The number are in, and paleo-capitalist Ayn Rand’s hot again. “Atlas Shrugged” is selling at a pace not seen since the novel was published in 1957. Sales of her other major novel, “The Fountainhead,” are up as well. It’s clear that the recession and a very liberal political leadership have caused the renewed interest.
Economist Stephen Moore recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama strategy mirrors the plot of “Atlas Shrugged. “The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you,” Moore said.
I recently re-read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” Both, particularly “Atlas Shrugged,” are maddeningly compelling polemics in novel forms. “Atlas” is about the world’s talented withdrawing from a dystopian society and the chaos that results. “Fountainhead” is about an architect hated because he won’t embrace a mediocre norm. In “Atlas” Rand articulated a belief, “objectivism,” which depicts personal happiness as man’s sole moral pursuit and reason as the only acceptable absolute. Pure capitalism, “objectivism” teaches, is the sole moral economic system. Anything else is a leech on society full of “second-handers.”
Rand’s novels — in 1991 “Atlas Shrugged” was judged the second-most influential novel in America — are very seductive and demagogic. Her ideas appeal to so many because the characters she creates are polar opposites. They are either perfect examples of reason and competence or corrupt, shallow, even homicidal parasites. As a writer, Rand deserves no censure for creating powerful polemics, but real life is more complex.
I am amused by the Rand adoration from many social — read religious — conservatives. Rand, and “objectivism,” detests religion and its call for individual sacrifice. In “Fountainhead,” the reader is urged to run away from any organization that urges sacrifice for others. When it comes to faith, Rand is more Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens than Mitt Romney.
I have a great deal of respect for Ayn Rand, but it’s for her literary and polemical skills, not the rigidity of her economic beliefs. Who else can write a novel where a character, John Galt, speaks for 60 pages and you can’t stop reading. And I admire her life, where she escaped communism, lived life on her own terms and created an economic ideal.
But objectivism is not a practical ideology. Still doubt me? Read the late Whittaker Chambers’ devastating but on-target critique of Ayn Rand, published in the Dec. 28, 1957 edition of National Review. It’s at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback
TV
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 8:40 am:
You’re kidding, right? Ayn Rand’s opinions and all the creepy Wall Streeters who endlessly have quoted her these last couple of decades took a complete nosedive into oblivion when the financial world melted down in the fall. He snooty arrogance — and the arrogance of those expense-account-abusers followers of hers — tumbled into ridiculousness as the stock market ate away the lives of, oh dear Ayn, those second-tier leeches of us in the middle class.
To Ayn Rand and all her followers, I say I deeply felt and hearty goodbye — you power-hungry, sneering, know-it-all scum. No, here’s who see Ayn Rand as the model of perfect society: ***holes.
flatlander100
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 10:34 am:
You wrote:
“Her ideas appeal to so many because the characters she creates are polar opposites. They are either perfect examples of reason and competence or corrupt, shallow, even homicidal parasites. As a writer, Rand deserves no censure for creating powerful polemics, but real life is more complex.”
Exactly right. Much more complex because most people — in government, in business, anywhere else and everywhere — fall somewhere on the lengthy continuum between those extremes.
Steve
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 10:47 am:
I haven’t read Rand in many years…mostly because she doesn’t really appeal to me. Her books are so heavy handed that I feel I’m having my knuckles smacked with a ruler for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Perhaps if I agreed with her philosophy reading her novels wouldn’t seem so much like being yelled at. Still, she’s worth a read once…if only to shake your head in wonder that a political philosophy can be so divorced from reality.
Jim
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 11:03 am:
I like Rand the way I like DIE HARD – fun to watch it…wouldn’t want to live it.
Niemsters
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 2:54 pm:
you wrote: “Who else can write a novel where a character, John Galt, speaks for 60 pages and you can’t stop reading.”… out of 6 people I know who’ve read “Atlas” NONE have been able to read all 60+ pages of the ’speach’.
Still you can’t discount Objectavism because it’s not practical. All ideologies are ‘pure’ and it’s up the adherent to apply the ideology to their lives and thus make it ‘practical’. We don’t live in the Utopian worlds that Locke and Hobbes described but is democracy not practical then? Rand describes the ideal, total self sufficiency, and is completely afoil to the “it takes a village to raise a child” mentality that modern progressives have.
Too TV who wrote: “To Ayn Rand and all her followers, I say I deeply felt and hearty goodbye — you power-hungry, sneering, know-it-all scum. No, here’s who see Ayn Rand as the model of perfect society: ***holes.”
It seems like you have a lot of built of resentment toward people that you think are “better off” than you.
James
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 3:12 pm:
SEPARATION OF ECONOMICS and STATE!
Why?
Today we see how Ayn Rand accurately predicted the results of a mixed economy edging toward full Socialism, nay Fascism, in Atlas Shrugged. Our default philosophy determines our choices.
Sure, Atlas is a mighty exaggeration, but look at the parallels to date. Our government is now controlling directly, vast portions of the economy of the United States. The rate of increase in this Fascist element is now growing exponentially. The adverse effect of one government control is now being “fixed” by introducing more government controls. An unstable system.
More rules and laws will only destroy the joy of life. It will also destroy the minds of those being allowed no choices of their own.
One day there will be papers required for permission to drive to the beach, because you will have had to convince the controlling travel authority of your need to do so.
This an exaggeration? Not in a couple more years.
Remember, CO2 is a controlled substance, the emission of which must be regulated/controlled. What a mindless farce!
The implied need for some government authority to control each aspect of life – for our own good – is clearly evident in the actions the Obama administration is taking to “fix” our economy. A fix required by the instability that came from, and will continue to come from, the mandated legal collusion, between the federal government and individuals.
We now have a nation (real close now) where individuals can’t do anything without the state’s permission.
Of course, one cannot expect to mix, the power and control demanded by the governments’ monopoly on force with the freedom of a capitalist society.
Stop worrying about the influence of Atlas Shrugged. Read Ayn’s non-fiction and learn why this has happened.
SEPARATION OF ECONOMICS and STATE!
TV
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 4:33 pm:
“To TV: … It seems like you have a lot of built of resentment toward people that you think are “better off” than you.”
Nope. I have a lot of resentment — deserved, I think — for people who think they have all the answers and, important, don’t leave room for people who are “lesser” than they to input in the decision-making process. You know, like democracy says we are allowed. And, by the way, I’m “better off” enough. I just don’t like arrogance in a supposed elite.
MichaelM
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 11:37 pm:
@ Doug Gibson, nice piece but for this:
“I have a great deal of respect for Ayn Rand, but it’s for her literary and polemical skills, not the rigidity of her economic beliefs.”
Rand deferred to Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt for her economic beliefs regarding the functioning of free markets, because free markets would be a consequence of enacting her politics of radical capitalism in which the sole task of government was to stop, prevent, and punish the use of physical coercion in all human interrelationships. That politics was itself not a primary, but rather a consequence of her egoist ethics that recognized the necessity of fallible human beings to be free from the dictates of other fallible men. And that ethic was itself a consequence of her commitment to the recognition of man’s capacity of volitionally exercised reason as his only means to survive and thrive as what he is, a human being.
Thus, Rand’s economic beliefs were beliefs that free markets are *right* in the absolute sense for all men because they were consistent with the prerequisites of human life given the specific nature of human beings — that which is the common denominator of all of us. To profess your disagreement with her “rigidity” is a cop out to escape addressing the real question of whether her beliefs are valid or invalid. For if her ideas are valid, that rigidity would indeed be a virtue.
Bob Flynn
on Apr 30th, 2009
@ 1:16 am:
Whittaker Chamber’s review was a rambling stew of vitriol. I envision him reading his review to me while looking down his nose over a glass of $300 cognac, wearing a velvet robe, and casually drawing his big toe across a canvas through fresh feces in an attempt to create, in art, the contents of his own mind.
Jim Valliant
on Apr 30th, 2009
@ 12:45 pm:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzlmM2JiOGViYzBiY2EyZjM3N2U4NWE4ZDI2YjMxMDI=
HerbSewell
on Apr 30th, 2009
@ 4:35 pm:
Anybody who found that insult to intelligence spurted off the pen of Chambers to even a remotely competent critique of Objectivism has no reason to be offended because there was nothing of his to insult on the behalf of such admirers.
Aron
on May 1st, 2009
@ 1:36 pm:
Funny how socialist leaning people resent those who have all the answers when that is exactly the premise their system relies upon.
All of the armchair critics of Ayn Rand here don’t even realize that our economy isn’t even close to the model Ayn Rand envisioned and yet they critique it as if it were. This is a heavily govt. regulated market, not a free one. I like individual liberty and equality of opportunity, others prefer collectivism and they can keep it.
Stuart Macdonald
on May 4th, 2009
@ 4:35 am:
You refer to the article by Whittaker Chambers to prove the weakness in the ideas of Ayn Rand. The Chamber’s article is a visceral attack. The venom is pure emotion. I note only the suggestion that Any Rand’s philosophy will lead to the use of brute force. Nothing could be further from the truth. But consider how Mr Chamber’s reaches this view. Not by any analysis of Ayn Rand’s work but rather from his emotional reaction to Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand’s premises when it comes to politics, is that no one may initiate force against another. The only legitimate use of force is in retaliation to the initiation of force.