Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  First and foremost then, this is a book about ideas. I discuss Rand’s ideas as she expressed them in her published and unpublished works, in her written essays and spoken lectures, from the earliest available material to the last. I consider all these sources important to a comprehensive understanding of her thought and legacy. Unfortunately, because Rand never wrote an exhaustive treatise, her system must be pieced together from her novels, essays, and lectures. Furthermore, many of Rand’s journals and private papers are not yet available to the scholarly community. Since Rand agreed to place these papers with the Library of Congress, it is hoped that future scholars will have more information at their disposal than I have had.18

  I also discuss Rand’s thought as it has been interpreted, modified, or extended by those she influenced. This book is as much an analysis of the tradition that Rand’s philosophy has sparked as it is of the ideas she herself expressed, and I include substantive analysis of work by Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, Douglas Den Uyl, David Kelley, Tibor Machan, Leonard Peikoff, Douglas Rasmussen, George Walsh, and others. Even for those works not officially sanctioned by Rand, there is significant textual evidence to support their continuity and consistency with Objectivism. Some of these authors in fact, have written more for a scholarly than for a popular audience. Hence, their alternative formulations of Objectivist positions are characterized by scholarly rigor and precision appropriate to that context. I do not hesitate to use these materials, although this must be done with care, always remembering that the best source for evaluating their consistency is the writing of Rand herself. Ultimately, I argue that there is an essential unity in Rand’s legacy and that this unity is both philosophical and methodological.

  Before proceeding, however, I feel compelled to assert that Rand’s philosophy should be taken seriously and treated with respect. The mere mention of Ayn Rand’s name in academic circles can evoke smirks and a rolling of the eyes. Most often she is dismissed, without discussion, as a reactionary, a propagandist, or a pop-fiction writer with a cult following. The fact that her work often appeals to the young seems proof that her ideas are immature or simplistic.

  From my own experience, I can attest that Rand’s work does inspire youthful admiration. I was first exposed to her ideas when I was a senior in high school. Captivated by the starkness of her essays and the benevolent heroism of her fictional protagonists, I consumed all of Rand’s available works. I gradually discovered a rich classical liberal and libertarian literature that provided a fundamental alternative to mainstream social science.

  Although my interest in Rand never abated during my college years, I was far removed from the dogmatic, cult-like devotion of fans who seemed to worship her every pronouncement. Moreover, I witnessed the hostile reaction to her work by many academic professionals. Although Rand provided an insightful, moral defense of capitalism, I found it difficult to imagine that she could ever gain scholarly acceptance.

  Not until I was in graduate school did I discover something else in Rand’s work. As a doctoral student, I was engaged in a comprehensive study of dialectical method with two distinguished scholars of the left academy, Bertell Ollman and Wolf Heydebrand. Much to my amazement, I discovered provocative parallels between the methods of Marxian social theory and the philosophic approach of Ayn Rand. Both Marx and Rand traced the interconnectedness of social phenomena, uncovering a startling cluster of relations between and among the institutions and structures of society. Both Marx and Rand opposed the mind-body dichotomy, and all of its derivatives. But unlike Marx, Rand was virulently anticommunist. Unlike Marx, Rand viewed a genuinely capitalist social system as a necessary condition for the achievement of truly integrated human being. Paradoxically, Rand seemed to embrace a dialectical perspective that resembled the approach of her Marxist political adversaries, even while defending capitalism as an “unknown ideal.”

  In 1984, recognizing these parallels and distinctions, I was encouraged by Ollman and Heydebrand to undertake my first systematic study of the dialectical aspects of Rand’s philosophy. In the process, I rediscovered elements in Objectivism that challenged my entire understanding of that philosophy and its place in intellectual history.

  Rand was notorious for maintaining that her intellectual debt to other thinkers was very limited. And yet in my own research, I discovered similarities between Rand’s approach and the dialectical approach of Hegelians and Marxists. Rand would have vehemently denied such a link. She viewed Hegel and Marx as heirs to the destructive Platonic and Kantian philosophic traditions. I grew certain, however, that at some point in her intellectual development, Rand had absorbed, perhaps unwittingly, crucial dialectical methods of analysis. My preliminary study compelled me to look further.

  THE STUDY IN BRIEF

  Rand was born and reared during a revolutionary period in Russian history. That context is the key to understanding the peculiar character of her Objectivism, her essentially dialectical mode of inquiry, and her radical critique of contemporary society. By the time she graduated from the University of Leningrad in 1924,19 she had been exposed to a dialectical revolt against formal dualism that would profoundly influence her literary craft and philosophical project.

  In this book, I explore Objectivism on three distinct levels: (1) its intellectual roots, (2) its formal structure, and (3) its radical social implications.

  All too often, Rand’s philosophy is presented as a deductive formulation from first principles. This approach prevails in the work of both her followers and her detractors. Objectivism is defined in a logically derivative manner: Rand allegedly begins with an ontological view of the law of identity and then proceeds to enunciate a doctrine of epistemological realism, ethical egoism, individualist-libertarian-capitalist social philosophy, and a “Romantic-Realist” literary credo. Each of these branches is integrated in a hierarchy of interrelated abstractions.

  I do not deny that such a relational structure exists within Objectivism as a formal totality, but I depart from established perspectives by exploring Rand’s philosophy as a phenomenon with a history and as a system.

  From a historical vantage point, I examine Rand’s philosophy in “the process of its becoming.” I approach Objectivism diachronically, as an evolved response to the dualities that Rand confronted in Soviet Russia. Although she rejected both the mysticism of Russia’s religious traditions20 and the secular collectivism of the Russian Marxists, she nonetheless remained a profoundly Russian thinker. Rand’s Russian nature was not reflected merely in her heavy foreign accent or in the length of her novels. She was Russian in more fundamental ways. In the sweeping character of her generalizations, and in her passionate commitment to the practical realization of her ideals, Rand was fully within the Russian literary and philosophic tradition. Like most of Russia’s great literary figures, she was an artist, social critic, and nonacademic philosopher who constructed a broad synthesis in her battle against the traditional antinomies in Western thought: mind versus body, fact versus value, theory versus practice, reason versus emotion, rationalism versus empiricism, idealism versus materialism, and so on. And like most of Russia’s indigenous philosophers, she presented an exhaustive, all-encompassing theoretical totality. Her system is as much defined by what she accepted in Russian thought as by what she rejected. In her intellectual development, Rand reflects the very Hegelian Aufhebung she ridiculed as a violation of the law of identity. In her intellectual evolution, Rand both absorbed and abolished, preserved and transcended, the elements of her Russian past.

  I do not mean to imply that Rand’s ideas can be wholly explained by—or reduced to—the context from which they emerged. People have free will; innovation and creativity are possible. But free will does not mean that people can step outside of their own skin. No human being can adopt a perspective on the whole that is external to all personal, cultural, social, or historical context. We are as much the creatures of history as its creators. Though Rand used genuinely inductive and deductive techniqu
es in fashioning her unique synthesis, she also responded to real, concrete circumstances. Abstracting Rand’s philosophy from this context damages our understanding of its historical importance.

  Part One partially recovers the lost world of revolutionary Russia and evokes the oppressive conditions that prompted Rand to emigrate to the United States. I concentrate on the intellectual traditions that dominated Russian culture during Rand’s formative years. Living in Russia during its celebrated Silver Age, she witnessed a burst of Nietzschean and neo-Hegelian thought: the Symbolist movement, Russian Religious Renaissance, and Russian Marxism each attempted the resolution of various forms of dualism. I focus in greater detail on the contributions of Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, Rand’s philosophy teacher at Petrograd University. Lossky, who encapsulated many of the significant dialectical methods prevalent in Russian thought, was the most significant of Rand’s professors and perhaps the one who most influenced her early intellectual development. I explore the historical connection of Rand and Lossky. As the dean of contemporary, pre-Bolshevik, Russian philosophy,21 Lossky viewed the world as an organic totality in which each part is internally related to every other. This dialectical conception reappears in many forms in the writings of Lossky’s student, Ayn Rand. I conclude Part One, with a developmental study of Rand’s intellectual maturation from the moment of her arrival in the United States until her death in 1982. My focus here is not on Objectivism as an integrated system, but on Rand’s intellectual groping toward synthesis.

  Historically, Rand’s revolt against dualism animated her project.22 In Part Two, I switch from the historical to the synchronic. I reconstruct Rand’s system to show how it is an inherently dialectical and nondualistic formulation that differs considerably from conventional alternatives.

  Since the hierarchical structure of Objectivism cannot be ignored, I present the basic tenets of Rand’s perspective in a logically progressive manner to emphasize their more specific applications. It would be an error, for example, to begin with Rand’s politics and proceed to her ontology. Because each branch and principle depend on their antecedents, one must first enter the lofty domain of metaphysics and work methodically toward Rand’s epistemology, philosophical psychology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

  In Part Three, I show how Rand’s mode of analysis culminates in a radical assessment of the nature of power as manifested in all social practices and institutions. I scrutinize her attempt to trace the interrelationships of culture, education, sex, race, and the neofascist welfare-warfare state. I also examine her theory of history, her vision of the Objectivist society, and her communitarian impulse.

  In this book I also make explicit comparisons and distinctions between Rand and other social thinkers. This is often a difficult task, owing partly to Rand’s myopia concerning both her intellectual debts and her assessment of other philosophers. In bravura fashion, Rand once said that in the history of philosophy, she could only recommend the “3 A’s”—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand.23 According to Barbara Branden’s biography, Rand’s formal study of philosophy was limited to just a few college courses. She studied Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche in some depth, but read only excerpts from—or summaries of—the work of other key figures. She often learned about different schools of thought in conversation with friends and colleagues who were themselves students of philosophy.24 Though Rand recognized some positive elements in the thought of Nietzsche, Spinoza, the classical liberals (such as Locke), and the Founding Fathers, though she celebrated the work of such twentieth-century individualists as Ludwig von Mises, John T. Flynn, and Isabel Paterson, she failed to see that many of the philosophers whom she attacked shared a similarly integrated perspective.

  Nathaniel Branden (1982T) has observed that her wholesale rejection of other viewpoints was a by-product of her theatrical, emotional, and abrasive style. According to Branden, Rand did little to build bridges to those who operated in different intellectual contexts. As a polemicist, she often dismissed her opponents on moralistic or psychologistic grounds. Moreover, her broad generalizations often lacked the rigor of scholarly analysis.25 Branden does not fault Rand for this; he argues that it was not Rand’s goal to work out the details of a full philosophical system. Rand offered important ideas in perception, epistemology, metaethics, politics, and aesthetics, but left it to her followers to defend Objectivism in the realm of technical philosophy (N. Branden 1989, 417–18).

  This is not to deny the sophistication or originality of Rand’s thought. But an enriched appreciation of her philosophy cannot emerge unless we compare her ideas to the ideas of the thinkers she celebrated or disparaged. Rand’s place in intellectual history will very much depend upon how effectively she responded to these other traditions and to the central problems with which they have grappled. These comparisons are essential. As Robert Hollinger suggests, we can utilize contrasting doctrines to enhance our understanding of Rand’s project, “even if they come from the pens of people whom Rand would consider anathema.”26

  I do not make these comparisons either to challenge Rand’s originality or to bolster her credentials as a grand social theorist. Rand synthesized a number of elements in her philosophic system that have been explored previously by other thinkers. She is neither qualified nor disqualified as a serious thinker simply because what she says about any particular issue resembles what other thinkers have said about that issue in the past. The integrity and seriousness of her work cannot be established by merely pointing out its similarity to or difference from the works of more “respected” philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Lossky, Hayek, or Habermas.

  Comparison promotes confrontation and communication not merely between those who celebrate Rand and those who criticize her but also between the traditions that are being engaged. As Richard Bernstein (1971) puts it, “The provincialism that is so fashionable among ‘true believers’ of different philosophic orientations can blind us to a serious, sympathetic understanding of other philosophers who are working in different idioms” (4). The dialogue that may result can help us to comprehend not only the perspectives of those we oppose but the implications of our own beliefs as well.

  For many reasons, such a dialogue has been slow to develop with Objectivism. Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, and David Kelley all suggest that the Objectivist movement of the 1960s fostered a cult-like reverence toward Rand. Ironically, a movement dedicated to freedom and individual autonomy engendered disputes over ideological purity.27 Some devout followers attempted to model themselves on Rand’s fictional characters. If John Galt, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, smoked cigarettes, this behavior was to be emulated. If Rand’s heroines had a penchant for rough and explosive sex, this was also to be admired.28 Many of Rand’s disciples accepted each of her pronouncements as if they were intrinsic to the system of Objectivism. If Rand equated horror movies with depravity, or argued against electing a woman president on principle, or expressed distaste for the music of Beethoven, the works of Shakespeare, or the paintings of the Impressionists, or abhorred the practice of homosexuality, or disliked facial hair,29 her personal, aesthetic, and sexual preferences were elevated to the status of dogma.

  Kelley (1990) writes that many of Rand’s followers failed to distinguish between the ideas essential to her philosophy and those that were not. For Kelley, Rand offers “the foundation and outline of a system” within which different interpretations are likely to develop (61).

  Nevertheless, one cannot simply dismiss the authoritarian, sometimes downright foolish, aspects of the organized Objectivist movement. That these aspects exposed Rand’s philosophy to ridicule and caricature cannot be denied. Of course, from the vantage point of intellectual history, Rand has no monopoly on folly. Of greater importance, however, is the charge that authoritarianism is inevitable in any grand system of philosophy. Since Rand posits a cultural revolution as necessary to the establishment of a genuinely free society, she seems to mimic the totalistic approach
of the Marxists. In the twentieth century, Marxist ideology linked its organic, integrative methodology with its sanction of the total state. Hence, it is legitimate to examine the connection between what Karl Popper has called political and methodological totalitarianism. According to Popper ([1962] 1971), the totalistic attempts by Hegel and Marx to transcend the dualism of facts and standards underlies the inexorable totalitarianism of their worldviews. Popper argues that the fact-value distinction is a necessary one, for it bars people from attempting to enforce their own normative prescriptions on society as if these values were divinely dictated. Popper’s “open society” is liberal and capitalist; it opposes totalistic central planning, but sanctions limited social engineering.

  And yet by identifying dialectics with Marxism and dualism with capitalism, Popper agrees with Marx. Marx argued that dualism was both essential and historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, capitalism both reflected and generated the dualities in the modem world. His historical project points toward a communist society that would transcend these dualities and the capitalist system on which they depend.

  Rand proposes a resolution transcending the Popperian and Marxian alternatives. She links her defense of capitalism to a strong, dialectical sensibility. Her vision of the free society rejects traditional antinomies, but embraces the morality and practicality of the capitalist system. Given the collapse of Marxism as a theoretical paradigm and political force, Rand’s alternative is particularly compelling. In many ways, it redeems the integrity of dialectics as a radical method by rescuing it from its mystical, collectivist, and statist incarnations.