We’ve been receiving so many items related to Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday that we’re now creating a new category called “Ayn Rand Centennial,” in which we’ll file all these items together in one location.
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Reason Mag on Ayn Rand at 100
Writing for Reason Magazine, Cathy Young offers a frankly critical tribute to Ayn Rand’s legacy in her article “Ayn Rand at 100.” The article is sure to be controversial among admirers of Rand’s work.
It begins:
A hundred years after her birth and nearly 25 years after her death, Ayn Rand remains a fascinating and enigmatic presence. She has been ?mainstreamed? enough to have been honored by a U.S. Postal Service stamp in 1999 and to have been featured on C-SPAN?s American Writers series in 2002. Her novels figure prominently in readers? lists of the 20th century?s greatest books. Notably, in a 1991 survey of more than 2,000 Book-of-the-Month Club members about books that made a difference in their lives, Rand?s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, came in second?albeit a very distant second?to the Bible. Rand, a devout atheist, might have seen that as an insult rather than an honor.
Yet in many ways Rand remains an outlier and an oddity on the cultural scene, a cult figure with plenty of worshippers and plenty of desecrators. No other modern author has had such extravagant claims of greatness made on her behalf: Followers of her philosophy, Objectivism, regard her as the greatest thinker to have graced this earth since Aristotle and the greatest writer of all time. Mainstream intellectuals tend to dismiss her as a writer of glorified pulp fiction and a pseudo-philosophical quack with an appeal for impressionable teens. Politically, too, Rand is an outsider: Liberals shrink from her defiant pro-capitalist stance, conservatives from her militant atheism, and conservatives and liberals alike from her individualism. Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand?s ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild. In her insistence that political philosophy must be based on a proper epistemology, she rejected the libertarian movement, which embraced a wide variety of reasons for advocating free markets and free minds, as among her enemies.
In recent years, at last, some analysis of Rand has appeared that is neither uncritical adulation nor unrelenting bashing. Some of it has come from unorthodox neo-Objectivists, such as the feminist scholar Mimi Gladstein or the political philosopher Chris Matthew Sciabarra. (The two edited the 1999 book Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, and Sciabarra wrote 1996?s controversial Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.) The five-year-old Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, co-founded by Sciabarra, often features essays by mainstream intellectuals that treat Rand?s legacy in a non-hagiographic way. Two controversial books about Rand the person remain a good place to start for an understanding, but not adulatory, look at her life and work: The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) by Barbara Branden, no doubt the first-ever sympathetic biography whose subject slept with the biographer?s husband, and Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand (1989) by Nathaniel Branden, the husband in question.
In 1962, when they were still among the faithful, the Brandens co-wrote a book called Who Is Ayn Rand? More than 40 years later, the question still stands.
And it ends:
Rand herself was a creature of paradox. She was a prophet of freedom and individualism who tolerated no disobedience or independent thought in her acolytes, a rationalist who refused to debate her views. She was an atheist whose worship of Man led her to see the human mind as a godlike entity, impervious to the failings of the body or to environmental influences. (Nathaniel Branden reports that she even disliked the idea of evolution.) She was a strong woman who created independent heroines yet saw sexual submission as the essence of femininity and argued that no healthy woman would want to be president of the United States because it would put her above all men.
This is perhaps how Rand is best appreciated: as a figure of great achievement and great contradictions, a visionary whose vision is one among many, whose truths are important but by no means exclusive. Rand, it is safe to say, would have regarded such appreciation as far worse than outright rejection. But that?s just another paradox of life.
See the full article for further reading.
The Literary Art of Ayn Rand
The Objectivist Center has announced the publication of The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. Edited by the Center’s William Thomas, this collection of nine essays focuses on Ayn Rand as a writer. Contributors include: Kirsti Minsaas, Susan McCloskey, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Nathaniel Branden, David Kelley, and Stephen Cox.
More information is available at The Objectivism Store
Ayn Rand at 100: The Moral Defense of Freedom
In honor of Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday, Edward Hudgins of The Objectivist Center has written a commentary that briefly oultines Rand’s life and influence. Hudgins writes:
A century after her birth, Ayn Rand’s legacy lives on not only in her novels—The Fountainhead (1943), Anthem (1938), We the Living (1936) and Atlas [Shrugged] (1957)—but also in political and cultural ideas that are changing the country.
Read the full article for more…
Ayn Rand in Chicago Tribune: Rand is now Mainstream?
An article sympathetic to Ayn Rand was written by Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, titled “The evolution of Ayn Rand.” It starts:
Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream? The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, “The Incredibles.” And Wednesday, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress–an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist.
In her day, Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing attitude in American society. She infuriated liberals by preaching economic laissez-faire and lionizing titans of business. She appalled conservatives by rejecting religion in any form while celebrating, in her words, “sexual enjoyment as an end in itself.”
But her novels found countless readers. “The Fountainhead,” published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged,” which followed in 1957, are still in print. In 1991, when the Book-of-the-Month Club polled Americans asking what book had most influenced their lives, “Atlas Shrugged” finished second only to the Bible. In all, Rand’s books have sold about 22 million copies and continue to sell at the rate of more than half a million a year.
The article is short, but Chapman argues that Rand’s ideas, once so controversial, are now so mainsteam that “we have forgotten where they originated”.
Chapman mentions the 100th anniversary, gives a brief history, and quotes David Kelley of the Objectivist Center.
See the full article for further information.
Ayn Rand in NY Times: Howard Roark at Ground Zero
An article in today’s New York Times (“‘Sixteen Acres’: Rebuilding Ground Zero“) starts with a nod to Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, and an unsubstantiated claim about the validity of her philosophy:
AYN RAND may be long discredited as a philosopher, but her ideas about architecture are still very much alive. Howard Roark, the protagonist of her objectivist fantasia ”The Fountainhead,” is the archetypal artist-hero, rendering society’s soul in concrete and steel. Since the 1940’s, his image has shaped our appreciation of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, defining even the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site: the struggle between Daniel Libeskind and Larry Silverstein was seen as a veritable ”Fountainhead Redux” in which a valiant architect armed only with his dreams takes on a mega-developer.
The article contains this prediction for Ground Zero:
Flashy architecture became the smoke screen behind which the real deals were made. ”Though the process would churn on in search of a master plan,” Nobel writes, ”the only politically acceptable solution was already apparent in the summer of 2002. The site would be rebuilt as a crowded, mixed-use, shopping-intensive corporate development surrounding a large but compromised memorial. It was all over but the shouting.”
Just what Howard Roark would have recommended… Not!
The article ends with:
Still, if the selection process has so far produced a poor excuse for a monumental rebuilding, it is nonetheless a tribute to New York — messy, money-soaked, dominated by too many egos and too few level heads. ”When the politicians line up to cut their ribbons,” Nobel writes, ”whatever shades the dais that day will be at once stranger and more fitting than anything they had imagined when they set about to govern its birth. In a way it will be perfect.” Clearly, Nobel wishes things were otherwise. But he also recognizes that in New York, even Howard Roark couldn’t make it so.
See the full article for further information.
What is the Nature of Ayn Rand's Appeal?
Writing for the Ayn Rand Institute, Onkar Ghate has published an op-ed titled “The Appeal of Ayn Rand” that examines the eternal appeal of Rand’s ideas, particularly among students. From the article:
The key to Rand’s popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days–the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”
See the full article for additional elucidtation.
Request for Ayn Rand Citations in the Media
From the Objectivist Center:
Ayn Rand is often mentioned in newspapers, magazines, books, and other publications, but writers don’t always seem to understand her ideas. The Objectivist Center is researching an article on the ways in which Rand and/or Objectivism are misunderstood, misrepresented, or misquoted. We would appreciate any examples you have seen. We’re also interested in examples where the ideas are accurately presented. In either case, what we’re looking for is not simply a reference to her, to her novels and characters, or the name of her philosophy, but a characterization of the ideas. If you would like to contribute an example, please email David Kelley (at dkelley at objectivistcenter.org) — and thanks in advance.
Ayn Rand Centenary in The OC Register
I just had a long and pleasant chat with Orange County Register Staff Writer Valerie Takahama, who is writing an article about the Ayn Rand Centenary for publication in the next couple weeks. Keep your eyes open for that if you read the Register. We’ll post an announcement here on the meta-blog as well, as soon as we receive notice of its publication.
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