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The Age of Rand

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DragonMaci

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After browsing the first few pages, especially the table of contents, and noticing that the author believes that Objectivism could "degenerate into a religion," I don't think much of this book.

Objectivism could never become a religion. True, some of its so-called supporters might act religiously regarding it - and some do - but that doesn't make it a religion.

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After browsing the first few pages, especially the table of contents, and noticing that the author believes that Objectivism could "degenerate into a religion," I don't think much of this book.

I could see the rationalist tendency and pitfall leading to huge numbers of so-called "Objectivists" essentially acting like it's a religion. If that's what the author meant, I agree. No doubt the author is thinking of such a thing and has run into a lot of rationalists (I prefer to call them and not ARI, Randroids), and may very well be assuming that that is an inevitable consequence of Objectivism. Nathaniel Branden and his ilk have of course done quite a bit to help this impression along. What the author probably is NOT stating (not having read it) is that the result of this would not be Objectivism.

It would nevertheless be a greatly improved world where the only thing we had to worry about was Randroid rationalists. They would at least accept enough of our premises that we could probably have a higher success rate jolting them out of their particular mental malfunction than we do with Christian fundies and nihilist Chomskyite twits.

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I read the introduction and the book seems very interesting and worth reading. Although the author states that he will criticize some aspects of Rand's work, he recognises her as a giant, seems completely anti-socialist and anti-Altruism, and proposes interesting things such as creating new terminology completely untainted by Altruism.

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  • 8 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...
I just ran into a link to this book while searching for Hillary's quote about having gone through a "Rand phase" in her youth.

Amazon has 5 reviews of the book that are all generally positive.

I picked up a copy of this book and it's sitting in my reading stack. I've read the introduction and a small part of the first chapter. While the author seems to have genuine respect for Rand, I've already found a few outright factual errors and misevaluations. For example, he predicted that Peikoff would redact the contents of Rand's personal journals to avoid having to admit that Branden's claim of an affair with Rand was true. Given that at the time of the book's publication Peikoff had already explicitly admitted that the affair occurred in the Q&A of "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir", this is a shaky charge at best. The subsequent publication, with Peikoff's cooperation, of James Vallient's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics serves as final refutation.

I'll keep reading.

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I just ran into a link to this book while searching for Hillary's quote about having gone through a "Rand phase" in her youth.

Amazon has 5 reviews of the book that are all generally positive.

Hilary went through a "Rand phase"? This boils down to that other topic on 'Why People Outgrow Objectivism". Can you link to that if you find it, Tom?

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