Objectivism

Objectivism

Book Review: “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right”

Sat, 11/14/2009 - 1:46pm | posted by Doug Mataconis

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.

Love and Hate for Ayn Rand

Mon, 12/28/2009 - 5:03pm | posted by Michael Orion Powell

(This article is an amended version of an earlier essay on Ayn Rand.)

I first heard about Ayn Rand earlier this year while reading a copy of the brilliant magazine Liberty. Curious about why libertarians were so ga-ga over this novelist, I picked up a copy of We the Living. From the plot of that book, I expected her to be a libertarian George Orwell, illustrating the horrors of dictatorship and tyranny by way of dramatization.

We the Living is a great book. I think it should be assigned reading for any course on communism. Rand did a brilliant job of illustrating how weak in authority the Soviets initially were and how their power eventually became omnipotent. There was even quite a bit of nostalgia for her mother country in many parts of the book, which clashes with the harsh criticisms of Russian society that Rand made in interviews.

Thinking I had found another great author, I plowed through Anthem, which detailed a collectivist dystopia in which all aspects of individualism had been wiped from existence. Another great book and far more compact than her others. I went through a little bit of The Early Ayn Rand, which publishes some of her earlier fiction work for magazines.