Toolboxnj Posted November 1, 2009 Report Share Posted November 1, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/re...irsch-t.html?em Kirsch's article is more of a personal attack on Ayn Rand than anything. It doesn't address the philosophy of Objectivism which I wouldn't expect anyone writing for the New Republic to be a fan of. Read for yourself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eiuol Posted November 1, 2009 Report Share Posted November 1, 2009 It's not bad, the worst is "Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done." And that's not really even a condemnation, either. It's about Ayn Rand anyway, not Objectivism specifically. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agrippa1 Posted November 1, 2009 Report Share Posted November 1, 2009 We learn more about Kirsch than we do about Rand. Certainly he has no "undeserved self-esteem." None whatsoever, from what I can gather. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyco Posted November 2, 2009 Report Share Posted November 2, 2009 It's not bad, the worst is "Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done." And that's not really even a condemnation, either. It's about Ayn Rand anyway, not Objectivism specifically. It seems to me that situation is analogous to Roark forfeiting his fee in order to correct the dissatisfying west wing of the Sanborn house. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kainscalia Posted November 2, 2009 Report Share Posted November 2, 2009 That's always the fallacy with anti-capitalists... they think that capitalists pursue money for money's sake. The whole idea of 'value' is something that escapes them completely when 'value' isn't defined by a monetary sum (and then THEY say that we're the base materialists!) It seems to me that situation is analogous to Roark forfeiting his fee in order to correct the dissatisfying west wing of the Sanborn house. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agrippa1 Posted November 3, 2009 Report Share Posted November 3, 2009 This royalty thing is a red herring, regardless of how you look at it... Rand could have gone to another publisher and tried to negotiate more favorable terms, but she made an economic decision - to lose a small amount of her per-copy royalty - in the belief that her total royalties would be far greater because of higher sales of the book. Her publisher believed the Galt speech added no value to the book and would have been an unnecessary cost incurred on his business. His request that she cover that cost was perfectly rational, from his point of view, and her decision to agree was also rational, given her belief that Galt's speech was, quite literally, worth more than the paper it was printed on. When she turned out to be right, she didn't quite out-smart her publisher - he increased his profit margin through the expanded printing of the same book - but she showed herself to be a shrewder judge of value. Had Atlas Shrugged not included Galt's 75-page monologue, it would have been greatly diminished, as I think most would agree. That "contradiction" of Rand's, as Kirsch describes it, ended up making a huge amount of money for Miss Rand, in spite of Kirsch's judgment of its inherent economic irrationality. Sucks being proven wrong by your own argument, but what do you expect from poet and critic "of some distinction," as his wiki page generously describes him. Here's an interesting exercise in infinite regression, written, unwittingly, by the critic. A latter day Toohey, if ever there was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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