Happy Birthday Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the great novelist and philosopher who championed individualism, atheism, reason, and the “virtue of selfishness,” was born one hundred years ago today in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1926 Rand (born Alyssa Rosenbaum) fled the Soviet Union for the United States. In 1943 she published her acclaimed novel, The Fountainhead, the story of architect Howard Roark and his fierce commitment to individual expression, which was modeled on the life and works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1957, Rand published her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, an explicitly philosophical and polemical novel celebrating laissez faire capitalism as a moral and economic ideal. It is no exaggeration to describe Ayn Rand as one of the twentieth century's most influential libertarians.

Though an engaging writer and thinker, Rand notoriously attracted (and encouraged) a cult-like following, complete with True Believers who happily excommunicated those who questioned her often-dogmatic style and conclusions. Today, the Objectivist movement (the name for her philosophy) includes some of the most cloistered, self-censoring, and intolerant politicos one is likely to meet. Thankfully, Rand's ideas have exerted tremendous influence without converting every reader to orthodox Objectivism. Her most important impact is probably on those that consider her ideas, absorb what they need or want, and then fight for individualism on their own terms.

In a notable recent turn of events, the academic world has gradually begun to take Rand and her work seriously, with journals and symposiums exploring and debating her contributions to economic, cultural, philosophical, and political thought. The leading figure in this regard is Chris Matthew Sciabarra, a visiting scholar at New York University and author of the remarkable Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the second volume in his “Dialectics & Liberty Trilogy,” which also includes Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism. In Sciabarra's provocative view, Rand, like Karl Marx, employs a dialectical method of inquiry, rejecting mind-matter dualism and emphasizing context. Sciabarra investigates Rand's intellectual roots in Silver Age Russia, discussing both what she accepted and rejected in the Russian tradition and how it shaped her fiction and philosophy. Needless to say, many in the Objectivist camp have denounced the book (we can only speculate on whether or not they have actually read it).

You can find Sciabarra's website here. In Reason, Cathy Young offers her critical appreciation, “Ayn Rand at 100.” And in the New York Times, there is Edward Rothstein's largely negative, “Considering the Last Romantic, Ayn Rand, at 100.”

UPDATE
More Rand-O-Rama, for those that just can't get enough: a nice piece by the Cato Institute's David Boaz, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, several posts at the always interesting Liberty & Power group blog (scroll down), and "The Illustrated Rand," Chris Matthew Sciabarra's fascinating look at Rand's influence on popular culture, particularly in the work of comic book creators Steve Ditko (Spiderman) and Frank Miller (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).