Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Part I

I've written so many pieces for the Ayn Rand Centenary, for so many publications, that I don't think I'll have much more to say, which might be considered"new" and"original." But, of course, not being one to keep my mouth shut, I'm sure I'll have more to say each day from now till Wednesday, February 2, 2005, when the one hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth will be celebrated in various forums from the East coast to the West coast.

Today, I came upon a piece in the New York Times Book Review section that just pissed me off. Written by Clay Risen, an assistant editor for The New Republic,"Rebuilding Ground Zero: The Struggle Between Architects and Developers at the World Trade Center" is a review of Philip Nobel's book, Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. I'm less concerned with the politicized process of rebuilding that is the subject of Nobel's book and more concerned with the opening paragraph of Risen's review:

AYN RAND may be long discredited as a philosopher, but her ideas about architecture are still very much alive. Howard Roark, the protagonist of her objectivist fantasia ''The Fountainhead,'' is the archetypal artist-hero, rendering society's soul in concrete and steel. Since the 1940's, his image has shaped our appreciation of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, defining even the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site: the struggle between Daniel Libeskind and Larry Silverstein was seen as a veritable ''Fountainhead Redux'' in which a valiant architect armed only with his dreams takes on a mega-developer.

Notice how Risen opens this article:"Ayn Rand may be long discredited as a philosopher..." stated as if it were an observation of fact.

But if Risen had been paying much attention to the academic tide, he'd discover that, after many years of being perceived as an outsider, Rand is finally being considered as a serious thinker worthy of our critical attention. This is not happening across the board and it is not happening in all academic circles but it is clearly a trend that cannot be ignored. As I have written in an article for Philosophical Books (a piece that has been revised for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology edited by Edward W. Younkins, entitled Philosophers of Capitalism):

Since the 1982 death of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, there has been ever-growing interest in her thought. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s edited collection, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and the first edition of Mimi Reisel Gladstein’s Ayn Rand Companion appeared. ... Together with ... heightened cultural awareness of Rand’s life and thought, academic work has proceeded apace with some fanfare. Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and [the now defunct] Lingua Franca featured major stories on new books and research projects involving philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and feminism, highlighting how Rand had “finally caught the attention of scholars.” ... These articles note the increase in scholarly sessions devoted to Rand’s work in such organizations as the Modern Language Association and the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, which includes an affiliated Ayn Rand Society.

My own Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, published in 1995, was central to the Chronicle and Lingua Franca studies—as was my 1999 anthology, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, co-edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein. The former book rooted Rand’s intellectual development in Silver Age Russian thought and reconstructed her Objectivist philosophy as a radical dialectical project. The latter book is part of the Penn State Press “Re-reading the Canon” series, edited by Nancy Tuana, in which nearly two dozen volumes center on questions of gender and sexuality in the works of thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Sartre, Levinas, and Foucault. The Rand anthology includes original and reprinted contributions from writers across the globe, including Susan Brownmiller, Camille Paglia, Karen Michalson, and Melissa Jane Hardie.

Another measure of Rand’s growing scholarly presence is the appearance of entries on her in textbooks—in philosophy, political science, and economics—and in reference works, such as Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Encyclopedia of Ethics, Scribner’s American Writers, Gale’s American Philosophers, 1950–2000 (a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography), and Lexington’s History of American Thought. A Rand primer, by philosopher Allan Gotthelf, in the Wadsworth Philosophy Series, a volume by philosopher Douglas J. Den Uyl on The Fountainhead, and another by Mimi Reisel Gladstein on Atlas Shrugged, in Twayne’s Masterwork Series, and CliffsNotes monographs on Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, by philosopher Andrew Bernstein, are further evidence of increased attention to Rand by professional scholars. (It should be noted too that one can find an increasing number of master’s and doctoral dissertations devoted to Rand’s thought.) [In addition, a recently published scholarly collection on We the Living will be complemented by forthcoming collections on Anthem and Atlas Shrugged,] as well as an anthology on The Literary Art of Ayn Rand (edited by William Thomas and David Kelley), a Thomas-Kelley authored study, The Logical Structure of Objectivism, and a book on induction and integration, written by Leonard Peikoff, entitled The One in the Many: How to Create It and Why. [And let's not forget monographs by some of our esteemed L&P colleagues, such as Roderick Long, who has published on Rand and Aristotle.]

One final measure of expanding scholarship on Rand is the commencement, in the Fall of 1999, of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, co-founded by R. W. Bradford, literature professor Stephen Cox, and me. The journal is a nonpartisan semi-annual interdisciplinary double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly periodical dedicated to an examination of Rand’s work and legacy. In its contents, one will find essays by Objectivist philosophers and those sympathetic to Rand, as well as critics of Objectivism ...

Clearly, the ever-expanding scope of Rand studies suggests that philosophers of various stripes have begun a long overdue reassessment of her thought.

Say what you will about Ayn Rand but it is simply not the case that she has been"discredited as a philosopher." It seems to me that the scholarly community is finally taking notice.

I'll have more to say about this and other related topics in the coming days.

Update: Ironically, I just discovered that, today, Carlin Romano, literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer published a piece"Assessing Rand at Centenary." Romano mentions my work and the work of others in the piece, stating:"Even studies in academe—the sector of America most [resistant] to Rand in her lifetime—are increasing."