Ayn Rand Revisited

[Bill Mattocks]

This is an interesting 'two book review' of a couple of new books about Ayn Rand, with reference to how her philosophy plays against the backdrop of the current economic situation.

http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/07/ready-for-her-close-up/

Ready for Her Close-Up

Re-examining Ayn Rand's place in American intellectual and cultural life

Nick Gillespie | October 7, 2009

Ayn Rand and the World She Made. By Anne C. Heller. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 567 pp. $35
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. By Jennifer Burns. Oxford Univ. Press. 369 pp. $27.95
Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the "greatest books" of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand's writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was "too intelligent" to believe in God.)

I can't really afford these two books right now, but I might have to eat some ramen for awhile and pony up for them. I was once a Rand fan, but in retrospect, I never really understood what it was I thought she espoused. Like my former flirtation with Libertarianism, I have changed my viewpoints as I've aged, but I still find both Objectivism and Libertarianism intriguing.

 

[blindsage]

I'm calling you the Can Opener from now on, Bill.

 

[Omar B]

Oh you know I'm getting those. She's my favorite author.