United Liberty

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.

Oxford University Press, which published Jennifer Burns’ biography of Ayn Rand, has made available a short excerpt of the book:

“I am coming back to life,” Rand announced as the Nathaniel Branden Institute entered its second year of existence.  Watching Nathan’s lectures fill, Rand began to believe she might yet make an impact on the culture.  Roused from her despair, she began once more to write.  In 1961 she published her first work of nonfiction, For the New Intellectual, and in 1962 launched her own monthly periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. Over the course of the decade she reprinted articles from the newsletter and speeches she had given in two more books, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.  Although she occasionally talked of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned fiction for good.  Instead she reinvented herself as a public intellectual. Gone were the allegorical stores, the dramatic heroes and heroines, the thinly coded references to real politicians, intellectuals, and events.  In The Objectivist Newsletter Rand named names and pointed fingers, injecting herself directly into the hottest political issues of the day.  Through her speeches and articles she elaborated on the ethical, political, and artistic sides of Objectivism.

There are few figures in the American libertarian movement that gave rise to as much controversy or passion as Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, it’s hard to find a libertarian who doesn’t have an opinion about the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. For many of us, she was the one who lit the spark that sent us down the road toward becoming a libertarian. Even after her death, some still consider themselves hard-core Objectivists in the model of those who gravitated around the Nathanial Branden Institute in the 1960s.

A few months ago, I was temporarily immersed in the recent history of Eastern Europe. I was devouring Ayn Rand’s We the Living, Michael G. Roskin’s The Rebirth of East Europe and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde.