Mammonart

Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation
1st edition
Author(s)	Upton Sinclair
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Self (Pasadena, California)
Publication date	1925
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	390 pages
Preceded by	The Goslings
Followed by	Money Writes!

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.

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. Bocaccio
10. Dante
11. 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. Emile 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 0972518975.

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)

External links

• Sinclair's papers for Mammonart are at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.