- Burns, Jennifer.
Goddess of the Market.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-19-532487-7.
-
For somebody who built an entire philosophical system founded
on reason, and insisted that even emotion was ultimately
an expression of rational thought which could be arrived at
from first principles, few modern writers have inspired such
passion among their readers, disciples, enemies, critics, and
participants in fields ranging from literature, politics,
philosophy, religion, architecture, music, economics, and
human relationships as Ayn Rand. Her two principal novels,
The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged (April 2010),
remain among the best selling fiction titles more than half a
century after their publication, with in excess of ten million
copies sold. More than half a million copies of
Atlas Shrugged were sold in 2009 alone.
For all the commercial success of her works, which made this
refugee from the Soviet Union, writing in a language she barely
knew when she arrived in the United States, wealthy before
her fortieth birthday, her work was generally greeted with derision
among the literary establishment, reviewers in major newspapers,
and academics. By the time Atlas Shrugged was
published in 1957, she saw herself primarily as the founder of an
all-encompassing philosophical system she named Objectivism, and
her fiction as a means to demonstrate the validity of her system
and communicate it to a broad audience. Academic philosophers, for
the most part, did not even reject her work but simply ignored it,
deeming it unworthy of their consideration. And Rand did not advance
her cause by refusing to enter into the give and take of philosophical
debate but instead insist that her system was self-evidently correct
and had to be accepted as a package deal with no modifications.
As a result, she did not so much attract followers as disciples,
who looked to her words as containing the answer to all of their
questions, and whose self-worth was measured by how close they
became to, as it were, the fountainhead whence they sprang.
Some of these people were extremely bright, and went on to
distinguished careers in which they acknowledged Rand's influence
on their thinking. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner
circle in the 1960s, making the case for a return to the gold
standard in her newsletter, before becoming the maestro of paper
money decades later.
Although her philosophy claimed that contradiction was impossible,
her life and work were full of contradictions. While arguing that
everything of value sprang from the rational creativity of free
minds, she created a rigid system of thought which she insisted
her followers adopt without any debate or deviation, and banished
them from her circle if they dared dissent. She claimed to have
created a self-consistent philosophical and moral system which was
self-evidently correct, and yet she refused to debate those
championing other systems. Her novels portray the state and its
minions in the most starkly negative light of perhaps any
broadly read fiction, and yet she detested libertarians and
anarchists, defended the state as necessary to maintain the rule
of law, and exulted in the success of Apollo 11 (whose
launch she was invited to observe).
The passion that Ayn Rand inspires has coloured most of the
many investigations of her life and work published to date.
Finally, in this volume, we have a more or less dispassionate
examination of her career and œuvre, based on original
documents in the collection of the
Ayn Rand Institute and
a variety of other archives. Based upon the author's Ph.D.
dissertation (and with the wealth of footnotes and source citations
customary in such writing), this book makes an effort to tell the
story of Ayn Rand's life, work, and their impact upon politics,
economics, philosophy, and culture to date, and her lasting legacy,
without taking sides. The author is neither a Rand follower nor
a confirmed opponent, and pretty much lets each reader decide where
they come down based on the events described.
At the outset, the author writes, “For over half a
century, Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the
right.” I initially found this very off-putting, and
resigned myself to enduring another disdainful dismissal of Rand
(to whose views the vast majority of the “right” over
that half a century would have taken violent exception: Rand
was vehemently atheist, opposing any mixing of religion and
politics; a staunch supporter of abortion rights; opposed the
Vietnam War and conscription; and although she rejected the
legalisation of marijuana, cranked out most of her best known
work while cranked on Benzedrine), as I read the book the
idea began to grow on me. Indeed, many people in the libertarian
and conservative worlds got their introduction to thought outside
the collectivist and statist orthodoxy pervading academia and the
legacy media by reading one of Ayn Rand's novels. This may have
been the moment at which they first began to, as the hippies
exhorted, “question authority”, and investigate
other sources of information and ways of thinking and looking at
the world. People who grew up with the Internet will find it
almost impossible to imagine how difficult this was back in the
1960s, where even discovering the existence of a
dissenting newsletter (amateurishly produced, irregularly
issued, and with a tiny subscriber base) was entirely a hit or
miss matter. But Ayn Rand planted the seed in the minds of
millions of people, a seed which might sprout when they happened
upon a like mind, or a like-minded publication.
The life of Ayn Rand is simultaneously a story of an immigrant
living the American dream: success in Hollywood and Broadway and
wealth beyond even her vivid imagination; the frustration of an
author out of tune with the ideology of the times; the political
education of one who disdained politics and politicians; the
birth of one of the last “big systems” of philosophy
in an age where big systems had become discredited; and a life
filled with passion lived by a person obsessed with reason. The
author does a thorough job of pulling this all together into a
comprehensible narrative which, while thoroughly documented and
eschewing enthusiasm in either direction, will keep you turning
the pages. The author is
an academic, and
writes in the contemporary scholarly idiom: the term
“right-wing” appears 15 times in the book, while
“left-wing” is used not at all, even when describing
officials and members of the Communist Party USA. Still, this
does not detract from the value of this work: a serious, in-depth,
and agenda-free examination of Ayn Rand's life, work, and influence
on history, today, and tomorrow.
December 2010 