1 Divisive Rand
In 2018, I organised a conference on the work of Ayn Rand, the controversial and popular novelist, founder of the philosophical movement of Objectivism, and cheerleader for unrestrained capitalism. As far as I know, this was the first conference to approach its subject from a perspective consistently and explicitly resistant to her ideology. This fact still surprises me. Since her death in 1982, Rand’s influence has only grown. One might think that the result of having possibly the most famous twentieth-century American theorist of the right top bestseller lists, receive praise from powerful politicians and business leaders, and gain endorsements from weighty academic tomes, would be a substantial counterattack from progressive or left-leaning academics.1
Is this reluctance to discuss Rand due to her work being figured as morally and politically irredeemable? Perhaps. This is the author of The Virtue Or Selfishness, who argued for child labour, idolised the child-killer William Hickman, and described Native Americans as ‘savages’ (Rand 1974).2 I think this is not the whole of it, however, as her output is also considered by many to be vulgar, confused, and, well, just a bit silly. Her classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, turns on the invention of what is fundamentally a perpetual motion device, after all. It also praises artistic refinement despite climaxing in a speech by its hero, extolling the virtues of Rand’s own Objectivist philosophy, that goes on (and on) for sixty uninterrupted pages. Taking Atlas Shrugged seriously is not without its risks, therefore, as it might result in some fellow theorists being less inclined to afford one the same privilege.
Rand’s writing divided opinion from the moment it encountered a significant audience, and a stubborn resolve to ignore or ridicule the work has long been established as an acceptable critical response. Desperate to escape deprivations in communist Russia, the 21-year-old Rand travelled to America in 1926, gained some success as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and, 10 years later, a Broadway play and her first novel met with modest sales and some positive reviews. It was with the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, however, that Rand began to gain widespread recognition. The novel concerns an architect successfully pursuing his personal vision in a world hostile to individualism and self-reliance. It was not well publicised, and did not instantly find a readership, but within a year it entered the bestseller lists, largely through word of mouth, was made into a film in 1949, and by 1956 had sold 70,000 copies. The Fountainhead met with derision as well as praise, with one particularly unimpressed critic concluding that ‘anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing’.3 The film version was savagely reviewed: ‘incredibly stupid’; ‘the silliest picture of the year’.4 Atlas Shrugged was published 14 years after The Fountainhead, and follows a group of business leaders as they prove their worth to society at large, and ultimately turn a profit, by going on strike. It was even more successful and divisive than her previous work, with the fiercest criticism coming from thinkers on the right, shocked by Rand’s unapologetic celebration of selfishness and sexuality. In a notorious review, conservative commentator Whittaker Chambers initially describes ‘a remarkably silly book’, but ends with a far darker assessment: ‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber—go!”’ (Chambers 1957). Rand was dismayed by this reception, retreated from public life for a while, and abandoned the novel as her preferred form of expression. When she re-emerged, it was as a writer of non-fiction and public speaker, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.5 All of Rand’s writing, fictional or not, consistently champions her philosophy of Objectivism, which she summed up in the following terms: ‘(1) Metaphysics: Objective Reality; (2) Epistemology: Reason; (3) Ethics: Self-Interest; (4) Politics: Capitalism’ (Rand 1988, 343). If Rand’s work is rejected by some because of its violence or absurdity, it is arguably the starkness of her worldview evidenced here that is the greatest contribution to the polarisation of critical responses.
2 Academic Rand
Despite the initial rejection of Objectivist literature by conservative thinkers, Rand and her followers exercise a profound influence on the contemporary right, not only in America, but across the world, and since the 1970s‚ critical commentary on Rand has been produced largely by uncritical defenders of her work. Recently, however, unswerving adherence to Objectivist philosophical principles has, in some quarters, been replaced by more nuanced and scholarly assessments. Most significant here, perhaps, is Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns, an academic biography published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Burns is sympathetic to Rand, but offers a rich and detailed history that very much departs from the parochialism that characterises much of what passes for scholarship in the field. Despite this, it is instructive that Burns’ work, and that of other comparable figures such as Anne C. Heller, is often taken as a politically neutral assessment of Objectivism. Roderick Long calls Burns’ text ‘even-handed’, Elaine Showalter describes it as a ‘dispassionate intellectual history’, and, in a recent monograph on Rand and Posthumanism, Ben Murnane praises its ‘nonpartisan’ approach (Long 2001; Showalter quoted in Burns 2017; Murnane 2018, 4). It could be argued that such reviews do little more than establish what their authors regard as politically unmarked. The Goddess of the Market rejects the critical view that Rand is a ‘right-wing extremist’, for example, and resists also the argument that her work is racist: for Burns, although Rand ‘opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a litmus test of liberal acceptability’, she was not ‘truly prejudiced’ (Burns 2009, 205).6
Something of a connection can be made here to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, the main source of academic work on Objectivism, which also makes the claim for neutrality, encouraging those who would both criticise and celebrate Rand to contribute articles. The journal has done much to legitimise the study of Objectivism by encouraging scholarship from academics opposed to it, and has received strong disapproval from some Objectivists for this (Glenn 2007). If it can thus be applauded for encouraging genuine academic debate, one could also understand its work in a more critical sense: by bringing in recognised, mainstream academic voices, the journal grants legitimacy to the work of down-the-line Objectivists. Instead of being taken as limited, inward-looking works, Objectivist texts are reframed as both entirely equal and a necessary counter to those of established academics. Significantly, in relation to claims of neutrality, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was created and initially edited by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, arguably the most successful contemporary academic promoter of Objectivist thought, Stephen Cox, editor of Liberty magazine, and R. W. Bradford, who‚ although critical of aspects of Rand’s philosophy, was also a libertarian.7 Although these academics may offer divergent opinions, they do so from within a specific—and to those on the outside, rather niche—tradition of political thought. It is my understanding, then, that texts that claim neutrality on Rand more usually end up endorsing and normalising at least some of her ideas, and it follows that the approach taken by this present book is one of critique.
Although the response to Objectivism from left-leaning or progressive commentators has often been amused indifference or horrified recoil, the chapters that follow are not the first to question Rand’s ideas in detail. Many individual articles in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies do offer pointed criticism from positions not aligned with libertarianism or Objectivism, the most celebrated of these perhaps being Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Actuality of Ayn Rand’, a work that is analysed at length within the opening chapters of this present book (Žižek 2002). Arguably, the initial, path-breaking engagement occurs in the 1970s, however, when feminist scholars such as Susan Brownmiller offer brief yet reasonably detailed responses to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Brownmiller takes issue with the gender politics forwarded by these texts, and figures Rand as ‘a traitor to her own sex’, not least because of her ambivalent attitudes to rape (Brownmiller 1999).8 More recent feminist work, although strongly critiquing Rand’s patriarchal worldview, moves on from wholesale rejection, seeing in these novels also a subversive potential: Rand’s heroines enjoy sex with multiple partners, and suffer no repercussions for this, while her ‘libertarian rages against the strictures of family, church, and state appeal to many LGBT readers’ (Duggan 2019, 11).9 In 1999, a number of such responses were collected in Feminist Interpretat...