Why Ayn Rand?

Rand was a unique public figure because she presented as a fiction writer, but served as a philosopher. She was and is wildly popular and harshly critiqued. When I was in an academic department about ten years ago we were offered funding to "place" a Rand scholar on our faculty. My mentor at the time was adamant that this kind of special treatment was not a benefit to our department. The offer was not accepted.

Below is from the AAUP website about Rand "gifts":

"At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, three years passed before faculty members learned that a million-dollar gift agreement establishing a new course contained language requiring both that Rand’s lengthy paean to laissez-faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, be assigned reading and that professors who teach that course “have a positive interest in and be well versed in Objectivism.””

https://www.aaup.org/article/universities-major-battleground-fight-reason-and-capitalism#.ZDVDS3bMKUk

The above article is a support for what my mentor had been warning - that academia cannot be influeced from the outside for ideological gain.

So, how do we unravel this? The first step is to make clear what Ayn Rand was doing. Much of her philosophy (in any depth) was chided and dismissed by a certain type of acdemic. But the blame for her popularity was placed on her fiction. Fiction if it is to be literary contains very specific elements that can be learned and that create what can be called "art." None of Rand's books do this. They lack character depth, surprise, truth within the story (not related to her philosophy truth), ie: believability, resonance, historicity, etc. Her philosophy was put out there through the mouthpiece characters in the books and through essays and newsletters written by Rand and her associates.

If the books were poorly written then why the popularity? Though people didn't want to admit it in many cases, they were interested in her modern adaptation of naturalism, Nietzsche-ism, pure capitalism, and more. In most cases, however, she was not granted the title of philosopher. A student will not find her in a text book and her novels or essays will be unlikely to show up on syllabi. After all, Nietzsche's revelation about lop-sided moral history (religion and sacrifice), his all-out emphasis on individual power and autonomy, his desire for absolute truth though it can be seen as sociopathy (he is sometimes and disturbingly catagorized as a perspectivalist) all made a prominent philosopher. His emphasis on absolute individual truth and power inspired Rand to eventually despise his writing and refer to him as a "brute."

So, if a group of academics or writers pushed for Aristotle or Nietzsche to be in classrooms, it would appear as legitimate. But not Rand. I'm not saying she was as thorough or concise as Nietzsche, but in terms of conflict and reputation, no writer has gotten in more trouble than Nietzsche. If her ideas were at all "philosophical," it makes sense to imagine that, though she created conflict, her best works could be discussed academically. But they are not.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Nietzsche's opposition to the cultural/moral premise of sacrifice and faith is older and contextually different. We have forgotten it as a real edifice to rational self-interest and, in his time, the critiques would not have sounded the same. As capitalism itself and most first-world entities eroded from self-interested capitalism to ethical/altruism we then see the clash with Rand's ideas as more present and more modern. There is no room today for Rand's clash with the cultural/moral language game. It simply won't work. Even though Nietzsche was blamed tangetially for starting WWII, Rand's ethical egoism today seems incoherent. It is this cultural/moral order that condems Rand to the status of "vulgar" and superficial and "evil." Her best concepts might, to Nietzsche, seem more like the Greek "good," but her modernity puts her too far apart from our world. For this reason, she cannot be seen as acadmically sound and her intrusion into academia can only be solicitation and dogmatism and ideological.