Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. As I reported last week, there are two new books about Ayn Rand's life and work that are currently out in the bookstores and being reviewed in the media, both online and off. These are Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, by University of Virginia history professor Jennifer Burns, and Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by journalist and editor Anne C. Heller. Of the two, I'd say Anne Heller's is the better one, despite the fact that Heller was denied an opportunity to conduct research in the Ayn Rand Institute archives and to examine Ayn Rand's personal papers.

0:55It seems she wasn't deferential enough when applying to Leonard Peikoff. She seems to have given the impression that there was at least some chance that she might actually say something critical of Rand in her book. And Peikoff and Company obviously couldn't run the risk of letting that happen, and then having it get out that they had let her into the archives. Better to just keep her out in the first place. The fact is that Peikoff and company are far too paranoid to be able to recognize who their real friends are. Anne Heller is not an objectivist, true enough, but she has legitimate literary credentials. She's a former fiction editor of both Esquire and Red Book, magazines that published some of the finest short fiction of the 20th century.

1:45Anne Heller knows good fiction when she sees it, and she's willing to go to bat for Rand as a fiction writer. This is a rare and valuable thing. For as Jennifer Burns notes in the introduction to her book, Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, there is a nearly universal consensus among literary critics that Rand is a bad writer. But Heller rejects this consensus. She writes of Rand that her ability to spot and skewer cowardice, and Justice and Hypocrisy is at least as keen and passionate as that of her ideological opposite Charles Dickens. Heller writes of Rand that she had the remarkable ability to write more persuasively from a male point of view than any female writer since George Eliot.

2:37The fact is that Anne Heller is right. Ayn Rand was a much better writer than most literary people give her credit for. And at her best, in, for example, the satirical parts of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she was brilliant, one of the most powerful and accomplished writers to work in English during the 20th century. She was also, of course, a major figure in the recent history of the libertarian idea. The fact is that you can't hope to understand the contemporary libertarian movement, the that got underway in the 60s without understanding the importance of Ayn Rand in the development of that movement. Any serious student of libertarian intellectual history will want to own both of these volumes.

3:25And this brings me to exactly what Mars Jennifer Byrne's book, Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, exactly what makes it inferior, if only slightly, to Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made. In a word, the big problem with goddess of the market, Ayn Rand and the American right, is confusion. Specifically, the state of utter and abject confusion which Jennifer Burns seems to wander around in whenever she tries to focus her mind on terms like right, and left, and conservative. are the terms she needs to be most rigorously clear about if she proposes to conduct a discussion of the sort she does, in fact, propose to conduct.

4:14She gives her book the subtitle, Ayn Rand and the American Right. You'd think, then, that she'd make some effort to explain what exactly she means by terms like right, left and conservative, wouldn't you? Otherwise, how is she going to make sure that her meaning is clear, rather than muddled and vague? Now Rand herself was quite unequivocal and quite insistent that objectivists were not conservatives. This is how she responded to a question on that topic when it was posed in January 1964 by an interviewer for the Columbia University campus radio station, WKCR. Objectivism, most emphatically, is not a form of conservatism.

5:03I am not a conservative, neither is objectivism a conservative philosophy. To begin with the positive, I would say that I describe myself as a radical for capitalism. Objectivism. By radical I mean the respectable or original dictionary sense of the word radical means fundamental. Objectivism starts from basic fundamental premises in almost all cases diametrically opposed to the premises of today's so-called conservatives. So that to begin It's true that in this excerpt from her 1964 interview Rand does not deny that she's on the right.

5:56She only denies that she's a conservative. And that's not exactly the same thing, is it? Jennifer Burns thinks it's not. She told a live audience at the Cato Institute in late October that she has bent over backward to avoid using the word conservative to describe Ayn Rand. Throughout the book I juxtapose Rand to conservatives, but I don't call her a conservative and I don't identify her as a conservative because there are a multiplicity of reasons why she doesn't fit in that category. The most obvious one would be her atheism, but there's a whole host of other reasons which I'm sure you're all thinking of now which make her really incompatible with this and the synthetic modern American conservatism we know today.

6:43I'm not sure how successful Burns has been in her quest to avoid describing Rand as a conservative, however. Burns writes on page 209 of her new book, for example, that Rand was blazing a trail distinct from the broader conservative movement. Would this sentence make any sense at all if we didn't take it to mean that Rand was herself part of the broader conservative movement? It would be like writing, Elvis Presley was blazing a trail distinct from the majority of operatic tenors of his time. Burns writes on page 189 of her book that Rand's following among college students during During the 60s was a new generation of campus conservatives.

7:33On page 202, she describes the same group as a segment of the conservative youth population. On page 194, Burns explains the rapid growth in Rand's popularity during the 60s by noting that the more the guardians of respectability criticized Rand, the more irresistible she We became two conservatives who loved thumbing their noses at the ascendant liberal order. On page 204, Burns writes that, like most conservatives, Rand was energized and excited by Barry Goldwater's battle for the 1964 Republican nomination. If this is indicative of the restraint Burns imposed on herself by her determination not not to identify Rand as a conservative. I wonder what the book would have been like if Burns had given her impulse to call Rand a conservative utterly free rein. Burns went on in her comments this past October at the Cato Institute to offer a sort of explanation, something she never does in her book, of why she thinks of Ayn Rand as being a part of something called the American right.

8:48I place her instead on this broader category of the American right. And when I use the term American right, I'm not being pejorative, this isn't a code word for fascism, simply choosing the term the right to draw our attention to this broader ideological field that includes conservatives but is not limited to them, that includes and other groups, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, regular capitalists, classical liberals, all those who are interested in limited government and the promotion of capitalism as a social and economic system. I submit that this explanation is, if not totally vacuous, then at least profoundly unhelpful.

9:35It does not encourage the belief that Byrne's understanding of the phrase, the American and Right is in any sense coherent. Anarcho-capitalist, after all, is merely a subset of libertarian. An anarcho-capitalist is merely a libertarian who sees the implications of his principles and remains un-terrified by what he sees. If you say that libertarians are part of the right, then anarcho-capitalists are part of the right by definition. The same is true for classical liberals, otherwise known as limited government libertarians or minarchists, people like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Ayn Rand. If libertarians are part of the right, then classical liberals are part of the right by definition.

10:26But when did classical liberals get kicked out of the left? It's easy enough to find leftist writers who still claim them. Why are these writers wrong? What are regular capitalists? In what sense can anarcho-capitalists, or any anarchists of any kind, be said to be interested in limited government? More fundamentally, what do any of these libertarians have in common with conservatives, in virtue of which they are lumped together as part of the American right? The conventional answer to this question, of course, is that both conservatives and libertarians advocate individual freedom and free markets. In fact, this is not the case.

11:13As Ayn Rand told that WKCR interviewer back in 1964, A conservative today is supposed to be someone who is opposed to the welfare state and therefore Nor should this surprise anybody. For historical reasons, dating back to the political shifts of the New Deal era, American conservatives use libertarian rhetoric.

12:01But it is nothing but rhetoric, nothing but wind. Conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush do not shrink government, they expand it. They do not lower taxes, they raise them, or they increase deficit spending, thereby raising future taxes. They are just as much proponents of big government as the liberal democrats they deride for their taxing and spending ways. Conservatives tax and spend every bit as liberally as their supposed opponents. They merely spend their ill-gotten gain on a slightly different set of programs and causes. Nor do conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Jr. advocate individual freedom and free markets.

12:49Oh, they say they do, but every time they're pressed on a particular issue, it swiftly becomes apparent that they don't. Not really. For them, as for the politicians, libertarian rhetoric is just a kind of surface polish designed to make them look different from their liberal opponents, from whom, in fact, they aren't all that different. Anyone who wants to understand how and why modern American conservative republicans, the descendants of the Federalists and the Whigs, came to talk the language of libertarians, has only to read Murray Rothbard's seminal essay on intellectual history, Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty. Or, if you prefer, listen to it.

13:37You'll find it in both print and audio versions at this website, Mises.org. Conservatives are not advocates of individual liberty. They are advocates of statism who hide their true program behind libertarian slogans. Just as today's phony liberals are conservative statists hiding behind a smiling liberal mask, The American right is made up of people who can find common cause behind what is and always has been the conservative program. Big intrusive government that hobbles both international and domestic trade and production in an effort to advance the interests of the big businesses whose contributions keep the conservatives themselves both rich and powerful.

14:28Ayn Rand is not now and never has been a part of the American right. Yet, according to Jennifer Burns, in the late 60s, when an independent libertarian movement began to take shape, at just about the same time Rand's break with Nathaniel Brandon destroyed the burgeoning objectivist movement, it was Ayn Rand who was instrumental in keeping this newly independent libertarian movement on the right. Here's how Burns expressed her idea to the Cato Institute audience this past October.

15:25How does Burns figure the early libertarian movement had the potential to become a part of the American left instead of the American right? Well, many libertarians looked, sounded, and maybe even smelled like the new left. They were hippies. They didn't like the draft. But their encounter with Rand, their vision of gulch-gulch, which once imagined could Fortunately, as Burns sees it, Ayn Rand came riding to the rescue.

16:11What is the significance here of Rand's presence among this new libertarian movement? Well, it was really significant because it kept the libertarians from becoming just another wing of the new left. And what have libertarians become instead, as a result? Just another wing of the American right? Is that an improvement? Burns seems to think so. Because you see, the American right believes in capitalism, and the only way libertarians could have been accepted on the left as if they had abandoned their commitment to the free market. Could libertarianism have found allies on the left if they dropped capitalism? Yes. But that wasn't going to happen. According to Burns, when Murray Rothbard attempted in the late 1960s and early 1970s to create a coalition between the newly established libertarian movement and elements I do think that capitalism, commitment to markets remain this fundamental stumbling block.

17:25Rothbard was more willing than Rand to say, let's kind of put that aside and attack the state. He was focused on state power, he was an anarchist and whatever way you could attack the state was welcome to him.

17:42Berns is softer on free markets than Ayn Rand was, and no more eager than Rand was to give them up. Nor would he have had to, necessarily, to consummate the relationship he sought with certain new leftists. Berns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives, or liberals, for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism, a system in which huge corporations aided by the state dominate a heavily regulated and centrally directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate. This is what the New Left opposed.

18:32One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me 30 years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labor, specialize in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions. Indeed, there are. But if you pay no attention to this elementary fact, as Burns does, if you follow her example and make no distinction between what Rand meant by a word and what others have meant by it, if you don't define your terms and use them consistently, you will produce a confused mishmash rather than a useful study.

19:26It's too bad that this should be the case with regard to Jennifer Burns. Mises is likeable and obviously intelligent. She takes Rand and libertarianism seriously. She does not condescend to her subject matter. She has read widely in the relevant literature and has dug through the private papers of Rand, Rothbard and others important to her story. She has made an honest effort to understand this body of work, this movement of ours, and to a large extent she has succeeded. It's just a pity she didn't take the time and and put in the effort to achieve a comparable understanding of basic political terminology and history. This is Jeff Rigenbach.