Read e-book online The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority PDF

Popular tradition frequently champions freedom because the essentially American lifestyle and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. yet movie and tv have additionally explored the strain among freedom and different middle values, similar to order and political balance. What might appear like fit, effective, and artistic freedom from one standpoint may well seem like chaos, anarchy, and a resource of damaging clash from one other. movie and tv always pose the query: Can americans care for their difficulties on their lonesome, or needs to they depend upon political elites to control their lives?

In this groundbreaking paintings, Paul A. Cantor explores the ways that tv exhibits comparable to Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and movies corresponding to The Aviator and Mars assaults! have portrayed either top-down and bottom-up versions of order. Drawing at the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and different proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal imaginative and prescient of the USA -- relatively its emphasis at the virtues of spontaneous order -- with the Marxist realizing of the "culture undefined" and the Hobbesian version of absolute nation control.

The Invisible Hand in well known Culture concludes with a dialogue of the influence of 9-11 on movie and tv, and the hot anxieties rising in modern alien-invasion narratives: the terror of an international technocracy that seeks to break the extended family, non secular religion, neighborhood govt, and different conventional bulwarks opposed to absolutely the state.