The New Criterion

I am not a particular fan of Ayn Rand’s work, though I hasten to add that I have read very little of it. I have always felt about it the way Cary Grant, in The Philadelphia Story, felt about George Kittridge (or "George Kittridge, Man of the People," to give him his full epithet): that "to hardly know him was to know him well."

Yet I have a few friends who are avid fans of Ayn Rand’s work, and one in particular who has taken it upon himself to educate me about her thought. I am, I have to say, a recalcitrant chap, unlikely to be converted at this late date to Rand’s species of atheistic individualism. But it is clear that she exercises a powerful appeal on some powerful minds, and it is useful to ask why. One reason is that she was right about the evil of collectivism (a.k.a. Socialism or, in watered-down form, the welfare state). She was also right (or, I would say, partly right) about some other important things. And she had the gift of dramatising her ideas very effectively in her novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The philosopher Elaine Sternberg explains:

Ayn Rand deserves to be taken seriously, because she was right about three things of immense importance: metaphysics, morals and individual liberty. Although many of her characteristic arguments were anticipated by Aristotle, Rand highlighted their relevance to modern life, and made them accessible. And by illustrating key philosophical concepts in superbly titled novels, she has provided millions of readers with arguments, and a vocabulary, that can be used to challenge the errors of conventional morality and collectivist government.