2 weeks Ago
Love her or loathe her, Ayn Rand is an undeniably influential figure. Her contemporary admirers range from celebrities – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe – to politicians, including Donald Trump. Cultural commentator Lisa Duggan has called her "the ultimate mean girl".
Rand was implacably opposed to all forms of altruism, social welfare programs and governmental oversight. She also harboured a lifelong hatred of communism. She was "one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought," according to intellectual biographer Jennifer Burns.
And while Rand founded a philosophical movement, Objectivism, which privileged the "concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life", her ideas are not the key to her influence. Her "blockbuster" novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), lie "at the heart of her incalculable impact," as Duggan writes. Trump has said of The Fountainhead: "That book relates to .
.. everything.
" He told a journalist in 2016 that its depiction of the tyranny of groupthink reflects "what is happening here". The attitude of John Galt, hero of Rand's best known book, Atlas Shrugged, is best summed up by his famous credo: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Of course, this has since become a rallying cry for libertarian politicians and thinkers.
Atlas Shrugged attracted largely negative reviews on publication: Time called its philosophy "ludicrously naïve" and the Atlantic Monthly said it "might be mildly described as execrable claptrap". But for Gregory Salmieri, co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand (2016), the Russian-born American philosopher is "one of the most important intellectual voices in our culture". Rand's celebration of egotism and rapacious capitalism remains resonant today.
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