This paper advances two claims. The first is that the novels of Ayn Rand are, as novels, worse than mediocre performances. The second is that those novels have injured the tone of our civic and political culture.

    Any argument that Rand's novels are bad—since she was first and foremost a novelist, we should begin there—has to acknowledge that they have been stupendously popular for decades. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have never gone out of print since they were published and continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Both novels frequently appear in lists of books that have changed peoples' lives.

    Popularity and aesthetic quality, however, are two different things. Consider Rand's prose.  Here is a sentence I chose at random by flipping open Atlas Shrugged: "She leaned forward, both forearms braced firmly against the counter, feeling calm and in tight control, sensing a dangerous adversary" (329).  Even in this short sentence there are four redundant modifiers: braced already implies firmly, control already implies tight, adversary already implies dangerous, and the plural forearms makes both unnecessary. Take them out, and we would have "She leaned forward, forearms braced against the counter, feeling calm and in control, sensing an adversary"—not great prose, but no longer carrying excess baggage.  Almost any page of Rand contains such filler, usually in over-familiar combinations: streams gush, heat scorches.

    Next look at "sensing a dangerous adversary." The first rule an aspiring fiction writer learns is "show, don't tell."  Rand always tells. Dagny Taggart (for it is she at the counter) tells us by her posture alone that she is on the alert, preparing herself for a challenge, yet feeling equal to it. A truly crafty fiction writer would simply tell us, "She leaned forward, forearms braced against the counter, feeling calm and in control," and let us infer the rest—if we are paying attention, we know she senses an adversary.  Great fiction writers suggest more than they announce, letting readers participate in conjuring up the novel's imagined world. We see, without its being stated, that Dr. Bovary's young wife is desperately bored, or that Ivan Karamazov's intellectual pride is eating away at his sanity. This is what makes great fiction intellectually stimulating and not just an escape. By contrast, Rand is always pointing out the obvious, never letting the action speak for itself.

    Lovers of Rand usually love her characters—John Galt, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, Dominique Francon. Rand's protagonists are uniformly and unfailingly strong, intelligent, capable, sexually magnetic, and charismatic, without the least shadow of a conflict or contradiction.  Rand establishes their personalities from their first appearance, and they remain exactly the same to the final page. They are as static, and as interesting, as mannequins. The characters of great novelists—Don Quixote, Pip in Great Expectations, Natasha Romanova in War and Peace, Col. Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Sethe in Beloved—are compounded of virtues and flaws, are complex, conflicted, and contradictory.  They change and develop before our eyes. This is what makes them lifelike, and what makes us care about them.
 
    It is true that Rand did not aim at the lifelike; she rejected verisimilitude (the quality a novel is said to have if it is "lifelike") as a goal for her fiction. She called her novels "romantic realism," a term also applied to the work of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Rand's own favorite novelist, Victor Hugo. Romantic realist novels are set in the real world, not a fantasy one, but incorporate a degree of idealization, exaggeration, and even implausibility.  Rand, a defender could argue, made her heroes consistently heroic and her villains consistently villainous in order to dramatize what she saw as a war between true and false values. Her great romantic realist precursors, however, always remained capable of imaginative sympathy, and this is part of their greatness.  Hugo was a diehard inheritor of the republican tradition of the French Revolution, but he made his reactionary aristocrats powerfully appealing.  Dostoevsky was a right-wing religious zealot, but his atheist revolutionaries are among his most memorable creations.  Hugo and Dostoevsky, in other words, possessed what Keats identified as Shakespeare's distinctive gift—"negative capability"—the power to imagine and inhabit other minds, other lives. All great writers possess this gift to some degree.  Rand possesses it not at all. Her books are sometimes called "novels of ideas," but the only ideas in them are hers, reverberating over thousands of pages in a deafening echo chamber.


    We should turn to Rand's ideas now, for it is her ideas that meant the most to her and made many of her readers her disciples.  The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, long as they are, have the simple clarity of fables, bearing an unambiguous message.

    In The Fountainhead, a genius architect, Howard Roark, is thwarted by forces of envy, resentment, and incomprehension, in the form of academics, bureaucrats, critics, clients, and mediocre fellow-architects, but ultimately triumphs over all of them by remaining true to his vision and ignoring everything else.

    In Atlas Shrugged, the world's most brilliant inventors and entrepreneurs, led by the engineer John Galt, are so pestered by envy, resentment, and incomprehension, in the form of high taxes, government regulation, and various abuses of the power of eminent domain, that they withdraw from the world; without them, the world collapses.

    Both novels see civilization as spearheaded by a tiny vanguard of the visionary, capable, and extremely good-looking, who are misunderstood by everyone around them and hampered by (1) the indifference, envy, and stupidity of the masses, (2) religion, with its obsolete morality of altruism and self-sacrifice, and (3) the state, with its taxes and regulations. Randianism, we can say, is equal parts Milton Friedman and Friedrich Nietzsche.

    Rand had good reason to loathe arbitrary state power. She was born Alissa Rosenbaum, in 1905, in Russia (1).  Her father owned a large pharmacy and was prosperous enough that the family could afford vacations on the Black Sea and in Austria.  Alissa Rosenbaum was twelve when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred; her father's business was seized by the government, leaving the family in relative poverty. (The Soviets also provided her with a free university education, which, as a Jew and a woman, she would have been denied under the czars, but that did not diminish her rancor against the state.)  In 1926, thanks to some maternal relatives in Chicago, she had a chance to emigrate to the United States; she immediately seized it, changed her name, and moved to Hollywood to write for the movies.  In 1937 she published her first novel, We the Living, set in Russia and emphatically anti-Soviet in tone.  Her anti-communist politics made her anti-New Deal as well, and she worked energetically in Wendell Wilkie's 1940 presidential campaign, thanks to which she met several leading conservative thinkers of the time, including the economist Ludwig von Mises.

    The Fountainhead was published in 1943, in a moderate press run with almost no advertising and little initial response, but word of mouth made it a phenomenal bestseller over the next few years and attracted a large and worshipful following. She worked next on elaborating her philosophy, which she named Objectivism, and embodied her ideas in her third and final novel, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957.  It was met with catastrophically bad reviews, even in the leading conservative journal of opinion, the National Review, but sales were massive, especially among college students. The young conservatives who founded Young Americans for Freedom, energized the Barry Goldwater campaign, and then moved on the Libertarian Party or the Reagan Revolution were often Rand readers.

    If we ask why novels as unapologetically elitist as Rand's have been embraced by millions, the answer may be this appeal they hold for the young.  In one's late teens and early twenties, one is all too likely to feel like an unrecognized genius.  It seems obvious, at that age, that all the world's business has been hitherto conducted on unsound principles, muddied by compromise and mediocrity, that everyone is wrong. One feels a surge of potential within, a clarity of vision and solidity of purpose that could set everything right—yet one is thwarted, frustrated, misunderstood.  No one gets it.  All authorities conspire to hold things back.  Every young person feels that way some of the time.  If he or she feels that way much of the time, coming across Ayn Rand is like discovering chocolate heroin. That Rand is ignored, even disdained by the literary and philosophical establishments, that she is on no course's syllabus, that one has to find her all on one's own, only makes the novels that much sweeter and intoxicating. The world's failure to appreciate Ayn Rand seems just one more of the world's inexplicable lapses.


    Still, even though the academic literary establishment never took Rand seriously, her influence elsewhere has been deep and lasting. No other American writer has become so potent a political icon. Among her acknowledged admirers in Congress are Ron Paul of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Paul Ryan and David Schweikert of Wisconsin, Ron Johnson of Arizona, Mike Pompeo of Kansas, and Rick Crawford of Arkansas (Frank 141). John Hospers, the Libertarian Party's first candidate for President in 1972, was a Randian (Burns 268). Other admirers include entrepreneurs Ted Turner, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Craig Newmark of Craigslist (Burns 214, 284); from Hollywood, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and the late Farrah Fawcett (Robin 21); and Alan Greenspan, longtime Federal Reserve chairman, who in the 1950s was part of Rand's inner circle, the young disciples who met every Saturday evening at her New York apartment. In the words of historian Jennifer Burns, Ayn Rand is "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right" (4).

    Burns considers Rand a figure of the "right" rather than a classic conservative. Once upon a time, political conservatives were mainly about conserving things: religion, morality, the family, existing social arrangements.  They were skeptical towards innovation and valued stability.  We still have a lot of this kind of conservative around, but these are not the people Rand inspires. She disliked bourgeois morality and scorned religion, which is the main reason why, so long as William F. Buckley was alive, the National Review treated her warily. She was not about conserving anything; her take on existing institutions was radical.  Her influence helps account for what writer Sam Tanenhaus has called "the paradox of the modern Right": "Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative—in its arguments and ideas, in its tactics and strategies, above all in its vision" (16).

    Rand has contributed most crucially to that radical right vision in two closely related but still distinguishable ways: first, her idea of free enterprise, and second, her idea of individualism. 

    Businessmen have not come off well in American novels and films. Most are sinister and grasping, like Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life or Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, or bumptious and ridiculous, like Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, businessmen are seen more as they would like to be seen: as the men who made progress happen, the Atlases who held up the sky.  (One of the many neat touches in the television series Mad Men, about an early 1960s advertising agency, is that Bertram Cooper, head of the firm, is a devotee of Rand's novels.)  Rand's characters Howard Roark, Hank Rearden, and John Galt provided a cultural counterweight to Mr. Potter and Babbitt at a time when the business community was keen to refurbish its image.
 
    In their recent book Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson quote a 1971 memo by Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court justice, but at the time the chair of the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: "Business must learn the lesson […] that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without the reluctance that has been so characteristic of American business" (Hacker and Pierson 117). This is a mild version of the message of Atlas Shrugged to American businessmen: stop apologizing, and take what is rightfully yours!

    Hacker and Pierson see this memo as inaugurating a corporate siege of Washington and, more broadly, a campaign to move the culture. The National Association of Manufacturers moved its headquarters from New York City to Washington in 1972; between 1971 and 1982, the number of corporations with registered lobbyists rose from 175 to almost 2,500. Policy recommendations for reducing taxes, rolling back regulation, and privatizing government services began to issue forth from the Heritage Foundation, founded 1973, and the Cato Institute, founded 1974. These developments drew on many thinkers besides Rand, certainly, but consider the title of Jerome Tuccille's informal history of the modern conservative movement: It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.  Stephen Moore, of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth, notes that in the early days of the Cato Institute those who had not yet read Atlas Shrugged were referred to as "virgins."  The Cato Institute, incidentally, was founded by Charles and David Koch, financial backers of a wide array of right wing causes, including providing grants to universities willing to offer courses on Ayn Rand.

    Early Tea Party rallies usually had a sprinkling of Rand-referencing signs, and Thomas Frank's book Pity the Billionaire devotes a chapter to this movement's interest in Rand, especially Atlas Shrugged.  Frank writes, "To its present-day fans, it is a work of amazing prescience, the story of the over-regulating, liberty-smothering Obama administration told more than fifty years before it happened" (140). A full-length documentary on this theme—Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged—was released in January 2012, and the first two installments of a projected trilogy of films based on the novel were released in 2011 and 2012.

    The worrisome thing about Rand's influence, though, is not her free market ideology, which after all is shared by many distinguished economists, but her tone: the brazen assurance, the corrosive contempt, and the sheer indifference to other points of view.  Let me note again that there are at least half a dozen Randians now in the House of Representatives.

    Rand's celebration of the free market blends naturally with her celebration of individualism.  Here we come to the heart of her appeal.

    We Americans love stories about individuals, and we like seeing ourselves as individuals. An astute Frenchman noticed this about us way back in 1831.  The first time the word "individualism" appears in print in English, as it happens, is in the English translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. In a traditional aristocratic society, according to Tocqueville, a web of obligations and needs bound class to class; the nobles, the middle classes, and the peasants perhaps did not like each other or even see each other as belonging to the same species, but they did see themselves as mutually dependent on each other in a variety of ways.  In a democratic society like ours, according to Tocqueville, the idea that we depend on each other tended to evaporate.  He put it this way:

     As conditions equalize, one finds more and more individuals […] who have […] acquired or retained enough enlightenment and wealth to take care of themselves. These people owe nothing to anyone, and in a sense they expect nothing from anyone. They become accustomed to thinking of themselves always in isolation and are pleased to think that their fate lies entirely in their own hands.
     Thus, not only does democracy cause each man to forget his forebears, but it makes it difficult for him to see his offspring and cuts him off from his contemporaries. Again and again it leads him back to himself and threatens ultimately to imprison him altogether in the loneliness of his own heart. (586-87)

    Tocqueville's description of American individualism resonates deeply with what Randians call "John Galt's Oath," which has become a kind of password among them: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" (Atlas Shrugged, 1069). Tocqueville helps us see that readers respond passionately to Rand because this individualism is a wide strand in our cultural DNA as Americans. Something about it just sounds right—or almost right.

    Tocqueville also saw that there was another strand twining with this one: our penchant for association, what we call civil society or community organizations, the Red Cross, Planned Parenthood, Torch Club, and on and on. The number and variety of these associations astonished him—there was nothing like them in France—and he saw in them the counterbalance to our individualism.  He wrote:

     The free institutions that Americans possess, and the political rights of which they make such extensive use, are, in a thousand ways, constant reminders to each and every citizen that he lives in society. They keep his mind steadily focused on the idea that it is man's duty as well as his interest to make himself useful to his fellow man. (593)

This recognition is missing in Rand's vision, utterly absent, and its absence makes the United States of her novels one I cannot recognize as my own, and one I hope never comes into being. Humans are social animals, after all, and we do need each other, and the great and moving moments of our national history are the times when we responded to that need. To quote Tocqueville one more time:

It is through political associations that Americans of all walks of life, all casts of mind, and all ages daily acquire a general taste for association and familiarize themselves with its use. Large numbers of people thus see and speak to one another, come to a common understanding, and inspire one another […]. (608)

    My hope is that, one day, sales of Democracy in America surpass those of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged combined.  But that's just my opinion, and as a best-selling novelist once wrote, "The worst of all crimes is the acceptance of the opinions of others" (qtd. in Burns 285).  Can you guess which best-selling novelist it was?

(1) The biographical details here come from the books by Jennifer Burns, Anne Heller, and Claudia Roth Pierpont listed in the works cited.
Return to Text

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Frank, Thomas. Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.  New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012.

Hacker, Jacob, and Pierson, Paul. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.

Heller, Anne. Ayn Rand and the World She Made.  New York: Anchor Books, 2010.

Moore, Stephen. " 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years." Wall Street Journal, 9 January, 2009.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth.  "Twilight of the Goddess." In Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. NY: Knopf, 2000, 199-222.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

-----.  The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Robin, Corey. "Garbage and Gravitas." The Nation, 7 June 2010, 21-27.

Tanenhaus, Sam.  The Death of Conservatism. New York: Random House, 2009.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835 (vol. 1), 1840 (vol. 2). Arthur Goldhammer, translator. New York: Library of America, 2004.


    Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University and is now Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and various articles on modern British and Irish writers.

     He is the son of Paul and Salee Stanfield, both of whom were members of Des Moines Torch Club, Paul serving as president of the IATC from 1984 to 1986.

     He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife of a good many years, Barbara Straus.  They have two daughters. He has belonged to the Lincoln Club since 1986.

     He recently became editor of The Torch, but would like it known that the paper was accepted for publication before he came on board.

     The original paper was presented to the Lincoln Torch Club on March 19, 2012.  Excerpts of an earlier version appeared, under a different title, in the Prairie Fire newspaper.