Mostly, it seems to mean the general policy agreement of the last few decades, but again, the people who use the term cannot agree on when this begins! There was an excellent article about this in the latest issue of Liberties. Many supposed neoliberals did not follow the policy agreement! (I also hope to write more about this topic.)
So when we talk about neoliberalism I never quite know what we mean. I don’t think there is a purely economic framing of life. I am not aware of anyone—Hayek, Reagan, Friedman, etc—who made or believed such a claim. They made strong claims about the nature of the economic side of life, but there simply isn’t such a thing as an ideology or political settlement that sees your whole life as economic. No-one is so insane as to think that the way you play with your children or sit by a river is economic. This might sound nit-picking, but one of the great weaknesses of modern literary criticism is the sheer refusal to talk about this topic without lowering standards to those of a bad newspaper editorial. Remember Mill on Coleridge!
But yes, poetry is another department of life, to borrow from Mill again, and has so much to show us that economics doesn’t. It is poetry and logic together, as Mill wrote to Carlyle, that makes the true philosophy.
G. K: Your essay on Mary Oliver defends her earnestness against accusations of being “middlebrow.” Why do you think sincerity and clarity have become suspect qualities in contemporary poetry? Have we confused difficulty with depth?
Henry:
Do I read enough modern poetry to know? I am working on a review of the Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney and he is full of sincerity and clarity. You could call him a liberal, in the pre-political sense I mentioned above. The ache and pain for people as people in North is a full expression of that liberal idea. Sincerity often seems corny. In an age where everything is ironised, it seems stupid or irrelevant. I liked what Victoria Moul said in her interview with you about poetry being useful. I enjoy that sort of Early Modern poem too, though I haven’t read many of the ones Victoria was talking about and I anticipate her anthology. Difficulty often does mean depth, but one aim of literary criticism is to understand the relationship between the style and the moral: there is no writing without style, and no style without moral purpose. The question is how it is done, how well it is done.
G.K: Taste, as you once wrote, is a kind of knowledge. Do you think our sense of taste in art, in writing, even in public life has been distorted by market incentives and social media? What does “good taste” look like now?
Henry:
Markets enable more people to have more taste(s). As the economy gets larger and more complex, there is more and more division of labour. This means that you can be a romance novelist or a sci-fi screenwriter or a mid-tier Substack writer or whatever else it is you can do as a writer now that you couldn’t do in 1500. Distortion happens when something is pulled out of its natural course (such as when a tax policy changes behaviour and thus “distorts” the market). But what is the natural course of literature without a market? If you can’t sell your book, you have a smaller audience, or, more likely, you don’t have an audience beyond your family. (Obviously many writers didn’t sell their work.) Without a deep market and division of labour, how many niches of modern fiction would even exist? What the market does for readers is to bring them all of this diversity.
If you want to talk about distortions, we need to know the counter-factual. A lot of people think that corporate structures in publishing are responsible for significant changes in the way novels are written, or published. I don’t doubt them (though I have not yet read the new book on this topic), but I think it’s superficial to say the “market” is “distorting”, as opposed to seeing it as a process of change that is driven by people and what they want. A lot of things are put out into the world that fail.
Social media can be a means of discovery. This is being written for Substack, which is a form of social media. It obviously has many problems, but in some sense, it is just another way of using the internet. So you can use it as a means of helping you to acquire taste. Sometimes people reply to me on Notes and tell me something I posted got them to read V.S. Naipaul or Jane Austen or something. We all make choices about what to do, and while there are incentives involved in that, there are other factors too. You are not incentivised to watch Netflix rather than read a poem, but that is how most people behave. The market, however, and social media, can be used in other ways.
G. K: If you could redesign the cultural economy around poetry — who writes it, who reads it, who funds it — what would that look like? How might we make poetry once again feel essential to civic and intellectual life?
Henry:
As a good polycentric liberal pluralist I would never wish to redesign the cultural economy! Let people express their talents in all the myriad ways I could never hope to predict or understand or control!
I do believe, however, that patronage in the arts is far too bureaucratized, and that the arts would benefit from more individual patrons making decisions based on good taste, perhaps with the aid of an advisor, which is what happened with the modernists, much of the great art and architecture of the twentieth century, and so on. (This is something else I am hoping to write about while I am at Mercatus.)
As for poetry feeling central to civic life—did it ever? And why should it? Poetry simply is essential to intellectual life. Those who have been profoundly shocked by Shakespeare and Milton know this.
G. K: What poem, or line of poetry, has stayed with you most persistently — one that still feels like a touchstone for how you see the world?
Henry:
We say that God and the imagination are one—
How high that highest candle lights the dark!
Editor’s Note:
Henry writes about poetry as if it were a branch of moral philosophy — not in the sense of preaching, but of paying attention. His vision reminds us that literature is not decoration for civilization; it is its conscience.
In a time when so much writing feels transient, The Common Reader remains steadfast in its belief that words can still illuminate the dark.
Further Reading:
Bound Voices is a continuing interview series from Ink & Ribbon Press, a nonprofit publisher devoted to craft, discovery, and the permanence of the printed word.
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