The extent of her influence was demonstrated this week when Paul Ryan joined the Mitt Romney ticket, although he has now distanced himself from her work. In , Ryan told the Atlas Society how Rand "taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are". But earlier this year, he told the National Review that as a Catholic he rejected her atheism. Beyond politics, the novel also had an impact in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs identified with its emphasis on heroic individuals and their work ethic.
Some have named their companies or their newborn children after the author or her characters. It's less about the economy or your relationship with government, so there is very little in Ayn Rand that they could identify with. Paul Ryan genuinely fell out of love with Randian ideas, says Stanley, and that comes with age. She massages the egos of juveniles. The emergence of the Tea Party - a wing of the Republican Party which favours a shrinking of the state - appears to be driving her recent resurgence.
John Galt is often referred to on placards and T-shirts. In Rand's later life, her followers turned away from her - some were appalled to learn she had been conducting a year affair with her associate Nathaniel Branden, apparently with the consent of her own husband and Branden's wife, Rand's close friend Barbara.
Others were put off for other reasons. One former acolyte, Jerome Tuccille, recalls supporters being "robotic" in their admiration and after two or three years, he turned his attention to less "flawed" libertarian causes. She wasn't open to debate but trounced them as irrational, altruistic and hopeless. Duggan opens Mean Girl by introducing readers to the slew of contemporary fans of Rand — including President Donald Trump as well as technology venture capitalists like Uber co-founder, Travis Kalanik , associated with a company that stands accused of exploitation.
The Objectivist Collective asserted the need to be selfish, promoted individualism and argued that the ideal political-economic system for a successful world was laissez-faire capitalism At its peak, Objectivism had a 3, strong following across the United States in 67 , yet many contemporary cultural commentators acknowledged the almost cult-like behaviour of its followers. Yet, interestingly enough, Duggan also highlights how her work has been co-opted by some leftist groups. As a researcher interested in queer studies and queer theory of which Duggan can be considered a giant , for me one of the most striking revelations provided in Mean Girl is the coveting of Rand by queer groups offering queer readings of her work.
While Rand is widely known as being homophobic ii , there has been significant investment in her political and philosophical writings by queer readers of her fiction, who are often interested in the homoeroticism and polyamorous portrayals within her work first and foremost. Mean Girl is also an essential text for anyone interested in the insidious shift towards neoliberalism, and how the spectre of Rand has shaped the political landscape, inhabited morality and made ethical egoism and rampant individualism a new cultural creed.
This book is incredibly prescient at a time when we are on the verge of environmental collapse, when we are bearing witness to a new rise of right-wing populism and when solidarity has become a word without any weight.
For Duggan, this is not just a book about Rand. It is a call for revolution against the grain of the cis-heteropatriarchal, white supremacist societies we live in. As Duggan writes, we must reject Ayn Rand and all her acolytes — because, after all, they reject us. Her research interests are predominantly in the area of gender studies, sexuality studies, social movements and queer perspectives on popular culture.
By the way, this book you are reviewing is nothing but a hit piece. Atlas shrugged is perhaps the most influential book I have ever read. But it feels like an addendum, however skillfully told, to a reasonably lucid and well-researched book about an influential but not very good 19th-century Russian novelist.
In connecting Rand — and contemporary American libertarianism — to an extremist strain of pre-revolutionary Russian thought, Weiner does help clarify this bizarre lineage, its combination of heartland America Firstism with something clearly alien to our Constitution and its mostly British political origins.
The book Weiner seemed to be delivering — offering the intellectual history of either kook libertarianism, or the crash, or both — still needs to be written. The third was neither but thought she was both.
It feels somehow inevitable that the recent libertarian, anti-government, pro-business strain on the American right would lead us to a man who seems right out of her pages: the defiant, comically masculine real estate developer Donald Trump. Banner image by Erik Fitzpatrick. By Chelsea Gibson. By Peter Trachtenberg. The Time of Finance. By Martijn Konings. The Intellectual Roots of the Radical Right.
By Anita Felicelli. By Jonathan Kirshner. Back to the Next Great Recession. White Feminism by Design. By Marcie Bianco. Speaking of Palestine. By Tom Sperlinger. By Jeanne Dreskin.
0コメント