http://www.newsweek.com/id/219001
In my experience, people who’ve read Ayn Rand’s books either love them or hate them. I’m one of the few who fall somewhere in between. When I first read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the 1980s, I was blown away. Those books portray the power of the free individual in ways I had never thought about before. Since then, I’ve grown more critical of Rand’s outlook because it doesn’t include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact. Yet I still believe firmly that her books deserve attention, and in that regard, Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rand’s world view.
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Another new book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns, examines Rand’s natural attraction for conservatives—Alan Greenspan was a member of the Saturday-night salon she held in her New York apartment (though William F. Buckley called objectivism “stillborn” in a column he wrote when she died). All told, Atlas has sold more than 6 million copies since it was published just over 50 years ago.
Why? I think at a fundamental level many people recognize Rand’s essential truth—government doesn’t know best. Those in power in Washington—or indeed in Columbia, S.C.—often lead themselves to believe that our prosperity depends on their wisdom. It doesn’t. The prosperity and opportunity we enjoy comes ultimately from the creative energies of the country’s businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, and inventors. The longer it takes this country to reawaken to this reality, the worse we—and in turn, our children’s standard of living—will be.
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Ironically, as Heller’s biography makes clear, while Rand’s philosophy was based on the individual’s absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own. Her chief acolyte (and lover), Nathaniel Branden, once circulated a list of rules for Rand’s inner circle to follow; one of them read, “Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world”; another said, “Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth.” For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn’t allow much of it around her.
More conservatives doing what they do best.
