United Liberty
Happy birthday, Ayn Rand
Tue, 02/02/2010 - 5:03pm | posted by Jason Pye
In case you weren’t aware, on February 2, 1905, Alisa Rosenbaum, later known as Ayn Rand, was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
I’m a fan of her work. Not that I necessarily agree with everything she said or wrote, but she laid a stable moral foundation for what I believe is the best economic system the world has ever known in her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She would later expand on her views in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness, which are both underrated books.
Ayn Rand is seeing a resurgence in this era of bailouts and increasing government intervention. “Going Galt” seems to be a catch phrase among, at least, early tea partiers. Two new books, Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, came out last year that cover her life from a new perspective. If you’re into Rand at all, I suggest you read them.
To celebrate her birthday, here is a clip of her discussing her philosophy and capitalism with Mike Wallace from 1959 (Parts 2 and 3 are available here and here):
For someone who’s never read a lick of Rand, in what order would you recommend her books, or does it matter?
Atlas Shrugged is a really long and daunting book that is difficult to read and quite strange in many parts. I would recommend reading her lesser known works like We the Living or Anthem first. Also, the biographies that Jason listed are pretty good and deconstruct Ayn Rand’s philosophical beliefs in a way that only an outside voice can.
“Philosophy, despite the best obfuscatory intentions of philosophers, occasionally seeps out of the ivory towers and informs our lives.”
Start with *Ayn Rand: Sense of Life*, which you can download or watch online:
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Sense-Life/dp/B0012I9O7O
Also a shorter read, Andrew Bernstein’s, *Objectivism in One Lesson*.
While I admire Jason Pye’s posting of the article, and particularly the Wallace clips, I can’t agree with his reading suggestions, which will do more to confuse a “newbie” than to clarify. Ayn Rand and her writings need no “deconstructing” — a horrible term to accept, given it’s generated from the cultural “liberal” Left.
Best wishes in your objectivist investigations!
Those suggestions were not meant for a “newbie.” More for someone with a basic understanding of that she believed.
If you like fiction, a very good short read is Anthem. If you want something longer, I’d read The Fountainhead. Finally, I’d read Atlas Shrugged. All of these books stand up well with repeated readings.
If you want nonfiction, I’d start with The Virtue of Selfishness, as ethics is important to everybody, whereas politics and aesthetics, or the more fundamental branches of philosophy are of less general interest.
A bit of advice: take your time reading Ayn Rand. She has many critics who lump her with various other people. Her ideas are actually quite different than most you may hear today. But they aren’t cryptic: She’s pro-reason (thinking), pro-individual, pro-self-interest, pro-freedom, pro-capitalist (as opposed to socialism or the mixed economy). At root, she holds we *can learn* from reality, so we *should learn* from it, and we *deserve* and have a *moral right* to the rewards of such learning. She also holds that “your life belongs to you, and the good is to live it”, as opposed to the fundamental good being to assist others. We each have a right to live, regardless of how much others might wish to stop us.
If a long book is too challenging, forget about reading Ayn Rand. Your life is longer than the book and yet you don’t think of it as not worth living, do you? Maybe you do.
Ayn Rand’s *Atlas Shrugged* is popular now, and will remain an all time classic of literature. But her most important work to be remembered will be *Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology*, the work that laid forth a new theory of concept formation and solved what’s known as “the problem of universals”.
Her writings in politico-economic systems and ethics, if accepted over time, will lead to a better way of living and a better culture.
Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand!
At 105, it is not that Ayn Rand is bigger, but what she gave us that justifies what our founders described that is bigger. It is because we have all left things to chance and are now paying the price that makes what she said bigger. The Changing Face of Democrats on Amazon and claysamerica.com describes the 19th century Democrats who followed Jefferson and Madison, contrasted with modern Democrats who follow Rousseau and Marx, that being what Rand found of no worth as was the Old World. claysamerica.com
Hello,
The best way to become acquainted with Ayn Rand is to read Ayn Rand, Neither Burns nor Heller cared to do unbiased biographies of Rand. Brandens’ only bio of Rand without the smears and sneers was their early Who Is Ayn Rand? A biographer’s biography of Ayn Rand is in preparation by Shoshanna Milgram.
In reading and recommending Rand, I’ve discovered that there are fiction people, who love an inspiring story and action which portray life’s truths, and there are non-fiction people who prefer the most straight-forward prose statements of a thinker’s point of view.
For the second, I recomment The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand’s plain-English book on the root of morality in natural facts, a feat long thought impossible by academic philosophers. It has numerous essays showing applications, so that one can see how the Objectivist morality fits life on Earth.
As for Atlas Shrugged, I can’t do better than the review I posted long ago on Amazon.com. See that next below.
If you like an action novel with adult-size, believable heroes living in the same world you do and, at the same time, the kind of book that’ll make you re-think every idea you’ve ever heard or lived your life by, you’ll love Atlas Shrugged..
In it, you’ll meet Dagny Taggart, a woman who runs a continental railroad against the resistance of her incompetent and politically-connected brother. You’ll meet Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian D’Anconia, the latest heir to a world-wide copper empire, which he blows up, appearing to become a worthless playboy for a reason you can’t guess for 2/3 of the novel. You’ll meet Hank Reardon, the archetypical example of the American self-made industrialist, who invents a new kind of metal, stronger and lighter than steel. When you first meet him, he is unable to understand why, not only his country, but his family does not value his creativity and productiveness. He learns why over the course of the novel. The world you live in is the world he lives in, a world in which there are two opposite moral systems in deep conflict. In Atlas Shrugged, you’ll meet Ragnar Danneskjold, a modern-day, high-seas pirate who hijacks American relief ships carrying cargo to the failed People’s Socialist Paradises around the world. He sells the cargo for gold, which he uses to reimburse people’s income tax to them.
The main character? Him you don’t meet until 2/3 of the way into the novel. And when you do, you’ll have several emotional reactions, one of which is to laugh your head off, because you’ll realize that the author has laid clues about this character from the first sentence all the way through. He is the character who has let loose a plot in the world of the novel that makes it clear what the moral conflict is in the world and how it affects your life today, where you live.
This story will make you angry, make you cry, fill you with uplifting feelings, and cause you to say, “I’ve thought things like this before.” You’ll see the world around you differently, You’ll understand the people around you differently. You’ll see yourself differently.
The author is Ayn Rand, a woman whose life was adventurous as the novels she wrote. If you like Atlas, you’ll like all the rest of her books.
Now, the recommendation of Atlas Shrugged does come with a warning. Though English was not Ayn Rand’s first language, it is written in the purest, most crystal-clear English you have ever read. It will draw you along page after page and it is 1,000 pages. So, you are well-advised to eat, drink and sleep between sections of chapters.
There are two kinds of people who have read Atlas Shrugged. There are those who hate it and would love to gnash teeth on its author. Then, there are those, like me, who will say, “It changed my life.”
Several years ago, the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club did a survey among the nation’s readers, asking, “What book has most influenced your life?” The number one book was the Bible. Number two was Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand is the thinker who champions you every time you spend time alone with your own mind, doing your own thinking about what you are experiencing in life. And, if you are a businessperson, hers is the only voice on planet Earth that gives a moral defense of your activity in society as a businessperson.
If you love your life on Earth, you’ll find Atlas Shrugged is the most inspiring novel ever written.
To see a video of a young woman telling how Atlas Shrugged has inspired readers for over 50 years, click on http://arc-tv.com/why-atlas-shrugged-changes-lives/
If you are just getting acquainted with Ayn Rand, I envy you the adventure of discovering her for the first time.
Paul Beaird
Post new comment