Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
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Authors: Jennifer Burns
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Philosophy, #Movements
GODDESS OF THE MARKET
GODDESS OF THE MARKET
Ayn Rand and the American Right
Jennifer Burns
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burns, Jennifer, 1975–
Goddess of the market : Ayn Rand and the American Right / Jennifer Burns.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-532487-7
1. Rand, Ayn. 2. Rand, Ayn—Political and social views.
3. Rand, Ayn—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Novelists, American—20th
century—Biography. 5. Women novelists, American—Biography.
6. Philosophers—United States—Biography.
7. Political culture—United States—History—20th century.
8. Right and left (Political science)—History—20th century.
9. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. I. Title.
PS 3535.A547Z587 2009
813’.52—dc22 2009010763
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
TO MY FATHER
CONTENTS
PART I: THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905 – 1943
2. Individualists of the World, Unite!
PART II: FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944 – 1957
PART III: WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957 – 1968
9. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand
Epilogue: Ayn Rand in American Memory
GODDESS OF THE MARKET
Introduction
HER EYES WERE
what everyone noticed first. Dark and widely set, they dominated her plain, square face. Her “glare would wilt a cactus,” declared
Newsweek
magazine, but to Ayn Rand’s admirers, her eyes projected clairvoyance, insight, profundity. “When she looked into my eyes, she looked into my soul, and I felt she saw me,” remembered one acquaintance. Readers of her books had the same feeling. Rand’s words could penetrate to the core, stirring secret selves and masked dreams. A graduate student in psychology told her, “Your novels have had a profound influence on my life. It was like being reborn. . . . What was really amazing is that I don’t remember ever having read a book from cover to cover. Now, I’m just the opposite. I’m always reading. I can’t seem to get enough knowledge.” Sometimes Rand provoked an adverse reaction. The libertarian theorist Roy Childs was so disturbed by
The Fountainhead’
s atheism that he burned the book after finishing it. Childs soon reconsidered and became a serious student and vigorous critic of Rand. Her works launched him, as they did so many others, on an intellectual journey that lasted a lifetime.
1
Although Rand celebrated the life of the mind, her harshest critics were intellectuals, members of the social class into which she placed herself. Rand was a favorite target of prominent writers and critics on both the left and the right, drawing fire from Sidney Hook, Whittaker Chambers, Susan Brownmiller, and William F. Buckley Jr. She gave as good as she got, calling her fellow intellectuals “frightened zombies” and “witch doctors.”
2
Ideas were the only thing that truly mattered, she believed, both in a person’s life and in the course of history. “What are your premises?” was her favorite opening question when she met someone new.
Today, more than twenty years after her death, Rand remains shrouded in both controversy and myth. The sales of her books are
extraordinary. In 2008 alone combined sales of her novels
Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living,
and
Anthem
topped eight hundred thousand, an astonishing figure for books published more than fifty years ago.
3
A host of advocacy organizations promote her work, and rumors swirl about a major motion picture based on
Atlas Shrugged
. The blogosphere hums with acrimonious debate about her novels and philosophy. In many ways, Rand is a more active presence in American culture now than she was during her lifetime.
Because of this very longevity, Rand has become detached from her historical context. Along with her most avid fans, she saw herself as a genius who transcended time. Like her creation Howard Roark, Rand believed, “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.” She made grandiose claims for Objectivism, her fully integrated philosophical system, telling the journalist Mike Wallace, “If anyone can pick a rational flaw in my philosophy, I will be delighted to acknowledge him and I will learn something from him.” Until then, Rand asserted, she was “the most creative thinker alive.”
4
The only philosopher she acknowledged as an influence was Aristotle. Beyond his works, Rand insisted that she was unaffected by external influences or ideas. According to Rand and her latter-day followers, Objectivism sprang, Athena-like, fully formed from the brow of its creator.
Commentary on Rand has done little to dispel this impression. Because of her extreme political views and the nearly universal consensus among literary critics that she is a bad writer, few who are not committed Objectivists have taken Rand seriously. Unlike other novelists of her stature, until now Rand has not been the subject of a full-length biography. Her life and work have been described instead by her former friends, enemies, and students. Despite her emphasis on integration, most of the books published about Rand have been essay collections rather than large-scale works that develop a sustained interpretation of her importance.
This book firmly locates Rand within the tumultuous American century that her life spanned. Rand’s defense of individualism, celebration of capitalism, and controversial morality of selfishness can be understood only against the backdrop of her historical moment. All sprang from her early life experiences in Communist Russia and became the most
powerful and deeply enduring of her messages. What Rand confronted in her work was a basic human dilemma: the failure of good intentions. Her indictment of altruism, social welfare, and service to others sprang from her belief that these ideals underlay Communism, Nazism, and the wars that wracked the century. Rand’s solution, characteristically, was extreme: to eliminate all virtues that could possibly be used in the service of totalitarianism. It was also simplistic. If Rand’s great strength as a thinker was to grasp interrelated underlying principles and weave them into an impenetrable logical edifice, it was also her great weakness. In her effort to find a unifying cause for all the trauma and bloodshed of the twentieth century, Rand was attempting the impossible. But it was this deadly serious quest that animated all of her writing. Rand was among the first to identify the problem of the modern state’s often terrifying power and make it an issue of popular concern.
She was also one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought. In a time when leading intellectuals assumed that large corporations would continue to dominate economic life, shaping their employees into soulless organization men, Rand clung to the vision of the independent entrepreneur. Though it seemed anachronistic at first, her vision has resonated with the knowledge workers of the new economy, who see themselves as strategic operators in a constantly changing economic landscape. Rand has earned the unending devotion of capitalists large and small by treating business as an honorable calling that can engage the deepest capacities of the human spirit.
At the same time, Rand advanced a deeply negative portrait of government action. In her work, the state is always a destroyer, acting to frustrate and inhibit the natural ingenuity and drive of individuals. It is this chiaroscuro of light and dark—virtuous individuals battling a villainous state—that makes her compelling to some readers and odious to others. Though Americans turned to their government for aid, succor, and redress of grievances ever more frequently during the twentieth century, they did so with doubts, fears, and misgivings, all of which Rand cast into stark relief in her fiction. Her work sounded anew the traditional American suspicion of centralized authority, and helped inspire a broad intellectual movement that challenged the liberal welfare state and proclaimed the desirability of free markets.
Goddess of the Market
focuses on Rand’s contributions as a political philosopher, for it is here that she has exerted her greatest influence. Rand’s Romantic Realism has not changed American literature, nor has Objectivism penetrated far into the philosophy profession. She does, however, remain a veritable institution within the American right.
Atlas Shrugged
is still devoured by eager young conservatives, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons. Critics who dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker appealing only to adolescents miss her significance altogether. For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.
The story of Ayn Rand is also the story of libertarianism, conservatism, and Objectivism, the three schools of thought that intersected most prominently with her life. These terms are neither firmly defined nor mutually exclusive, and their meaning shifted considerably during the period of time covered in this book. Whether I identify Rand or her admirers as libertarian, conservative, or Objectivist varies by the context, and my interchangeable use of these words is not intended to collapse the distinctions between each. Rand jealously guarded the word Objectivist when she was alive, but I use the term loosely to encompass a range of persons who identified Rand as an important influence on their thought.
I was fortunate to begin this project with two happy coincidences: the opening of Rand’s personal papers held at the Ayn Rand Archives and the beginning of a wave of scholarship on the American right. Work in Rand’s personal papers has enabled me to sift through the many biased and contradictory accounts of her life and create a more balanced picture of Rand as a thinker and a human being. Using newly available documentary material I revisit key episodes in Rand’s dramatic life, including her early years in Russia and the secret affair with a young acolyte that shaped her mature career. I am less concerned with judgment than with analysis, a choice Rand would certainly condemn. Though I was granted full access to her papers by the Ayn Rand Institute, I am not an Objectivist and have never been affiliated with any group dedicated to Rand’s work. I approach her instead as a student and a critic of American thought.