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  • Ayn Rand:A Romantic, Secular Libertarian
  • Ruth Rosen (bio)
Jennifer Burns . Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford, 2009. viii + 384 pp. Illustrations, essay on sources, bibliography, and index. $27.95.

Approximately forty years ago, some American historians realized that their discipline had excluded most women—or half the population—from their historical research. At first, these (mostly) young historians focused on famous women, but Ayn Rand was not among them. Social historians began to explore women's roles in creating reform movements that had profoundly altered our political culture, or they investigated women's long campaigns to vote and achieve equal rights under the law. Ayn Rand was not among them. Intellectual historians, for their part, focused on such notable women as Margaret Fuller and the extraordinary Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but not Ayn Rand. Although other writers had written about her work and ideas, Rand was missing from the new scholarship about women.

The reason for her invisibility is not hard to fathom. The generation that created the field of women's history wanted to study progressive women who had tried to address social injustice and inequality, or they wanted to learn about the lives and labor of ordinary women in our past. With some notable and significant exceptions, studies of right-wing women appeared infrequently.

Jennifer Burns has now provided us with a much-needed and thoroughly engaging biography of Ayn Rand, arguably one of the most significant individuals to influence American political culture in the twentieth century. Her legacy is strong; one of her novels, Atlas Shrugged, as Burns notes, "is still devoured by eager young conservatives, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons" (p. 4).

The real goal of Burns' biography is to understand the origins, appeal, and influence of Ayn Rand's political philosophy. Through meticulous and exhaustive research, she weaves a seamless, enthralling, and wonderfully readable narrative that analyzes the evolution of the ideas in Rand's novels and nonfiction writings, exposes Rand's controversial and destructive personal life, evokes her charismatic personality, and describes her cult of Objectivists. [End Page 190]

Many refugees from the Soviet Union have appreciated the new freedoms they enjoyed in the United States. Some have written novels and poetry about the brutality and humiliation they suffered, but few have created an entire political philosophy that resulted from the seizure of their privileged and cultured homes. For Ayn Rand, however, the revolution in the Soviet Union permanently affected her philosophical views. For the rest of her life, "Talk about helping others seemed only a thin cover for force and power" (p. 9).

When she arrived in the U.S. without her family in 1926, she changed her Jewish name, Alisa Rosenbaum, to Ayn Rand and began a lifelong demonization of the welfare state, regulated markets, the "collective," or the idea of the public good. At the same time, she began to idealize the individual and to promote free markets, capitalism, and a limited government. In most of her work, the state appeared as the villain and only the most virtuous and brave individuals battled the oppression of society or the government.

To support herself, Rand began writing screenplays in Hollywood, where she made important contacts and, perhaps more importantly, learned the necessary skills to plot romantic stories and create engaging characters. For the rest of her life, she would shuttle between New York, her political base, and southern California.

Burns is excellent at exploring the appeal of Rand's work, especially her novels. Her ideas resonated with American traditions of individual self-reliance and the national suspicion of centralized authority. Rand, however, recast these traditions as a Manichaen struggle between strong individuals and an evil welfare state and the weaklings it assisted. The McCarthyist hunts for traitors also gave her work a certain credibility among those who feared that communists might transform the New Deal into state socialism.

Rand's brand of secular capitalism also appealed to the young who could identify with the Ubermenschen she idealized in her novels. Seeking to break with their families and tradition, young people of the Fifties and Sixties sought heroes among her pantheon of...

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