Today is Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday. Bryan Caplan, who is smarter than you are, defends Rand’s legacy at the EconLog. I especially like this bit:
Yes, many of her philosophical arguments are question-begging. Shocking… unless you’ve read the work of Descartes, Locke, Kant, or Mill. They all make plenty of embarrassingly bad arguments. If you don’t want to dismiss their whole subject matter, you’ve got to judge philosophers based on their best work and/or the novel questions they raise. And by that standard, Rand more than holds her own.
Right on. Bryan mentions that he wouldn’t be a professor if it wasn’t for Rand. I certainly wouldn’t have studied philosophy (and wouldn’t be working at Cato) if Rand hadn’t convinced me that philosophy really matters. But more than that, Rand more than anyone I can think of, makes philosophy seem downright romantic. John Galt’s the bomb not just because he solves the problem of energy scarcity, or engineers the collapse of a parasitic corporate welfare state, but because he’s a philosopher!
I think Tyler’s right about what you really learn from Rand, even if you’ve given up on most of her particular arguments:
The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism — the greatest force for human good ever achieved — rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. I don’t know of any better celebration of that combination of forces.
Rand teaches a deep-seated reverence for innovation and discovery, and a heightened sensitivity to the dark motives that often underlie appeals to the commonweal. After reading Rand, you cannot live in a capitalist order and fail to appreciate the great glorious gift of innovation driven by the self-interested pursuit of excellence and wealth. And you cannot live in DC, the town of ten thousand Mouches, and fail to see daily how the fuel of resentment, parasitic avarice, and powerlust blazes in the rhetoric of shared sacrifice and fires the black engines of the state.
It may be that Rand has all the virtues you list, but she is such an atrocious stylist that the need to actually read her writings is an almost impossible obstacle to surmount; leaden, didactic prose, straw-men and cardboard-cutout characterizations are not the stuff of which intellectually challenging fiction is made, in my opinion, and had Ayn Rand’s books been my first exposure to libertarianish thinking, it’s highly unlikely I’d be a follower of that political philosophy today.
I still think she is a great writer and stylist.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
In that phrase lies certain aesthetic claims with which I thoroughly disagree. Though I’d rather not expand on the issue at length at this time, let it suffice to say that we have plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that beauty is not in fact entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and there is a meaningful sense in which we can say that Hermann Melville and Tom Clancy are not literary equals, despite the far greater popularity of the latter. Subtlety of psychological characterization, sentential variety and prose flow are just a few aspects in which Rand falls woefully short of genuinely good writers – Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey are cartoon characters, not human beings, and the notion that the world will come to a stop because a few geniuses choose to withdraw from it is so silly that even pulp science-fiction writers would hesitate to resort to such a plot device.
I agree with Will: her writing and stylistic talents far outstripped her abilities as a philosopher.
Her short essays are much better than her fiction, and among the fiction the early stuff is best. I too think of Rand as a good writer and stylist, but for _The Virtue of Selfishness_ and _We the Living_, not for the famous twin doorstops.
Abiola,
I think the idea is that if *all* the geniuses went away, the country (or world) would be in trouble. That doesn’t sound far-fetched to me. I bet it would take awhile but very bad things would probably happen.
Thank God for the geniuses! And Happy 100th to Ayn!
I also agree that she was a great writer.
I think the issue is muddled because different people are using different criteria.
She wasn’t trying to write realistic stories with complex characterizations. She was trying to present important philosophical ideas; and the novels were a way to do that in a dramatic context.
I think she succeeded brilliantly.
As I’ve said before, the difficuly in judging Rand’s literary comes from the fact that she is working within strange hybrid genre of her own invention. If she is judged according the standard of the Russian-Golden Age Hollywood-Monumental Philosophical Novel, it is possible to see the immensity of her achievement.
Will, right on. Agree 100 pct with your analysis. My main debt to the lady is that she flagged up vital issues for the defence of liberty and put philosophy up front. We could pick holes in her metaphysics but in fairness I think her views hold up remarkably well.
I have problems with her writing style – she had a tin ear for dialogue – but she was a page-turner. I mean, I read Atlas Shrugged at the age of about 27 and was hooked for a week. My way of looking at the world has never been the same since and she played quite a part in getting me into the libertarian scene in Britain. Thanks Ayn.
She reminds me most of the philosophical novels of the high enlightenment, which no one really reads anymore–except for Candide. But once there was an entire genre like this, from Rousseau’s Emile, to Mercier’s The Year 2440, to Diderot’s La Religieuse. More even than the 19th-century novelists, Rand’s novelistic style comes from the 18th, as it virtually had to do: No other style would have allowed her to make complex, conceptual arguments in philosophy–as opposed to vague allegories.
Ayn Rand may well have been one of the factors that got me interested in philosophy, though I think I had some of that interest already (and it was really philosophy of science with Peter Godfrey-Smith that actually hooked me). There’s definitely a lot to appreciate in her ideas, but the over-simplicity of a lot of it seems to be what leads to Randroidism. I’m glad that after reading all her novels and a couple essays I started reading the Romantic Manifesto – and then realized that her aesthetic philosophy really made little to no sense, so I started questioning the rest of her program.
Excellent post! My thoughts exactly! It seems that people who are not at home with the “practices” of ARI come up with their own equilibrium with Ayn Rand’s powerful impact, and that’s a good thing™
Libertarian blogs rule!
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It may be that Rand has all the virtues you list, but she is such an atrocious stylist that the need to actually read her writings is an almost impossible obstacle to surmount; leaden, didactic prose, straw-men and cardboard-cutout characterizations are not the stuff of which intellectually challenging fiction is made, in my opinion, and had Ayn Rand’s books been my first exposure to libertarianish thinking, it’s highly unlikely I’d be a follower of that political philosophy today.
I still think she is a great writer and stylist.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
In that phrase lies certain aesthetic claims with which I thoroughly disagree. Though I’d rather not expand on the issue at length at this time, let it suffice to say that we have plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that beauty is not in fact entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and there is a meaningful sense in which we can say that Hermann Melville and Tom Clancy are not literary equals, despite the far greater popularity of the latter. Subtlety of psychological characterization, sentential variety and prose flow are just a few aspects in which Rand falls woefully short of genuinely good writers – Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey are cartoon characters, not human beings, and the notion that the world will come to a stop because a few geniuses choose to withdraw from it is so silly that even pulp science-fiction writers would hesitate to resort to such a plot device.
I agree with Will: her writing and stylistic talents far outstripped her abilities as a philosopher.
Her short essays are much better than her fiction, and among the fiction the early stuff is best. I too think of Rand as a good writer and stylist, but for _The Virtue of Selfishness_ and _We the Living_, not for the famous twin doorstops.
Abiola,
I think the idea is that if *all* the geniuses went away, the country (or world) would be in trouble. That doesn’t sound far-fetched to me. I bet it would take awhile but very bad things would probably happen.
Thank God for the geniuses! And Happy 100th to Ayn!
I also agree that she was a great writer.
I think the issue is muddled because different people are using different criteria.
She wasn’t trying to write realistic stories with complex characterizations. She was trying to present important philosophical ideas; and the novels were a way to do that in a dramatic context.
I think she succeeded brilliantly.
As I’ve said before, the difficuly in judging Rand’s literary comes from the fact that she is working within strange hybrid genre of her own invention. If she is judged according the standard of the Russian-Golden Age Hollywood-Monumental Philosophical Novel, it is possible to see the immensity of her achievement.
Will, right on. Agree 100 pct with your analysis. My main debt to the lady is that she flagged up vital issues for the defence of liberty and put philosophy up front. We could pick holes in her metaphysics but in fairness I think her views hold up remarkably well.
I have problems with her writing style – she had a tin ear for dialogue – but she was a page-turner. I mean, I read Atlas Shrugged at the age of about 27 and was hooked for a week. My way of looking at the world has never been the same since and she played quite a part in getting me into the libertarian scene in Britain. Thanks Ayn.
She reminds me most of the philosophical novels of the high enlightenment, which no one really reads anymore–except for Candide. But once there was an entire genre like this, from Rousseau’s Emile, to Mercier’s The Year 2440, to Diderot’s La Religieuse. More even than the 19th-century novelists, Rand’s novelistic style comes from the 18th, as it virtually had to do: No other style would have allowed her to make complex, conceptual arguments in philosophy–as opposed to vague allegories.
Ayn Rand may well have been one of the factors that got me interested in philosophy, though I think I had some of that interest already (and it was really philosophy of science with Peter Godfrey-Smith that actually hooked me). There’s definitely a lot to appreciate in her ideas, but the over-simplicity of a lot of it seems to be what leads to Randroidism. I’m glad that after reading all her novels and a couple essays I started reading the Romantic Manifesto – and then realized that her aesthetic philosophy really made little to no sense, so I started questioning the rest of her program.
Excellent post! My thoughts exactly! It seems that people who are not at home with the “practices” of ARI come up with their own equilibrium with Ayn Rand’s powerful impact, and that’s a good thing™
Libertarian blogs rule!
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