The year of Ayn Rand? — VOICES for REASON

Amid the economic collapse and backlash against the growth of government, interest in Ayn Rand exploded in 2009. Within six months of 2009, bookstore sales of Atlas Shrugged had doubled the record of 200,000 set in 2008, and they are expected to exceed 400,000. Discussion of Rand and her views was a regular occurrence in the media, with some even dubbing 2009 “the year of Ayn Rand.”

Undoubtedly Ayn Rand’s popularity 27 years after her death was remarkable, and I view it as a positive sign that so many Americans saw on some level the connection between Atlas Shrugged and current events. I’d like to think, however, that the year of Ayn Rand would not be characterized by billion dollar government bailouts, the inauguration of a statist president elected on a platform as vacuous as “hope and change,” and government takeovers of automakers, financial institutions and the health care system.

On the contrary, a truly “Ayn Rand year” would witness the casting off of these and all other government chains. But this would require a much deeper process of intellectual and cultural change than we have yet seen. In a 1971 essay for her periodical The Objectivist, Ayn Rand concisely explains what that change would entail and why focusing on political issues alone is insufficient:

Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics- on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as ‘conservatism.’ Objectivists are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish. . . .

In summing up this publication’s record, I shall say that I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. . . . Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics. The hierarchical structure cannot be reversed, nor can any of its levels hold without the fundamental one—as those who have tried are beginning to discover.

2009 was quite a year in terms of cultural interest in Ayn Rand, but I’m not sure I’d call it the year of Ayn Rand. Hopefully it may someday be seen as a turning point, a moment when Americans’ outrage about the unchecked expansion of government led them to seek a deeper understanding of the philosophic causes of political events, and to seriously examine Ayn Rand’s answers to the question of why we’re heading down the path to statism.

[For more on what needs to happen for cultural change to occur today, see the lecture "Cultural Movements: Creating Change" by Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate on the homepage of ARI's main website. If you’d like a wrap-up of what the Ayn Rand Institute accomplished in this very busy 2009, you can find a summary in the year-end edition of our monthly newsletter.]