HOW TO USE THIS WEBSITE

This website is a work in progress; we are in the process of putting up as much of Paul Cantor’s work as possible. In the earliest phase, we will make available the chief representatives of his work; later phases will fill out the material.

You may search for his work by title, subject matter, and keywords. You may also browse by subject matter (e.g., all his works on “Music” or “Philosophy”). And in some cases, we have grouped related works, to create mini-courses of study.

Of Cantor’s nine books, seven are at the moment still in print, and are available on amazon.com and elsewhere. Used copies of Creature and Creator and Macbeth und die Evangelisierung von Schottland are also available on amazon.com or amazon.de and elsewhere. Literature and the Economics of Liberty is available for free in pdf form at mises.com (we have provided a link). For three of the books—The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, and Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream, we have made available the Word files of the original manuscripts. These do not correspond exactly to the published versions but they come very close (they predate the generally light copy-editing). Please note, however, that anyone who wishes to cite these texts in a scholarly fashion should make reference to the published versions. For Creature and Creator, we hope to provide a pdf scan of the published version. A variety of constraints forces us to be inconsistent in our treatment of these books.

For Cantor’s essays, articles, journalism, book reviews, and other published material, we are again forced to be inconsistent. Fortunately, a substantial portion of this material appeared in either The Weekly Standard or The Claremont Review of Books, and we have been able to post all of these articles in exactly the form in which they appear on the websites of these two journals. For the other material, we have drawn upon Word files or pdf scans, depending on what was available. For the pdf scans, it may be easier to read them by first printing them up. In a few cases, we have posted versions of the essays that are longer than the ones that appeared in print, restoring passages that were originally edited out solely for reasons of length. In other cases, we will be posting material that currently exists only in manuscript and has not yet been published. In the long term, Cantor plans on making a great deal of material available that was never intended for publication, including lecture notes for a variety of his courses.

The website includes links to Cantor’s audio and/or visual material. The featured items are his Shakespeare and Politics website, which posts 48 lectures on 17 different plays, as well as a 10-part seminar on the Roman plays; his 10 Commerce and Culture lectures for the Mises Institute; and his 8 Conversations with Bill Kristol. Over time, we will be posting links to more and more of Cantor’s extensive body of lectures, podcasts, interviews, and other online appearances. Please note that all of this material is spontaneous and in effect unedited. None of this material was scripted or rehearsed in advance or corrected after the fact. The recording conditions were never ideal and sometimes significantly less than ideal. In these live performances, sometimes Cantor and the other speakers make errors; sometimes words become inaudible or other glitches occur. There were no opportunities to do retakes. In short, these are not professional, studio recordings that meet the highest standards of production, and we do not pretend to present them as such. We hope that the inherent interest of the material makes up for what it sometimes lacks in production quality.

Please refer to our posting of Cantor’s CV to get an idea of what remains to be put online and/or to look up some of the material on your own. His CV also indicates when published essays are earlier versions of later publications. In general, we will not put up works that were later revised into expanded versions, which Cantor now considers definitive.