“Ayn Rand … is among the most outspoken – and important – intellectual voices in America today,” wrote Playboy Magazine in 1964. “She is the author of what is perhaps the most fiercely damned and admired best seller of the decade, Atlas Shrugged.” The magazine goes on to describe the novel’s impressive sales (“more than 1,200,000 copies since its publication six years ago”), the discussion groups and debate it spawned on college campuses, and the thousands of people who subscribed to Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter or attended lecture courses on her philosophy.
Over 50 years later, and 33 years after her death, Rand remains one of the most important intellectual voices in our culture. In the last six years alone (2009 through 2014) Atlas has sold 2.25 million copies – one million more than in the six years immediately after its publication. In total, more than 30 million copies of Rand’s books have been sold.1 Her ideas are as radical today as they were during her lifetime. And there remains a pronounced disconnect between the inspiration (both esthetic and intellectual) that so many readers take from her books and the dismissive or scornful response that these same books still often meet in academia.
In the political arena, liberals still despise and mock her, as do many leaders of the Christian right, neo-conservative, and libertarian movements. Yet Rand’s influence is always evident wherever one finds morally self-confident opposition to regulation, taxes, or entitlements, and wherever one sees celebrations of business and the free market. Thus, sales of Rand’s books soared to record levels in 2008 and 2009 as Americans struggled to make sense of the financial crisis, and slogans referencing John Galt (the hero of Atlas) were ubiquitous at the early “Tea Party” protests against the interventionist measures by which the Bush and Obama administrations responded to the crisis. Rand has been frequently referenced in American political discourse since, both by those who cite her as an inspiration and by commentators who attribute many of the nation’s ills to Rand’s influence.2 But references to Rand, on both sides, are usually superficial. They are attempts to evoke or to smear – but not to engage with – that strand in the American consciousness which resonates to Rand’s distinctive vision of what a human life can and should be.
She described this vision as “the concept 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” (Atlas 1070).3 Rand viewed “man” as a “heroic being” in the sense that she thought that human nature sets a demanding ideal that each individual can and should achieve in his own life and character (though few people do achieve it). This ideal is the fit object of the emotion of reverence, and Rand sometimes speaks of “worshiping” it or the people (real or fictional) who embody it. This ideal – the life proper to a human being – is egoistic in the sense that an individual leading such a life is dedicated as a matter of moral principle to his own happiness. Happiness, for Rand, is not mere pleasure or desire-satisfaction. It is that state of “non-contradictory joy” (Atlas 1022) that is the concomitant of achieving what one has rationally identified as objectively good. A heroic human being is committed to the fullest use of his reason; and he uses it to conceive ambitious, life-sustaining goals, and to achieve them via productive activity. All the aspects of this vision and Rand’s arguments for them are discussed in detail in later chapters. So are other aspects of her thought, including the view that, because such a life requires the political freedom to live by one’s own judgment, laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system. It is enough for now to note that this vision evokes intense reactions in many people: some are inspired; others, revolted; some find it profound; others, juvenile.
Rand used the phrase “sense of life” to designate the aspect of a person’s or a culture’s psychology that generates the differing emotional reactions we have to artworks and (especially) to the view of the world and of humanity that they project. A sense of life is an implicit worldview – a “pre-conceptual metaphysics” that is experienced as a “constant, basic emotion” and expressed in a person’s “widest goals or smallest gestures” (“Philosophy and Sense of Life” RM 8, 18, 22).4 Part of maturing, Rand held, is translating one’s sense of life into conscious convictions, which one can rationally evaluate; correct, if necessary; and then consistently implement. Adopting this terminology, then, we can say that, for better or for worse, Rand’s vision holds a deep and enduring appeal for something in “the American sense of life” – or, at least, for a sense of life that is shared by many Americans and that contributes to the character of the nation. If so, then engagement with her works and thought is a crucial means by which scholars can help America to understand itself, and by which they can help the many people, in every country, who find Rand inspiring or repugnant to understand one another.5
Taking Rand Seriously
The scholarly study of Rand’s works was postponed by two generations of academics who found her vision appalling and thought or hoped that she was a passing fad, and that their students’ attraction to her was a youthful indiscretion. These hopes have been dashed. Decades after her death, Rand’s appeal and influence cannot be denied; and very often something of her heroic vision of man remains even in the souls of readers who “outgrow” her and resign themselves (sadly or smugly) to a world in which they believe the kind of life she projects is impossible or vicious.
Happily, these facts are beginning to be recognized. Rand’s novels have, perhaps grudgingly, been admitted to the literary canon. They are seldom discussed in journals, but one increasingly finds Anthem and The Fountainhead taught in high school English courses or listed on summer reading lists, and Atlas Shrugged has begun to appear in university syllabi. Objectivism, as Rand called her philosophical system, may still be regarded as a curiosity by most philosophy professors, but her defense of egoism is now often covered in ethics textbooks, excerpts from her essays are widely anthologized, and there are entries on Rand in the two major encyclopedias of philosophy.6 Moreover, there is a small but growing number of scholars and advocates of Objectivism within the philosophy departments of America’s colleges and universities.7
Indeed, the last decade saw a boom in quality Rand scholarship. Among the highlights are Tara Smith’s (2006) Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics, Robert Mayhew’s (2004, 2005a, 2007, 2009, 2012a) edited collections of essays on each of Rand’s novels, and the first two volumes of the Ayn Rand Society’s Philosophical Studies series: Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue (2011) and Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge (2013), both edited by Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox. Since its founding in 1987, the Society (of which I am co-secretary) holds sessions on Rand’s ideas at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. There have been 30 such meetings, collectively involving 48 panelists who represent 41 academic departments from institutions on three continents.8 Some of these panelists are advocates for Objectivism; many are not; but all are participating in the stimulating exchange of ideas that occurs whenever philosophers take Rand’s works seriously.
Turning from scholarly to popular books, two biographies of Rand were published in 2009, by Jennifer Burns and Anne C. Heller. Burns’s book, especially, is less informative than one might hope about Rand’s ideas and intellectual development; and both authors, in what seem to be attempts t...
