Is Ayn Rand important?
By Tyler Cowen on History
No, I don't mean historically, but rather as a thinker to read today. Bryan Caplan tells me this is the one hundredth anniversary of her birthday, so here are my bottom lines:
1. Her greatest strength: Her analysis of the mentality of resentment. She is, oddly, best as a sociologist, albeit in fictional settings. Wesley Mouch is a brilliant character in his loathesomeness. Her treatment of cocktail party conversations, while unintentional ridiculous parodies, also point to sad truths.
2. Her worst intellectual tendencies: The competition here is strong. One could list sheer dogmatism, a necessity to make everything black or white, or an unwillingness to read others carefully or charitably. More specifically, I will cite her tendency to redefine any favorable aspect of altruism as something other than altruism.
3. What do you really learn from her? Most of her formal philosophy is wrong or at the very least underargued. The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism -- the greatest force for human good ever achieved -- rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. I don't know of any better celebration of that combination of forces.
4. Her quirkiest yet correct view: That landing on the moon was an intrinsically wonderful thing to do, and libertarian objections be damned.
5. Her quirkiest yet incorrect view: That Mickey Spillane was a titan of American literature.
The Fountainhead
By Alex Tabarrok on Books
Here, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, are some thoughts on Ayn Rand.
It used to be commonly said that “Until Robinson Crusoe is joined by Friday there is no need for ethics on a desert island.” Rand replied that it was on a desert island that ethics was most needed because on a desert island you cannot free ride on the virtues of others; if you are to survive you must yourself exercise the virtues of rationality, independence, and productiveness. As her reply indicates, Rand was an exponent of virtue ethics, the Greek/Aristotelian idea that ethics is about how one should live. Indeed, although she does not get much credit, Rand is the most prominent and lucid, contemporary exponent of virtue ethics.
plato.stanford.edu
I think Rand’s version of virtue ethics is compelling because it is explicitly modern – where the recent literature still sometimes seems to focus on the virtues required of a Greek olive grower, Rand’s virtue ethics is post industrial-revolution, a virtue ethics for the capitalist world. |
