TRIBUNE MAGAZINE: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns Oxford University Press, £16.99
At last! A well balanced book about Ayn Rand (1905-82), the guru of selfishness. After all the attack memoirs and right-wing adulation, Jennifer Burns has finally given us an intellectual biography of the founder of objectivism that can truly be described as objective. Burns explains Rand’s integrated system of ideas in clear language, showing us how it developed out of her life experiences and personal relationships, both intellectual and emotional. To her credit, Burns resists the temptation to snipe at such an inviting target as the elitist and dogmatic Rand and, wherever possible, she presents negative criticism using the original words of Rand’s colleagues and contemporaries.
Goddess of the Market traces Rand’s irresistible rise from bourgeois Russian origins to fame and fortune in America and shows how the success of her two blockbuster novels – The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) – which both glorified heroic individualism – allowed her to use her celebrity as a platform for her subsequent career as political ideologue and philosopher. She invented an abstract rational system called objectivism, which was designed to keep the world safe from communism by proving (mostly by assertion) that capitalism was the most rational and moral form of human society.
But even as an anti-communist in America, she discovered that she didn’t quite fit in. She was an atheist iconoclast, not a traditionalist reactionary, and was forced to create her own niche on the contrarian far right, promoting guilt-free wealth creation and denouncing the state, but viciously opposed to libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and religious conservatives. Thus she escaped from the tyranny of collectivism in Russia only to end up in a self-created dystopia of heightened rhetoric where she lived out a life of extreme alarmism, always imagining civilisation was crashing around her ears. >>> Roddy Matthews |Friday, May 28, 2010
HT: Guido Fawkes >>>
