Holiday reads: Two biographies of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Goddess of the Market
Following my review of Jennifer Burns’s biography of Milton Friedman last week, I thought I would dip into the vault and reproduce here my earlier review of her biography of Ayn Rand, based on her PhD thesis and published in 2009.
Rand had quite the moment in 2009, with the publication of two biographies, the other by Anne Heller, also reviewed below. Her work was seen then as speaking to the government response to the financial crisis of 2008-09. There is in fact a lot of implied public choice theory in Rand, which was remarkable given the prevailing benevolent social planner conception of government when she was writing in the 1940s and 1950s and when academic public choice was still in its infancy. If the dominant ideologies of the time romanticised big government, Rand’s response was to romanticise capitalism.
Like Friedman, Rand was enormously influential in her own time, but it can be difficult to discern her influence today. Like Friedman, she was a formidable debater and advocate for her ideas. But in contrast to Friedman’s philosophical pragmatism, Rand was a philosophical absolutist and her system of ideas degenerated into a personality cult.
The difference between them is illustrated by Rand’s role in trying to prevent the publication of one of Friedman’s earliest forays into public policy, his attack on rent control co-authored with George Stigler and published over Rand’s objections in 1946, a story nicely related by Mike Munger in a recent episode of Econtalk.
The following review was originally published in the Autumn 2010 issue of the now defunct journal Policy.
Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Double Day, 2009; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Oxford University Press, 2009.
For an author whose novels have consistently sold in the hundreds of thousands for over half a century, Ayn Rand is a remarkably understudied figure. Rand is still largely ignored by scholars, who refuse to take her novels or ideas seriously, despite her enormous influence. Barbara Branden’s 1986 memoir The Passion of Ayn Rand was the only significant biographical treatment until now, but Branden was hardly a disinterested observer.
The near simultaneous publication of these two books by Heller and Burns rectifies this deficiency. Heller’s book is a stunning portrait of Rand’s life that offers considerable insight into her extraordinary personality and achievement. Burns’s book, which has its origins in a PhD dissertation, is focused more squarely on her intellectual influence, in particular, her role as the ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’ (Burns, 4). Despite the inevitable overlap, the two books are complementary and deserve to be read together.
It would be difficult to overstate Rand’s role in the emergence of the post-war libertarian right. Rand was almost a lone voice in making the case for limited government in the 1940s (Burns, 100) and her novels and later non-fiction writing played a major role in paving the way for the libertarian movement of the 1970s, alongside the scholarly revival of classical liberalism led by the members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Her influence on the post-war American right is exemplified by Jerome Tuccille’s 1972 political memoir It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Her influence was not limited to the United States and spread as far afield as Australia. The libertarian Workers/Progress Party had its origins partly in Ayn Rand study groups. A young Greg Lindsay was introduced to the 1949 movie of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead by film critic Bill Collins (Collins’ favourite film). This was Lindsay’s first introduction to libertarian ideas and set the stage for the founding of the Centre for Independent Studies in 1976.
Rand had a singular understanding of the power of literature to communicate ideas and from the beginning saw her writing as a vehicle for presenting and promoting her worldview. Rand was not interested in literature for its own sake, but for its power to shape the world. Rand was a formidable intellect and few could match her in debate. She was particularly successful in engaging younger readers, especially on college campuses, where she acquired a following that would shame contemporary pop stars. As Burns notes, Rand ‘filled in the gaps universities left unattended’ (Burns, 198), providing the intellectual and moral clarity that was no longer to be found in higher education. For many of readers, her novels were life-changing experiences. Her books, especially The Fountainhead, relied heavily on word of mouth promotion, which more than offset the often terrible reviews they received in established media.
While Rand understood the power of ideas better than most, she also completely failed to understand how ideas develop and are spread. Especially in later life, Rand became convinced of her infallibility and increasingly dogmatic. The dogmatism was shared by many of her acolytes, who were encouraged to believe that Rand was the greatest thinker of all time and that she was the sole arbiter of all philosophical and other questions. Rand acknowledged no intellectual debts and allowed for no interpretation of her ideas. Only she and her acolyte-lover Nathaniel Branden were permitted to claim the mantel of ‘Objectivists’. All others were mere ‘students of Objectivism,’ the name given to her philosophical system. Rand saw any unauthorised or unapproved use of her ideas as plagiarism, contributing to irreconcilable conflicts with others and making her an increasingly isolated figure, despite her literary success.
Rand’s attempt to control the use people made of her ideas by asserting they were her personal intellectual property inevitably failed. She hilariously backed out of one threatened lawsuit against Reason magazine when Reason’s lawyers pointed out that if it went to trial it would enter US case law as Rand v Reason. While she served as an introduction to libertarianism for many, most ultimately found Rand’s closed philosophical system unsatisfying and moved on to embrace classical liberal or libertarian ideas more broadly. It is profoundly ironic that Rand had nothing but contempt for the libertarian movement and its intellectuals, even though she did more than any other individual to inspire them. Rand routinely denounced libertarians as ‘plagiarists’, ‘monstrous’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘scum’. Classical liberal scholars such as Hayek were ‘pure poison’ and a ‘pernicious enemy’. As her dogmatism grew, she increasingly refused to engage or debate with others, claiming that the ‘epistemological disintegration of our age has made debate impossible’ (Burns, 217). The influence of Rand’s ideas grew as much despite rather than because of her own efforts to promote them.
Both books document the encounters between Rand’s inner circle, known as The Collective, and Murray Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat, an informal grouping of like-minded students of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard was convinced of Rand’s brilliance, but also become a fierce critic of her personality cult, noting that ‘the adoption of her total system [was] a soul-destroying calamity’ for many (Burns, 152). It was Rothbard who perhaps first noticed the contradiction that while Rand celebrated individualism, her individualist heroes were necessarily of one mind. There was no tolerance of diverse intellectual, philosophical, ethical or moral positions in Rand’s worldview. This led her to maintain absurd positions, such as her claim that ‘there are no conflicts of interest among rational men’ (Heller, 337).
While Rand’s ideas have obvious limitations, their influence remains pervasive. Rand had a remarkable understanding of political economy and Atlas Shrugged can be read in part as a literary exposition of public choice theory. But Rand’s realism was in obvious tension with her romanticism, in particular, her dramatic fantasy of striking entrepreneurs ‘stopping the motor of the world.’ James Buchanan’s call for ‘politics without romance’ could equally be adapted to Rand’s conception of capitalism.
ICYMI