Psychomachia or "The Fight for Mansoul": Making Moral Sense of Neo-Republican Economics

This polemical response to the dystopian direction that politics and economics have taken in the United States is a combination of literary criticism and economic theory. It draws on the poem Psychomachia by Prudentius, a citizen of the Roman Empire, who lived through the last half of the fourth century into the beginning of the fifth, and on the 1959 groudbreaking graduate text on public finance by Richard Musgrave, which comes closest to infusing the present polemicist with the economic equivalent of what Prudentius called "Worship-of-the-Old-Gods."

Robert E. Kohn, Prefessor Emeritus of Economics, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, changed his field of study to literary and art criticism after his retirement in 1990. His first book in the new field, New Close Readings of The Crying of Lot 49, was printed in St. Louis in 2011 by Mira Digital Publishing.