Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, 

, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the “greatest books” of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was “too intelligent” to believe in God.)

indicates that a belated but timely reconsideration of Rand’s place in American cases for Rand’s importance to the past 80 years of American intellectual and cultural life all the more convincing. That Rand’s life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader’s attention. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.”

Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926 and thoroughly reinvented herself in real life far more successfully than Jay Gatsby ever managed to do in fiction. Moving to Hollywood to be in the film industry, she met legendary director Cecil B. DeMille and, despite her heavily accented English, talked her way into a job reading scripts for him. On a movie set, Rand met the man who would become her husband, an unambitious bit player named Frank O’Connor who nonetheless became the model for her relentlessly proactive, sexually rapacious heroes. By 1935, her play 

, a courtroom drama in which the audience voted on the verdict for an accused murderer each night, was a minor hit on Broadway. She soon published two novels, 

 (a grim account of life in the Soviet Union) and 

 (which portrays a future in which collectivization has effectively wiped out the individual). Then, in 1943, she struck it rich with 

, a best-selling potboiler-cum-novel-of-ideas in which the hero, architect Howard Roark, blows up a housing project rather than see his original design compromised.

In 1950, Rand met Nathan Blumenthal, a UCLA undergrad 25 years her junior who would later change his name to Nathaniel Branden, honoring Rand by incorporating her surname into his new one, and become her designated “intellectual heir,” business partner, and secret lover. During the 1950s, Rand struggled with the writing of 

 and the creation, with Branden’s help, of a unified philosophical system that conceived of “man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Relocated in New York, Rand and Branden announced to their spouses that their love affair proceeded not from low passions but from high principle. “If we mean the values we profess,” Rand explained, “how can [Nathan and I] not be in love?” While publicly advocating living a transparent life with no regrets, Rand insisted that the arrangement be kept secret from even the couples’ closest friends and associates.

The affair, which continued sporadically over the next decade, eventually led to an acrimonious split among the participants. Betrayed by her emotions when Branden finally rejected her, the arch-rationalist Rand slapped him and spat on him, reportedly exclaiming, “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you’ll be impotent for the next 20 years.” The Brandens divorced and Nathaniel moved back to California, where he became a leading figure in the self-actualization movement. O’Connor slid into quiet alcoholism and stayed married to Rand until his death in 1979.

By the time she died, at age 77 in 1982, Rand had delineated what she and her followers insisted was the most significant new philosophy since Aristotle (“objectivism,” which emphasized rationality as the defining characteristic of humanity) and was hailed as the godmother of small-government, pro-freedom libertarians (whom she dismissed as “hippies of the right”). A self-declared “radical for capitalism” who praised the “virtue of selfishness” and exulted the individual above any group, Rand continues to excite the reading public, moving upward of half a million volumes of her fiction and essay collections a year.

 Rand has been a bona fide cultural touchstone whose long shelf life appears to have no expiration date, especially in a time of economic crisis and resurgence of the Big Government she inveighed against. Earlier this year, for instance, late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon did a bit in which audience members ate pages of Rand’s free market–friendly books for sustenance as the stock market tanked. Regular (though ever-changing) reports in 

insist that true-believing “Randroids” Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie—or is it Charlize Theron now?—are very, very close to rolling film on an A-list version of 

 Entrepreneurs ranging from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to BB&T chief John Allison have pledged allegiance to Rand’s archly individualistic philosophy that declares, “I am a man who does not exist for others.” One member of Congress, Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), gives his interns 

Since the TARP bailout last fall and the prospect of significant increases in taxes and regulation under President Barack Obama, the blogosphere has been abuzz with chatter about “Going Galt,” or pulling out of everyday economic life and retreating to a secret, laissez-faire lair, just like the unapologetic capitalist heroes of 

 who go on “strike” rather than submit to confiscatory taxes and a state takeover of their companies.

Despite—or perhaps because of—such persistent mass appeal, critics have never been kind to Rand. Consider the universally negative reaction to 

 upon its publication in 1957. This 1,100-page, densely plotted tale, packed in equal measure with descriptions of rough sex and paeans to capitalist innovation, climaxes in a Castro-length radio address in which the protagonist, John Galt, lauds “the man at the top of the intellectual pyramid [who] contributes the most to all those below” and attacks “the man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude.”

There’s a strong case that Whittaker Chambers’s notorious takedown of the novel remains the definitive poison-pen review; it makes Mark Twain’s legendary “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” read like a love letter. Even though he shared Rand’s deep-seated contempt for the Soviet Union and willingness to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about communist subversion of the United States, Chambers dismissed the novel in 

 not simply as “excruciatingly awful” and “remarkably silly” but as a crypto-Nazi tale of rule by a terrifying “technocratic elite” that would do away with lower life forms. “From almost any page of 

” Chambers wrote, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ”

Chambers was hardly alone in his outraged rejection of 

 vision of a world in which “looters” and “moochers” stole from the productive class. 

 similarly panned the work, calling it a book “written out of hate.” (Future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, then a member of Rand’s inner circle, wrote a protest letter to the paper of record, declaring Rand’s righteousness in depicting “parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason [and thus] perish as they should.”)

Contempt has long been the standard literati response to Rand. Like Jack Kerouac, Rand is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those of us who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization, but the extreme prejudice with which Rand is dismissed belies a body of work that continues to reach new audiences.

Given that critical context and the recession-driven boomlet in Randian thought, 

 are not simply well-timed explorations of an enduring writer. They are essential guides to contemporary American politics and culture. A journalist with a strong background in financial reporting, Heller is excellent at capturing the loneliness at the center of Rand’s (and indeed, any writer’s) life. Using original research from Russia, Heller draws a critical but sympathetic thread through Rand’s biography, arguing that Rand’s insistence on individualism was heavily informed by the anti-Semitism her family faced in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Rand considered racism of any kind to be the basest form of collectivism. Heller also has a great eye for the contradictions and hypocrisy that ultimately make her subject more approachable. For instance, Rand fueled her endless writing sessions not with rational determination but with amphetamines and by sticking herself with a needle to maintain “focus,” a tacit admission that even her mind had its limits. Rand and her acolytes were masters of revising history so that the grand dame was seemingly a timeless genius who had no real influences or predecessors (except for Aristotle, of all people). Heller’s account of the figures who helped Rand develop her thought—especially Isabel Paterson, a 

 book reviewer and author with whom Rand predictably broke—helps recover an entire intellectual tradition that has mostly been forgotten.

Burns, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, makes the most of her unique access to Rand’s personal papers at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. Like Heller, she situates Rand in a rich intellectual and cultural tradition that predated the New Deal and eventually gave rise to a revitalized limited-government movement that culminated in figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Burns is particularly sharp at analyzing how Cold War conservatives such as Buckley rejected Rand’s rationalism but eventually benefited from her popularity with college students during the 1960s. Since the demise of their common foe, the Soviet Union, conservatives and libertarians increasingly find themselves at odds with one another over precisely the same issues that Rand and Buckley fought over decades ago. These range from questions about the proper role of religion in a secular society to whether the state should be used to restrict alternative lifestyles to the legitimate circumstances for military action.

 help elucidate an underanalyzed cultural figure. Together, they provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as Burns writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that, even as she helped create an ideological framework that continues to energize debate in contemporary America.

 is editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com.

 by Anne C. Heller, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009. 


"Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" 

by Jennifer Burns, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ayn_Rand_by_Talbot_1943.jpg

Ayn Rand's work has been critically dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all, but this has obscured the fact that she helped create an ideological framework that continues to energize debate in contemporary America. 

Ready for Her Close-Up

For those of us who remember the 1970s as a time of lifestyle liberation and economic malaise, the word “anarchy” was nothing less than a punk cry of affirmation and an existential call to action. “I am an anti-Christ/I am an anarchist,” snarled Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in 1976, in one of the great forced rhyme schemes of all time. Yet the band’s song “Anarchy in the U.K.” — and punk more generally — presaged not a collapse of British or American or even Western civilization, but a do-it-yourself revolution in cultural production and consumption that rejected top-down, centralized authority and hidebound tradition. Not coincidentally, economic decentralization took place too — President Jimmy Carter deregulated airline pricing and interstate trucking rates, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher loosened government controls on business, and even French president François Mitterrand, a Socialist, ultimately sold off state-owned industries. The Iron Curtain, rusted out for decades, finally collapsed by the early 1990s, literally incapable of keeping its repressive, soul-killing act together.

, James C. Scott channels Proudhon more than punk while making a case for a kinder, gentler form of rebellion than the sort of bomb-throwing, street-fighting revolution typically associated with anarchism. Following Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the 19th-century French theorist who asserted that “property is theft,” Scott defines anarchism loosely as “mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” (emphasis in the original). His rejection of “a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy” is mirrored in the structure of the book, which consists of what he terms “fragments” rather than traditional chapters, the better to underscore the provisionality and narrow scope of his insights.

For Scott, anarchy is less a full-blown program than a tendency that privileges “politics, conflict, and debate” and shows a robust “tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning.” Most of all, it’s a rejection of rule by elites of any and all stripes, especially those who seek to remove themselves from scrutiny by claiming some sort of impersonal scientific basis for their rule.

Scott recognizes that total revolution often leads to something worse than what it replaces. “Virtually every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from and exercise more control over the very populations it was designed to serve,” he writes. 

 thus echoes themes from Scott’s previous books, including 

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 

(1998). That work analyzed how disaster routinely results from grand plans to remake society according to some leader or elite’s unified field theory of how the world should be. This book explores how the little people work around the grand plan imposed on them.

Scott uses what he engagingly calls his “anarchist squint” to find all sorts of generally unacknowledged mini-revolts happening around us. These range from the puny — stepping off sidewalks in defiance of “don’t walk” signs — to the profound. For instance, he describes an art project created by anarchists in West Germany shortly before it was reunified with its communist counterpart in 1990. The activists, Scott writes, hauled a papier-mâché statue called 

Monument to the Unknown Deserters of Both World Wars

 around cities in East Germany, creating an unauthorized display that inevitably raised the ire of local officials. The statue “bore the legend, ‘This is for the man who refused to kill his fellow man.’” Scott calls the statue “a magnificent anarchist gesture, this contrarian play on the well-nigh universal theme of the Unknown Soldier: the obscure, ‘every-infantryman’ who fell honorably in battle for his nation’s objectives.”

For Scott, such acts of “insubordination” are exemplary because they bring paradoxes in our everyday lives to the foreground and push us toward a new understanding of the typically latent cultural, political, and economic forces that actually structure our lives. Other examples of everyday anarchist rebellion include work slowdowns, the removal of traffic signs by some localities in the Netherlands, and the refusal of some K–12 students in Massachusetts, Michigan, and elsewhere to take achievement tests implemented in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This is all fine as far as it goes, and I think very few readers with even a passing knowledge of history would argue with Scott’s large conclusion that “the great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.”

Yet there’s a curious and palpable sense of datedness to much of 

. References to high-1960s theorists such as Jane Jacobs, Antonio Gramsci, and E.F. Schumacher abound as if their insights were brand-new. Reading Scott, one would think very little had changed since Schumacher’s 

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

 burst on the scene in 1973. In a world that is increasingly artisanal when it comes to food production and preparation, culture, lifestyle, and everything else, Scott quotes Schumacher to denounce McDonalds for its “Fordist production.”

There’s nothing wrong with Scott’s analysis of Robert McNamara and Vietnam-era body counts — “an infernal audit system that … blocked a wider-ranging dialogue about what might … represent progress.” But Scott seems to be fighting not even the last war but one several wars removed. He seems less interested in looking at the role of elites in the private and public sectors in precipitating the housing crisis of a few years ago than in settling a score with Enron and “market fundamentalists.” In a book that seeks to celebrate participatory culture, little is said about the rise of the personal computer and the Internet — and the vast decentralization of knowledge, expression, and power they have helped bring about.

Scott rightly castigates the nation’s K–12 public school system as “a ‘one-product’ factory” and laments the centralization of curricula and expectations. But in an American context, school, at least since it was made mandatory in the 19th century, has always been a crucible of conformity. (Go ask Mark Twain and Laura Ingalls Wilder.) What is actually new and “insubordinate” in a way that Scott should appreciate is the rise over the past several decades of a robust school choice movement that cuts across existing partisan political lines, racial and economic divides, and even long-standing distinctions between public and private education.

While around 90 percent of K–12 students still attend conventional public schools, each year an increasing number of children at all levels of learning and income are attending schools more tailored to their and their parents’ desires. (An increasing number of kids are also being homeschooled, arguably a more profound disruption of the norm.) There are more than 5,000 charter schools — publicly funded institutions with voluntary attendance and individualized curricula — serving more than two million kids in the United States. In 1991, there wasn’t a single one. Charters encompass a wide range of methods and educational programs — some follow “great books” curricula and others teach Afrocentrism or emphasize work-study. While their student outcomes vary, they represent the sort of decentralized experimentation Scott champions.

None of this is meant to suggest that contemporary America — or the wider world — is at some utopian tipping point toward self-actualization. But Scott’s well-meaning 

 is too limited in its survey. According to Wikipedia, which describes itself as “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit” — talk about anarchy — Scott, 76 years old, is a chaired professor at Yale in political science and anthropology, and director of the Agrarian Studies Program there. In other words, he is not simply a member of an everyday elite, but of a super-elite. As such, and despite his best intentions, he must find it difficult to see past the privilege and sense of entitlement that surely still surround him in New Haven. But if he could, he would realize that more people than he recognizes are not only viewing the world through an “anarchist squint,” but actually getting on with the important project of living their lives the way they want to.

 is editor in chief of Reason.com and a coauthor of 

The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play

Nick Gillespie