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130 of 153 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sets a New Standard for Books on Rand, October 15, 2009
For the first time, a book on Ayn Rand has been published which does not come from the Objectivist inner circle; which is of general interest; and which is written by an impartial scholar.
The book marshalls a remarkable amount of information: Professor Burns has consulted 18 collections at 10 archives - and was given access to the Ayn Rand Archives themselves. She has read, audited, or conducted 89 interviews. She also cites more than 200 books in her bibliography, and there are 48 pages of footnotes for those who want to know the exact sources for her information. The book examines Ayn Rand's work and ideas closely; but it also traces its many connections with and influences upon America's political and cultural right wing. If scholars who come after her wish to be taken seriously, they will really have to do their homework - as she has.
Burns is a historian, not a philosopher - and she approaches Rand from a historian's viewpoint. As a historian, she shows the influence that Rand's ideas have had on the right wing of American politics; but - also as a historian - she shows how Rand's personality and character affected the way that message was received. If you disregard either the person or the ideas, you're not writing good history. Burns gives full attention to both aspects of her subject in this book.
Still more importantly, what this book gives back to Ayn Rand is context. Many Objectivists have withdrawn into a self-referential, self-ghettoizing circle where every word of Ayn Rand is viewed as inerrant and one takes note of cultural or intellectual trends in the wider world only in order to express one's contempt for it all. Many people attribute the same sort of intellectual solipsism to Rand - and during the last ten years of her life, this may not have that far from the truth. But in the period up to 1970, Burns does an excellent job of documenting Rand's connections with many, many people on America's intellectual and political right wing. The connections weren't always friendly; but they were there. At the end of this book, a reader will understand how Ayn Rand fits into the story of America's culture and politics between 1930 and the present - and will understand this far better than he or she did at the book's beginning. It's an impressive achievement.
No review of this book, however, would be complete without commenting on Burns's "Note on Sources". This is the part of any book that many readers don't bother with. That would be a real mistake this time. For Burns makes it clear in her Note that the majority of the books published posthumously under Ayn Rand's name have been edited - changed, smoothed over and sanitized - without any indication within the texts themselves that such changes have happened.
The "Journals of Ayn Rand" comes in for especially heavy criticism. Chris Sciabarra raised concerns ten years ago about possible tampering with the texts of Ayn Rand's journals. He has been proven right, and with a vengeance. Burns reports that "On nearly every page of the published journals, an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand's original writing." She notes that in many cases, the editing "serves to signficantly alter Rand's meaning." She observes: "Even more alarming are the sentences and proper names present in Rand's originals that have vanished entirely without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change."
Professor Burns concludes: "The 'Journals of Ayn Rand' are thus best understood as an interpretation of Rand rather than her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution. They serve as a useful introduction to Rand's development and a guide to the available archival material, but they should not be accepted at face value." She adds that "Similar problems plague 'Ayn Rand Answers' (2005), 'The Art of Fiction' (2000), 'The Art of Non-Fiction' (2001), and 'Objectively Speaking' (2009). These books are derived from archival materials but have been significantly rewritten." Coming from a scholar, a more damning indictment could hardly be imagined.
It may well be that those who issued these books convinced themselves that they were acting in the best interests of Rand and her intellectual legacy: after all, English was not Rand's first language and Burns notes that there are awkward phrasings throughout the unedited journals. But as Rand herself never tired of pointing out, faking reality is in no one's best interest. What we have here is a major failure of stewardship on the part of those entrusted with Ayn Rand's literary estate.
So far, at many of the most militant Objectivist websites, there has been virtually no response to any of this. The silence is deafening. That's pretty depressing. Make no mistake about it: an editor who handled Thoreau's journals or Melville's journals the way Rand's journals have been handled would be committing professional suicide. At many universities or research institutions, he or she would risk dismissal. This is a Very Big Deal.
One of the more encouraging things reported by Burns is the professionalism and dedication to truth of those now working at the Ayn Rand Archives. That is an encouraging sign. It may mean that at some point in future we will have a complete, uncensored, scholarly edition of Ayn Rand's journals. But for now, those who edited five or more of Rand's posthumously published works will have to face the fact that the credibility of these books has been fatally compromised.
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very good overview, November 3, 2009
I picked up "Goddess of the Market" primarily because "The Fountainhead" is one of my favorite books. I have to say that I found Burns' work to be more interesting than any biography has a right to be.
Having read the 1-3 star reviews here, I'm left wondering if a reader's more extensive knowledge of Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, becomes a disservice in trying to read what one of these reviewers correctly labels a Reader's Digest version of Rand.
These reviewers are also correct that the work is not so much analysis and interpretation as a regurgitation of facts around Rand's life, relationships, and belief system. For the uninitiated such as myself, the regurgitation will naturally not come across as a repetition of well-known events. I can see that if the author is claiming "never before seen sources" as input to the work that there would be unmet expectations among the more knowledgeable, but for me the survey level was just fine. I take issue, though, with the complaints that the book (a) is laced with negative renderings of Rand and Objectivism, and (b) characterizes Objectivism as indistinguishable from "the right" or "the GOP". In this, perhaps because I'm less sensitive to it through distance from the philosophy, I thought Burns was extremely fair.
Were there negative statements about Rand and/or her behavior and/or her philosophy? Certainly, but there were also some very strongly worded positive statements. Did Burns imply/state that Objectivism influenced the development of "the Right"? Yes, but as a reader Burns also left me with the impression that Rand did not align her philosophy with others - she came across personally as extraordinarily consistent in her beliefs and behaviors through most of her actively influential years and, for example, refused to yield to the William F Buckleys of the new conservative right where she saw them going astray.
That said, the book did produce some lingering negatives for me. While Objectivism as a philosophy (based on my very limited understanding) advocates admirable overarching values, Rand and her tangible execution of Objectivism are portrayed as excessively pedantic, dogmatic and rigid. One reviewer doesn't argue with this portrayal; rather, says this is because she (and her inner circle) didn't truly live the principles of Objectivism. Here I believe we're splitting hairs - when any philosophy is used not as a set of guidelines; rather, as a user's manual for your life as Rand is portrayed as wanting her philosophy to be applied, it becomes difficult - perhaps unfairly - to separate the human error from the philosophical error. This is not unique to Objectivism. The difference from other philosophies, I suppose, is that Rand is shown to have been quick and merciless in culling the herd for these transgressions, allowing little dissent and tolerating no missteps. This doesn't appear to live up to the ideals of individualism to me; this seems like Orwell's 1984.
I leave "Goddess of the Market" impressed with Ayn Rand for her stalwart adherence to her personal convictions, and her energy and ambition in articulating her philosophy and extending its reach and influence through dogged determination. I also leave with the belief that Objectivism (or its tangible execution) sets the idealism bar too high for mere mortals to live their lives by in any meaningfully adherent way.
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Fountainhead Of The Modern Libertarian Movement, November 14, 2009
There are few figures in the American libertarian movement that gave rise to as much controversy or passion as Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, it's hard to find a libertarian who doesn't have an opinion about the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. For many of us, she was the one who lit the spark that sent us down the road toward becoming a libertarian. Even after her death, some still consider themselves hard-core Objectivists in the model of those who gravitated around the Nathanial Branden Institute in the 1960s. For most libertarians, though, while Rand is arguably the most influential moral philosopher, she is also someone who's flaws, both personal and philosophical have been acknowledged, debated, and argued about for decades.
There's always been a missing piece of the puzzle, though, and that was that nobody had really undertaken a full-scale intellectual biography of someone who, even today, can sell 200,000 copies a year of her 1,000+ page magnum opus. There were personal biographies by Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, but those both seemed to concentrate on the more lurid details of Rand's personal life and the circumstances behind the 1968 Objectivist Purge. The heirs of Rand's estate, meanwhile, have guarded her papers closely in an obvious effort to protect her legacy and reputation. Someone wanting to learn more about Rand's life, the development of her ideas, and her impact on American politics, had almost nowhere to go that wasn't totally biased in one direction or the other.
That's why Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right is so welcome.
Instead of dwelling on the lurid aspects of Rand's affair with Nathaniel Branden, and without taking sides regarding the many controversies that followed Rand in years after Atlas Shrugged was published, Burns provides a thorough, well-written and well-researched survey of how Ayn Rand went from Alisa Rosenbaum of St. Petersburg, Russia, born just as Czarist Russia was beginning it's decent into chaos, to Ayn Rand, the woman about whom more than one person has said "she changed my life."
For people versed in the history of libertarian ideas, the most interest parts of the book will probably be Burns's documentation of Rand's interaction with the heavyweights of both the Pre World War II Right and the conservative/libertarian movement that began to take shape after the war ended. She corresponded with Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken and, most interestingly, developed a very close personal and intellectual relationship with Isabel Patterson, best known as the author of The God of the Machine. For years, especially during the time that Rand was writing The Fountainhead, Rand and Paterson exchanged ideas and debated philosophy, and it's clear that they both contributed to the others ideas.
The Rand-Paterson relationship, though, also foreshadowed something that would happen all too frequently later in Rand's career, the purge. Paterson was among the first libertarian-oriented writers to experience Rand's wrath for the perception that she was not sufficiently orthodox. Over time, that would continue to the point where, at it's height, Objectivism displayed a level of orthodoxy and denunciation of perceived heresy that rivaled the religions that it rejected. It was, in the end, the reason why the movement's downfalls was largely inevitable.
Burns also goes into great detail discussing the process and the ordeal that Rand went through while writing both of her great novels. After reading that part, one marvels at the fact that she even survived.
In the final chapter, Burns shows that, even though Rand herself had flaws that led to the demise of Objectivism as a formal movement, her ideas have a staying power that has permeated throughout the conservative and libertarian movements in the United States. There is hardly a libertarian in the United States who has not read at least one of Rand's books and, it's clear that her ideas have taken hold in a way that she probably never expected and definitely would not have approved of. That, however, is the power of ideas, the creator can't control what people do with them once they're out there.
Burns does a wonderful job of filling in the missing pieces about Rand's life and her place in the wider context of the political and social history of Post World War II America. Whether you love or hate Ayn Rand - and I don't think you can have no opinion about her once exposed to her idea - this is a truly fascinating book.
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