In “Finding Atlas,” Stephen Cox says this really shocking thing: “The Economist recently reported that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, is back on the bestseller lists. A week before the president’s inauguration, more people were buying it than Obama’s Audacity of Hope.”
Here is a nice Coxian summary of Rand’s book: “Atlas explores a future world in which the nation’s economy is collapsing because of government interference.” But it’s also about dating and isolating your soul mate. At least that’s what I got out of it. (A very important N.B.: Ayn Rand will seriously fuck you up dating-wise.)
I had no idea a female intellectual über-capitalist anarchist genius writer preceded Ayn Rand. Most people do not know this. “For all the fervor that Rand inspires, little notice is paid to the woman who most inspired her”: Isabel Paterson, novelist and literary critic who believed in the old Republic. Cox provides a curious picture of Rand, who “sat at Paterson’s feet, learning about economics, politics, and American history.”
Critics dismiss Rand as a bad writer. This just isn’t true. Her sex scenes are incredible. Cox somewhat agrees: “It is a compelling picture of the world—one that demonstrates the importance of the literary imagination as a generator of intellectual energy. Indeed, if modern conservative and libertarian ideas had been forced to wait until professional economists and politicians conveyed them to the public, they would never have been conveyed. The task required people of imagination who were willing to offer America an alternative vision of itself. To put it bluntly, the task required people who could really write.”
It all comes down to this. Like Rand in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, “the fundamental problem, Paterson proposed, is confusion of the economy with politics.” Perhaps. But what’s her take on love?
***
Related material: “True Believers: Ayn Crowd,” by Lizzie Widdicombe in the New Yorker.
