the mass appeal of Ayn Rand

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 20 11:10:19 PDT 2002



>At 10:26 PM 04/18/2002 -0400, Carl wrote:
>>The mass appeal of Ayn Rand and her "philosophy" is one of the great
>>mysteries of history -- though admittedly I speak of the history of, as
>>you
>>mention, Homo sapiens, whose claim to the qualifier "sapiens" seems ever
>>more doubtful.
>
Joanna B:


>As a young woman I was definitely seduced by Rand: so I can offer a few
>ideas. I succumbed due to "The Fountainhead."
>So basically, unless you outgrow your adolescence, you'll worship Rand all
>your live long days.
>

My friend Chris Sciabarra is a Rand scholar, has published several books on her, as a well as fine little book on Hayek and Marx. Chris is a student of Bertell Ollman's, and a self-described dialectical libertarian. His politics are almsot as strange on the right as mine are on the left. (I'm the Hayekian Socialist). I have bugged him about what he sees in Rand, and have never gotten a satisfactory answer. Joanna is almost certainly right about the mass appeal of Rand--I liked her at 13 too, but by the time I was 15 or so thought her ridiculous. I got in trouble in my AP English class making vicious fun of Atlas Shrugged in a book report; my AP English teach, Mrs. Shahanan, detected my incipienmt radical politics before I did, and disapproved. What makes somelike like Chris like Rand is something I don't understand. jks

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