You got me curious. I don't have the fortitude to read through all of that but I dipped in here and there. What leapt out at me is how utterly Russian it is. The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)
Rand's desire to take her idea as far as it can possibly go, in classic can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs style, is as Russian as vodka. Think Bazarov the nihilist in "Fathers and Sons". Or better, Chernyshevsky's "What is to be Done?" which is famous for two things: having inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries and being a bit of a literary embarrassment.
Here's an example. This is interesting and at least plausible:
No other language or nation had ever used these words ["to make
money"] before; men had always thought of wealth as a static
quantity [...] Americans were the first to understand that wealth
has to be created.
But she follows it with a non sequitur so stupid that one wonders whether it is parody:
The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.
This kind of totalism isn't particularly American; there are no checks and balances for miles. Rather, it's a foreign species that has flourished in certain American soils. It's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd would go in for someone who writes things like "Money is the product of virtue". Much more interesting is the question of its popular appeal. There I think you have to look at what Steinbeck famously pointed out, that America doesn't have poor, it has temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
There's an awesome novel to be written by someone with the ability to grasp all this at its root. Rand didn't write such a novel but she would make a great character in it.
> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)
Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifestohttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)
Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radicalhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)
That's emotionally unsurprising but ideologically weird, since for Dostoevsky money is anything but "the product of virtue" and wealth creation is the last thing his characters are interested in. They kill for money, gamble for it, burn it, tear it up and throw it away, but the one thing they never do is rationally invest it.
Dostoevsky lived on the edge financially until late in life and thought that a society based on "wealth creation" was vulgar and spiritually dead. He critiqued it hilariously in The Gambler.
a perspective that sounds similar to yours
Yes, what I'm saying is that Ayn Rand was probably a Russian radical who merely flipped the high-order ideological bit. In other words, she's closer to Stalin than to Adam Smith.
If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).
My point is that she had at least as much cause to reject Dostoevsky on "moral" grounds as Tolstoy. I'd bet a fiver that she has to twist herself into quite some contortion to justify that one.
Ayn Rand is interesting, in my opinion, as a pathological case. In that respect she's very interesting - like, super weird. As I said, she and the social ripples around her would make a brilliant subject for a great comic novelist, if there were one around with the depth to get it right psychologically. But I'm not going to work on anything like that, so I have little reason to read her. Sorry if I'm offending you by being so dismissive. I do appreciate your comments.
Thanks for the rather punchy, refreshing literary and ideological analysis of Rand in this thread. It's a pity you're not going to contribute more words to a critique of her ideas, but I can certainly understand why.
In one brief excursion you've managed to survey the land of Rand and come away with the essence of what I found so absurd about Atlas Shrugged, the only book of hers I've read.
As a young pup I found it enjoyable, and her relentless romanticism did manage to cultivate within me an appreciation of capitalism, industry, and money at some emotional level (that was not unlike jaysonelliot's experience with more traditional financial self-help books).
However I left the novel amused by its absurdity and extremism and promptly discovered the world of Objectivists and the cult of Rand. At that point amusement turned to bemusement at the ideological adoration heaped on her by what seemed to be a whole intellectual movement. Eek.
As you mention, it's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd go in for Rand - she provides a satisfactorily-sized ideological fig-leaf for naked greed.
In that case I've done some good! If you want his critique of capitalism, The Gambler is pretty good. But if you want sheer entertainment, I think The Double is one of the best things Dostoevsky ever wrote. It was only his second novel, and before he was sent to Siberia. His first novel Poor Folk had made him a huge star (even though it's no longer thought to be very good). So he thought he'd top that and came out with The Double which was so weird and out-there that everybody immediately pronounced him a has-been. It's complete genius, though, and very funny.
Edit: if on the other hand you want the classics then Crime and Punishment is likely your best bet. It's all about what happens when someone takes an idea to its extreme conclusion and acts on it. And it's his easiest big novel from a story point of view.
Rand's desire to take her idea as far as it can possibly go, in classic can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs style, is as Russian as vodka. Think Bazarov the nihilist in "Fathers and Sons". Or better, Chernyshevsky's "What is to be Done?" which is famous for two things: having inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries and being a bit of a literary embarrassment.
Here's an example. This is interesting and at least plausible:
But she follows it with a non sequitur so stupid that one wonders whether it is parody: This kind of totalism isn't particularly American; there are no checks and balances for miles. Rather, it's a foreign species that has flourished in certain American soils. It's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd would go in for someone who writes things like "Money is the product of virtue". Much more interesting is the question of its popular appeal. There I think you have to look at what Steinbeck famously pointed out, that America doesn't have poor, it has temporarily embarrassed millionaires.There's an awesome novel to be written by someone with the ability to grasp all this at its root. Rand didn't write such a novel but she would make a great character in it.