Alex Goodall
'Individualists of
The World, Unite!'
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
By Jennifer Burns (Oxford University Press 384pp £16.99)
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Unlike classical conservatism, which stressed traditions and habits rather than absolutes of right and wrong, the modern American right has increasingly come to see all compromise as betrayal. Burke argued that 'circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind', but American right-wingers today are driven by a concern only for intellectual purity. Following the example of Barry Goldwater's famous speech of 1964, Fox News hosts, shock jocks and angry bloggers endlessly reiterate Cicero's claim that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.
Few figures better illustrate this harsh, fractious and uncompromising approach to right-wing politics than Ayn Rand. An émigré from Bolshevik Russia, Rand shot to fame in the Forties and Fifties writing popular fiction with a libertarian twist. Her work offered an ethical defence of acquisitive self-interest and commercial capitalism, presaging Gordon Gekko's claim that 'greed is good' by nearly four decades. She believed that the individual is the source of all value and that, by extension, selfishness is a virtue and altruism a crime: an argument she called Objectivism. 'All birth is individual,' Rand said, in defiance of both biological necessity and common sense. 'So is all parenthood. So is every creative process.' The community is therefore parasitical: the ideal society is one in which creative elites are freed from all constraints in order to pursue wealth and profit, while weaker, non-creative elements of society are left to wallow in their inferiority. She considered all collective action - unemployment insurance, healthcare coverage, minimum wages, taxation - to be not only wasteful but sinful, and argued that it should be fought by all means short of violence. 'Individualists of the World, Unite!' she declared.
In postwar America, this was a message that resonated deeply with the ambitious and the prosperous; as recent events show, its appeal remains strong. While modern free-market libertarianism owes more in substance to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, none can compare to Rand when it comes to popular appeal. Her books, despite being published half a century ago, sold more than 800,000 copies in 2008 alone.
Jennifer Burns's new biography of Rand is the most balanced and engaging yet written about this idiosyncratic and fascinatingly irritating character. It is not a literary study of Rand the novelist. Had it been, it could never have been as tolerant as it is of Rand's obnoxious pot-boiler fiction. Nor is Burns particularly focused upon engaging with Objectivist theory directly: its wacky claims get off far too lightly. Instead, the book seeks to explain Rand's thought by examining her life.
At one level, Burns nurses a quiet admiration for Rand's drive, ambition and ruthless determination not to be held back by the conventions of mid-century bourgeois life. Nevertheless, the biographical approach offers a fundamental challenge to Rand's assertion that only ideas, not the Burkean wellsprings of circumstance, are what matter. In examining her life, a picture emerges of Rand's thinking as a product not of reason but of neurosis and fantasy. Rand's was a profoundly lonely childhood in a wealthy but vulnerable upper-middle class Jewish family in St Petersburg. A litany of early trauma - a self-centred and emotionally abusive mother, a distant father, and the abandonment of her family in her formative years when a repressive regime came to power and began expropriating her family's property - was superseded by a promised land imagined through the idealised language of Hollywood. The result was a series of books that extolled the virtue of selfishness as a defence against the degrading demands of others. Only a true believer could deny how deeply emotional was Rand's obsession with cold rationality.
Rand's imbalanced philosophy certainly brought little joy to those closest to her. In her magnum opus, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand's cod-Nietzschean hero John Galt famously swears never to live for the sake of others, nor to have others live for him. Rand may have lived up to the first part of this oath, but her actions repudiated the second. Friends who questioned her world view were ruthless excluded, followers were subjected to intensive psychoanalysis in order to lay bare their insecurities, and only those ready to defer were allowed to remain in the luminescence of her company. It turned out that Rand's vision of the absolute freedom of the individual could only be achieved through the subordination of those around her.
Rand's life thus amounted to a failed pastiche of individualism. Her submissive husband Frank was virtually the only person able to remain beside her in the long term. Dependent on her both financially and psychologically, at one point he even agreed to have a small bell tied to his foot so that she could constantly monitor his movements. For several years Rand conducted an affair with Nathaniel Branden, an acolyte, which both Frank and Branden's wife, Barbara, were informed about and expected to accept but banned from discussing publicly in order to protect the reputation of Rand's work. When, eventually, Branden traded his mentor and lover in for a younger model, he was immediately excommunicated and all reference to him purged from the record. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Rand's followers tended not to be the supermen her fiction glamorised, but impressionable, weak-willed people who desperately dreamed of being exceptional and thought Rand might offer them a way of becoming so.
In the end, Rand's books slipped beyond her grasp. As Burns suggests, their continuing appeal lies not in the rigidity of their author's precepts, but in their presentation of the simple and repetitive assertion of every human's right to self-realisation. In this sense the young people of the Fifties and Sixties whose lives were changed by Rand's books were engaged in the same efforts as their ostensible enemies at Woodstock. The big difference, however, was that, with Rand, the search for integrity and authenticity ended in Wall Street, not a field in upstate New York; and so when the time came to don pin-striped suits and take to the boardrooms, it was the Randites rather than the hippies who ended up running the show.
Alex Goodall is a lecturer in modern history at the University of York. He is currently writing a book about American anticommunism between the First World War and the McCarthy era.