Mammonart

Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation is a book of literary criticism from a Socialist point of view of the traditional "great authors" of Western and American literature (along with a few painters and composers). Mammonart was written by the prolific muckraking journalist, novelist and Socialist activist Upton Sinclair, and published in 1925.

Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation
First edition
AuthorUpton Sinclair
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSelf (Pasadena, California)
Publication date
1925
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages390 pages
Preceded byThe Goslings 
Followed byMoney Writes! 

Overview

The book is one of the "Dead Hand" series: six books Sinclair wrote on American institutions. The series also includes The Profits of Religion, The Brass Check (journalism), The Goose-step (higher education), The Goslings (elementary and high school education), and Money Writes! (literature). The term "Dead Hand" criticizes Adam Smith's concept that allowing an "invisible hand" of many people's individual self-interests to shape economic relations provides the best result for society as a whole.

Sinclair intended Mammonart to be an alternative "textbook of culture" (p. 384). He says he expected it to soon be used as a textbook in Russian high schools, and hoped that it would be adopted by other European countries after they experienced Socialist revolutions.

In each chapter, Sinclair critiques an artist according to his or her support for the rich and powerful. Most artists do not challenge the status quo and take positions such as 'art for art's sake' or 'art is entertainment.' No matter how beautiful their work, by their passivity such artists perpetuate oppression and inequality.

For example, in the chapter on Shakespeare, entitled "Phosphorence and Decay," Sinclair praises the writer's glorious facility with words; however, this great talent "saved him from thinking." In contrast, Dickens' unique contribution was to "force into aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich and respectable."

Mammonart is notable for Sinclair's repeated statement that all art, including his own, is propaganda. The popular distinction between propagandists like Jesus and Tolstoi, and Shakespeare and Goethe, who are "pure and unsullied creative artists ... is purely a class distinction and a class weapon..." (p. 106)

The list of artists discussed is similar, though shorter, to a 1940 list of Great Books. Sinclair also includes writers of lesser importance who were included at the time in the American literary canon.

Artists discussed:

  1. Homer
  2. Aeschylus
  3. Sophocles
  4. Euripides
  5. Aristophanes
  6. Virgil
  7. Horace
  8. Juvenal
  9. Boccaccio
  10. Dante
  11. Miguel de Cervantes
  12. Michelangelo
  13. Raphael
  14. Shakespeare
  15. John Milton
  16. John Bunyan
  17. John Dryden
  18. Pierre Corneille
  19. Jean Racine
  20. Molière
  21. Voltaire
  22. Rousseau
  23. Jonathan Swift
  24. Samuel Richardson
  25. Henry Fielding
  26. Robert Burns
  27. Beethoven
  28. Goethe
  29. Jane Austen
  30. Sir Walter Scott
  31. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  32. Robert Southey
  33. William Wordsworth
  34. John Keats
  35. Honoré de Balzac
  36. Victor Hugo
  37. Théophile Gautier
  38. Alfred de Musset
  39. George Sand
  40. Flaubert
  41. Heinrich Heine
  42. Richard Wagner
  43. Thomas Carlyle
  44. Alfred Lord Tennyson
  45. Robert Browning
  46. Matthew Arnold
  47. Charles Dickens
  48. William Makepeace Thackeray
  49. John Ruskin
  50. William Morris
  51. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  52. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  53. John Greenleaf Whittier
  54. Nathaniel Hawthorne
  55. Edgar Allan Poe
  56. Walt Whitman
  57. Pushkin
  58. Gogol
  59. Turgenev
  60. Dostoievski
  61. Tolstoi
  62. Goncourt brothers
  63. Émile Zola
  64. Guy De Maupassant
  65. Henrik Ibsen
  66. Strindberg
  67. Nietzsche
  68. Emile Verhaeren
  69. Algernon Charles Swinburne
  70. Oscar Wilde
  71. James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  72. George Meredith
  73. Henry James
  74. Mrs. Humphry Ward
  75. Mark Twain
  76. William Dean Howells
  77. Ambrose Bierce
  78. Richard Harding Davis
  79. Stephen Crane
  80. Frank Norris
  81. David Graham Phillips
  82. O. Henry
  83. Jack London
  84. Anatole France
  85. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mammonart was reprinted in paperback in 2003 by Simon Publications, ISBN 0-9725189-7-5.

Critical reception

Mammonart was read by undergraduates in the 1920s.

Mammonart has been mostly ignored by critics. Very few reviews are available from online scholarly databases.

Quotations

"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda." (p. 9)

"Great art is produced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put across with technical competence in terms of the art selected." (p. 10)

On his enjoyment of John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, "One does not escape the need of personal morality by espousing proletarian revolution." (p. 112)

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