At last! A well balanced book about Ayn Rand (1905-82), the guru of selfishness. After all the attack memoirs and right-wing adulation, Jennifer Burns has finally given us an intellectual biography of the founder of objectivism that can truly be described as objective. Burns explains Rand’s integrated system of ideas in clear language, showing us how it developed out of her life experiences and personal relationships, both intellectual and emotional. To her credit, Burns resists the temptation to snipe at such an inviting target as the elitist and dogmatic Rand and, wherever possible, she presents negative criticism using the original words of Rand’s colleagues and contemporaries.
Goddess of the Market traces Rand’s irresistible rise from bourgeois Russian origins to fame and fortune in America and shows how the success of her two blockbuster novels – The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) – which both glorified heroic individualism – allowed her to use her celebrity as a platform for her subsequent career as political ideologue and philosopher. She invented an abstract rational system called objectivism, which was designed to keep the world safe from communism by proving (mostly by assertion) that capitalism was the most rational and moral form of human society.
But even as an anti-communist in America, she discovered that she didn’t quite fit in. She was an atheist iconoclast, not a traditionalist reactionary, and was forced to create her own niche on the contrarian far right, promoting guilt-free wealth creation and denouncing the state, but viciously opposed to libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and religious conservatives. Thus she escaped from the tyranny of collectivism in Russia only to end up in a self-created dystopia of heightened rhetoric where she lived out a life of extreme alarmism, always imagining civilisation was crashing around her ears.
Rand greatly prized consistency, but her remarkable career throws up multiple contradictions and paradoxes. She admired independent, freethinking individuals, but demanded unquestioning obedience from her followers. She despised second handers – those who heeded the opinions of others – yet yearned for respect as a writer and philosopher. She revelled in the primacy of reason and denied the role of emotions in human behaviour, but she craved love all her life.
Nor was she quite the self-made intellectual force she affected to be. She absorbed ideas on history, philosophy, economics and psychology from a long string of mentors, but she was not inclined to acknowledge her debts. She quarrelled, badly, with nearly everyone she was ever close to, especially her “intellectual heir” and sometime lover Nathaniel Branden. The one person she didn’t fall out with was her husband Frank, probably because he could never muster the energy to say “boo” to this particular goose, even when she told him about her affair with Branden.
This book sets out Rand’s manifesto dispassionately – the virtue of selfishness, the poison of altruism, the ultimate morality of capitalism – and follows objectivism from its foundations in pure rational thinking to its arrival at absolute ethical judgements. While not attacking this brittle system directly, Burns notes that there has, as yet, been no academic stampede to accept Rand’s claims to have sorted out the whole of human cognition and morality, and that her intellectual legacy is marginal and divided.
Burns takes Rand seriously as a thinker throughout, but the cumulative effect of her careful approach is to show how astonishingly little of Rand’s oeuvre was truly original. In some ways this is actually more damning, in Rand’s own terms, than dismantling her simplistic worship of lone hero figures. Rand was no genius. She was a formidably intelligent and determined woman who attempted to impose rational order on the world only to find out, to her evident disgust, that it was not how she had described it in her novels. It was much messier and more disobedient. But, although she could not see it herself, it was mostly rather kinder, too.
