Writing for Front Page Magazine, Alec Mouhibian has published a rousing defense of Ayn Rand’s legacy titled “Who’s Afraid of Ayn Rand?” It begins:
If you?ve heard of Ayn Rand, whose centennial birthday was Wednesday, it is probably because you?ve read her novels The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. But back when the greatest female thinker in history was alive, the above question was quite revealing. It still is.
Rand, a novelist and philosopher, came to America all alone in her early twenties after escaping Soviet Russia and before being castigated by everyone from Granville Hicks to Whittaker Chambers. Her first novel, We The Living, a semi-autobiographical depiction of life under communism, was panned by leftist critics for ?failing to understand the Soviet experiment.? The rigorous philosophy she later developed?which she called Objectivism and which can be summarized by the axis of reason-individualism-capitalism?unnerved intellectual nippleweights from both left and right. And mutual hatred with Women?s Lib was established from the get-go, because she liked men.
Mike Wallace reflected that Rand?s most vehement critics tended not to actually read her. So challenged were their basic assumptions by the ideas of this little big-eyed immigrant that they were too afraid to deal with them. Their fear of being challenged was a harbinger of an intellectual culture today in which monocle-dropping offense comes much easier than rational thought.
And so, since her death, Ayn Rand has merely been dismissed and ignored by her elite adversaries. When I asked the chairs of the Women?s Studies and Political Science departments at my school what they thought of her, they both gave the kind of bashful, blushing smile that I normally give when reminded of my childhood crush on Oscar the Grouch. Read her in high school, grew up, moved on, haven?t thought of her since. Great sex scenes though. May we talk Hegel?
…And it only gets better. See the full article for further reading.