A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

Paul Arthur Cantor was born on October 25,1945 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Morris Ochacher and Helen Katz Ochacher. He took the name of his stepfather after his father died and his mother remarried. His elder brother, Donald Ochacher, kept the original family name.

Cantor is a product of the New York City public school system. For elementary school, he attended PS 208 (an early magnet school); he moved on to Meyer Levin Junior High School (JHS 285); and finished at Samuel J. Tilden High School. His earliest interests were paleontology and astronomy, both fueled by his favorite spot in New York City, the American Museum of Natural History and its Hayden Planetarium. In general, he leaned toward the natural sciences and mathematics up through high school. He was captivated especially by geometry and the beauty of its axiomatic method. He read the early books of Euclid’s Elements on his own while in high school (his senior thesis on Shakespeare in college was later criticized for being too “Euclidean”). He was co-captain of the Tilden math team. But he soon began to sense that his talents lay elsewhere.

Cantor gradually developed a serious interest in literature—no surprise, given his family background. His grandfather, Samuel Katz, had a Ph.D. in English from NYU; his dissertation was on the 18th-century Scottish dramatist, John Home. Cantor’s mother had an M.A. in English from Cornell University. His father was an avid book collector, which meant that Cantor grew up in a household with plenty of reading material available. His elder brother introduced him to many modern authors he had studied at Cornell, including Franz Kaka, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, and Pär Lagerkvist. He was particularly enchanted by Goethe’s Faust, which he read in the wonderful Alice Raphael translation. One of the turning points in his growing love of literature was the opportunity to see the legendary Gustaf Gründgens production of Faust at the New York City Center Theater, with Gründgens himself playing Mephistopheles (the production was in German but with simultaneous English translation via headphones).

His mother dutifully took him to this Faust production, and also introduced him to live Shakespeare, mainly at the then flourishing American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. Among the many performances he experienced there, the highlight was seeing Morris Carnovsky in the role of King Lear (twice!). To this day, Cantor considers this the greatest Shakespeare performance he ever saw and it inspired his devotion to King Lear and Shakespeare in general. He went on to write his senior English paper in high school and his senior thesis in college on King Lear. Cantor’s academic interest in Shakespeare was sparked by studying Julius Caesar in junior high school. This was the first time he read literary criticism of Shakespeare—he soon became a fan of A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy--and it formed the basis for his life-long interest in the Roman plays.

Cantor’s interest in literature was also fostered by a series of excellent high school English teachers. He wrote his first extended study of a literary work in his junior year in high school, an analysis of Moby-Dick titled “Melville and the Evil Spirit of the Universe.” This class was taught by Everett Kerner; in his senior year, Cantor took a class on mythology with him, for which he wrote a 40-page paper on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Thus, coming out of high school, Cantor was beginning to think that his vocation might lie in analyzing literature. He had become enthusiastic about the ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, the English Romantics (he was  intrigued especially by the obscurity of William Blake), the classic German authors from Goethe through Nietzsche to Mann and Hesse, and a number of modernists, including Yeats and Beckett. In particular, he fell in love with Waiting for Godot when he watched the television production starring Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith (several times in one week).  He did not know it at the time, but in many ways the path of his future literary studies was already laid out during his high school years.

Meanwhile, Cantor had been developing another interest—economics, specifically of the Austrian School, whose chief representatives were Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek—the great champions of the free market and classical liberalism in the twentieth century. Cantor’s brother Donald introduced him to this material, having learned about Mises from Sylvester Petro, one of his professors at NYU Law School. Cantor read many of Mises’s books, including his magnum opus Human Action, while still in high school, and some of Hayek’s works as well. Cantor was deeply impressed by Mises’ work—its axiomatic nature appealed to his inner Euclid. He and a friend, Alan Udoff, took the unusual step of calling Mises at his Manhattan apartment. This led to a meeting with Mises and his inviting them to attend his legendary seminar at the NYU Graduate School of Business Research. Cantor and Udoff regularly attended two semesters of the Mises seminar in fall 1961 and spring 1962 (Cantor’s senior year in high school). The experience of watching a great teacher like Mises in action was formative for Cantor.

Between attending this seminar and reading many books by Mises and Hayek, Cantor got a solid grounding in Austrian economics that fundamentally shaped his thinking.  Coming out of high school, Cantor did not immediately pursue his interest in Austrian economics, but it never left him. In 1992, he submitted a paper on Thomas Mann and the German hyperinflation of the 1920s to an essay contest sponsored by the Mises Institute for its tenth anniversary. Cantor was one of the contest winners, thus beginning a long and productive association with the Mises Institute, which led to his attempt to apply Austrian economics to understanding literature, especially in Literature and the Economics of Liberty (co-edited with Stephen Cox) and his lecture series “Commerce and Culture.” Although Cantor found Austrian economics invaluable in understanding such phenomena as the serialization of the novel in 19th-century Britain, he has never thought of it as providing the master key to understanding all literary issues. Rather, he restricts his use of Austrian principles to specific questions of the relationship of literature to economics.

Coming out of high school, Cantor’s intellectual interests were in ferment. He was losing interest in the natural sciences, as the mathematics involved became increasingly abstract. The fact that he was finding himself reading as much science fiction as science fact at this point was evidence of his increasing shift to literature (he even experimented with writing fiction, poetry, and drama, with little or no success). Still, Cantor’s choice of college was governed by his original interest in the hard sciences. He went to Harvard largely because of the reputation of its astronomy department.

Ironically, once at Harvard, Cantor took no courses in mathematics and only one course in the natural sciences, and that was a course on the history and epistemology of science, based on the then new theories of Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions. Because of Mises’s work on the epistemology of economics, Cantor had become interested in philosophy more generally. Taking the lead from Mises, he read a number of philosophers with a particular interest in epistemology, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, and especially Ernst Cassirer. Considering majoring in philosophy, Cantor took a year-long survey of the history of philosophy as a freshman at Harvard. Harvard’s Philosophy department was so dominated by analytic philosophy that it was not at all interested in the history of philosophy, with the result that this course was taught by two visiting professors and taught badly. Cantor never enrolled in another philosophy course at Harvard (although he did audit one on Ludwig Wittgenstein). And as an Austrian in economics, he was not about to take courses in Harvard’s Keynesian economics department.

That left literature among Cantor’s interests. Due to his advanced placement credits in the area, he was immediately able to take upper-level courses in the English Department (beginning in his freshman year with courses on medieval literature and on Milton). That is how he became an English major. Over his nine years with the Harvard English Department (which included five years as a graduate student), Cantor profited the most from his courses with Larry Benson, Herschel Baker, and Walter Jackson Bate. Baker excelled at traditional intellectual history, which to some extent satisfied Cantor’s desire to be studying the history of philosophy. He has always been interested more in the content than in the form of literature, and he generally concentrated on the philosophical substance of whatever works he read.

But something was still missing in Cantor’s education, and that he found when he encountered Harvey Mansfield in the fall semester of his junior year. A professor in the Government department, Mansfield was a follower of Leo Strauss, the pre-eminent but controversial political philosopher, most famous for his discovery of the phenomenon of philosophical esotericism and the art of secret writing. Mises and Strauss are in many respects polar opposites, but the fact that they both saw positivism and historicism as their chief intellectual opponents meant that Cantor’s immersion in Mises’ work prepared him to be receptive to Strauss’s. Cantor had been hearing about Mansfield from his Lowell House classmate, Douglas Hoffman, who had been in his sophomore tutorial. Skeptical but intrigued, Cantor jumped at the opportunity to join an informal reading group Mansfield organized for a handful of students in their junior year.

Hearing Straussian interpretations of works like Gulliver’s Travels and King Lear at second-hand from his friends, Cantor thought that they were preposterous. But hearing them first-hand from Mansfield himself, Cantor was immediately won over when the professor began commenting on Machiavelli’s The Prince as the first subject of their reading group. Here is what Cantor had been searching for—a way of talking about a philosopher that did not make him sound outdated, obsolete, and utterly conventional. In his freshman year, he heard lectures about the logical fallacies in the Republic, as if Plato had been dumber than a high school student. Under Mansfield’s guidance, Cantor now saw that what had appeared to be elementary contradictions in a philosopher such as Machiavelli were actually carefully crafted rhetorical strategies, designed to conceal heterodox doctrines from would-be censoring and persecuting authorities, and thus to convey a secret philosophical teaching to those who knew what to look for.

Mansfield taught Cantor for the first time how to read philosophical texts with the care and respect they deserve. Over a four-year period (including his first two years in graduate school), Cantor took or audited five courses with Mansfield, and continued meeting with him in weekly reading groups. He studied the history of political philosophy with him, with particular emphasis on Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. In the spring of his junior year, Cantor wrote a paper on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus for Mansfield’s signature course, Government 112c, which among other subjects dealt with the rise of the Roman Republic. Exploring the relationship between Coriolanus and the distinctively republican form of government, that paper contained the germ of Cantor’s Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, officially directed by Herschel Baker and Walter Kaiser. For his graduate studies, Cantor had considered switching fields from English to Government, but he decided to stay in a literature department because he was already determined to write his dissertation on Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Mansfield served unofficially as the director of his dissertation, which went on to become Cantor’s first book, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire. Supplementing his studies with Mansfield by reading virtually everything Leo Strauss ever wrote, Cantor learned how to find philosophical depth in literature, and, above all, in Shakespeare’s plays. Many of Strauss’s students, such as Stanley Rosen and Seth Benardete, also influenced Cantor. For example, Shakespeare’s Politics, by Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, became the initial model for his Shakespeare studies.

Cantor was very fortunate in his education. He came out of college and graduate school having been exposed to a wide range of English literature and other literatures, especially German. And his knowledge of Austrian economics and Straussian hermeneutics gave him fresh and differing perspectives on literature and imparted an interdisciplinary character to his work. But Cantor has never committed himself to a single method of interpretation and indeed he does not believe that any single theory can tell us how to study all literature. He thinks of literary criticism as an art, not a science. Recognizing the heterogeneity of literary phenomena, the critic must choose among a wide range of theorists to deal with the infinite variety of literature. Over the years, Cantor has drawn upon the work of a whole range of critics and literary theorists, including M. M. Bakhtin, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, René Girard, E. D. Hirsch, Franco Moretti, and Gary Saul Morson.

During his years in high school and college, Cantor had also been informally developing his knowledge of other areas of culture. Although he never took an academic course on painting or music, he became well-informed in both areas on his own. Beginning with the Brooklyn Museum, he moved on in his teenage years to the great museums of Manhattan, above all the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art. These museums became a new classroom for him, developing his interest in painting and sculpture, and the related field of archaeology (especially Greek, Roman, and Egyptian). This was the beginning of a lifelong passion for museums, which was to take him all over the world to visit as many museums as he could, especially in North America and Europe. His favorite painter is Hieronymus Bosch, with Pieter Bruegel the Elder a close second. More generally, he loves the Flemish Old Masters, and once spent two and a half weeks in Belgium tracking down the works of Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, the van Eyck brothers, Hans Memling, and others in churches and museums in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp.

Starting with piano lessons in his childhood, Cantor became passionately devoted to classical music, although even at his best, he played piano very badly. He benefitted from the heyday of classical music radio stations in New York, including WQXR, WNYC, and WBAI. He became an obsessive record collector once he discovered the joys of discount pricing at the original Sam Goody’s in Manhattan. His passion for collecting recordings only grew in the era of compact disks, and today he numbers his CDs in the thousands. He discovered the thrill of live performances of classical music early on, especially when he attended a concert by his idol, Jascha Heifetz, at Carnegie Hall. Once he moved to the Boston area for college, Cantor began a lifetime of attending classical concerts, sometimes twice in one day.

His taste in classical music became wide-ranging. He began with the great Russians, especially Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninov. He soon became a fan of Baroque composers, especially J. S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann, but he also developed a taste for lesser-known composers from the period, such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Pietro Locatelli, Francesco Geminiani, Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Some composers took him a long time to learn to appreciate. For example, he never understood Bruckner’s symphonies until he heard what the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was able to do with them. And learning to like Wagner became a major project, involving concentrated study of the Ring Cycle, which later allowed him to lecture on the subject. Eventually, his love of classical music extended to all periods and styles, although he tends to draw the line at anything after Schoenberg and Shostakovich, with a few exceptions, such as Arvo Pärt and Peteris Vasks. Eventually, Cantor got to put his knowledge of classical music to good use, when he became involved in the 1990s in the Tuesday Evening Concert Series in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chiefly concerned with programming, Cantor helped build TECS into an internationally recognized chamber music concert series, which has brought established stars in the field, as well as rising talents, to Charlottesville. With all his record collecting and concert-going, classical music evolved into the chief hobby of Cantor’s life.

All the while Cantor was developing his knowledge and appreciation of high culture, often at its most elite, he had a secret passion for popular culture, often at its most vulgar, without a clue that what seemed at the time like cultural slumming was later to become important for his intellectual career. Starting in his early childhood, he loved movies and especially television shows. Of course, he took advantage of all the high culture that was available on television in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of his knowledge of music derives from Leonard Bernstein’s televised concerts and lectures. But Cantor also indulged in “real” television at what was then regarded as its low end, such as the comedy of Sid Caesar. His first hero on television was Ernie Kovacs; the young Cantor just enjoyed his shows without realizing at the time that the mad Hungarian was the first true genius of the television medium (incidentally, Kovacs introduced Cantor to Bela Bartok’s music). In general, Cantor loved genre television: Westerns like Have Gun--Will Travel, Sci-Fi shows like The Twilight Zone, gangster shows like The Untouchables, and so on. His taste in films when he was growing up was similarly split. He was aware of the high end of world cinema, and eagerly went to see the work of cinematic masters such as Ingmar Bergman, Frederico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa.  But he also could not stay away from genre films, specializing in horror movies and sword-and-sandal epics (although even in his youth, he found the 1961 Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules a bit disappointing).

For much of his life, Cantor did not trouble himself over the strange bifurcation in his artistic taste, the fact that he could like both Milius’ Conan the Barbarian and Coppola’s The Conversation. Only gradually did he begin to suspect that elite culture and pop culture might not be as far apart as he had been led to believe, and that perhaps he could find ways of unifying his approach to the high and low ends of his taste. He started to consider the possibility that the same principles he used to study Shakespeare’s drama could also be applied to the study of films and television shows. Critics had been disparaging pop culture as a realm of collaborative effort and hence artistic compromise, while celebrating high culture as the realm of the authentic solitary genius, insulated from external corrupting influences like the marketplace. But a little reflection shows that collaboration often happens in high art (witness teams like Beaumont and Fletcher or Wordsworth and Coleridge), and solitary creators often crop up in pop culture media like film (witness the auteur theory as exemplified by Orson Welles). Breaking out of deeply ingrained habits of thinking, Cantor began to search for continuities between what have been systematically and rigidly separated into high culture and low culture. Indeed, he soon realized that what is regarded as high culture today (Shakespeare’s plays, Dickens’ novels, Verdi’s operas) was the popular culture of its day. His studies show that in many cases authors, artists, and composers draw energy and inspiration from their contact with their audiences in commercial markets, while a good deal of elitist culture has suffered a loss of vitality by being insulated from any real audience and catering only to academic experts.

As a joke, at Cantor’s last lecture as an assistant professor at Harvard, he experimented with a learned discourse on the mythology of Gilligan’s Island, surely one of the silliest shows in the history of television. Cantor let his ideas on popular culture percolate for over a decade. In the late 1980s he began a series of guest lectures on popular culture at the invitation of James Pontuso at Hampden-Sydney College. At first Cantor thought of these lectures as parodies of the excesses of the trend toward cultural studies in his field. But what started out as a joke, soon became semi-serious. The spirited responses Cantor’s pop culture lectures elicited from students changed his view of what he was doing. He had always used select references to pop culture phenomena to liven up his lectures and to try to illustrate complex ideas by material with which his students were already familiar. He would explain the elaborate cross-plotting in Elizabethan revenge tragedies by drawing parallels to mafia vendettas in gangster films. Although he has never taught a course devoted directly to pop culture, he found that when he gave invited lectures at colleges on such subjects as South Park and The X-Files, he really caught the students’ attention and could introduce sophisticated concepts to them in terms they could more readily understand.

Cantor first published on popular culture with an essay on The Simpsons in the academic journal Political Theory in 1999. Two years later he published an expanded version of that essay in his book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, together with a chapter that more fully developed his original insights into Gilligan’s Island, as well as chapters on Star Trek and The X-Files. Cantor found that he was reaching new audiences with his writing on popular culture and gaining new recognition as well.  The Los Angeles Times named Gilligan Unbound one of the best non-fiction books of 2001. His Simpsons essay has been translated  into several languages, and has been reprinted in English more than any other essay he has written. Cantor has taken a good deal of flak for his intellectual excursions into popular culture, but he also received encouragement from some colleagues and many students, who were gratified to see the movies and television shows they value taken seriously by a professor.

Cantor’s interest in popular culture meshed with his interest in Austrian economics and its anti-Marxist principles. He noted that the academic left had been exercising a monopoly on the study of popular culture, an ominous development in his eyes. If the left staked out popular culture as its private domain, it might develop a stranglehold on youth, who get emotionally invested in the movies and TV shows they love and gravitate toward professors who also see value in them. Cantor felt that his work on popular culture helped break the left’s monopoly in the field, and indeed many libertarians and conservatives followed Cantor’s lead in taking popular culture seriously and offering non-Marxist analyses of it. With his background in Austrian economics, Cantor had sought to counter the Marxist modes that had been dominating literary analysis; he extended the battle lines to discussion of popular culture. In the second half of the twentieth century, Marxist critiques of capitalism, particularly from the Frankfurt School, became increasingly cultural in nature, focusing on how commercial markets had supposedly debased culture. In celebrating the cultural achievements of popular culture, especially in America, Cantor sought to reverse this movement, arguing that in many—although certainly not in all—situations, commercial forces had encouraged and facilitated the creation of cultural masterpieces. This became the focus of his Mises Institute “Commerce and Culture” lectures.

Cantor did not set out to become a specialist on popular culture. When as a child he obsessively watched the Universal horror movies of the 1930s on television, he never dreamed that one day he would be writing scholarly essays about them. Still, in retrospect, Cantor sees a continuity between his work on elite culture and his work on popular culture. He takes pride in having been able to bring together his study of Shakespeare and his study of television shows, culminating in his book chapter on Breaking Bad entitled: “The Macbeth of Meth: The Tragedy of Walter White.” Rejecting the widespread idea that certain cultural media can produce only mediocre art, Cantor has searched for aesthetic quality wherever he can find it, even in television shows. Nevertheless, Cantor remains aware of some fundamental differences between elite and popular culture, and he would never try to “read” a TV cartoon the same way he would read a philosophic treatise. For example, he understands that not all works are esoterically written and form perfect artistic wholes. Sometimes a contradiction is just a contradiction. Strauss himself regarded esoteric writing as a special category of literature, relatively rare in history. He did not think that what he called “logographic necessity” could be found in everything ever written. Recognizing an element of genuine contingency in much artistic creation, Cantor has worked to develop a hermeneutic for understanding popular culture that takes into account the conditions of multiple authorship and improvisation that generally prevail in film and television.

The course of Cantor’s intellectual journey may have been strange and circuitous, but it has always been driven by his curiosity and his openness to new ideas, new experience, and new approaches. He has never settled into comfortable or conventional intellectual positions, and has continued to experiment, venturing into new fields and adopting unconventional and unfashionable perspectives on them. This website attempts to capture the wide range of Cantor’s intellectual interests and of the work that has resulted from it. The one thread that runs throughout his intellectual life is a determination to figure out what things mean. Through all the twists and turns of his enquiries, he has been guided by a desire to understand the many ways that human creativity manifests itself, whether in a Platonic dialogue, a Shakespeare play, a Wagner opera, a Dickens novel, a Vermeer painting, a Coppola movie, or a TV cartoon. By assembling as much of his work as it can in one place, this website, created and curated by his friend and former student Peter Hufnagel, offers evidence for what Cantor semi-seriously likes to call his Unified Field Theory of Culture.