Free Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns Page B

time covered in this book. Whether I identify Rand or her admirers as libertarian, conservative, or Objectivist varies by the context, and my interchangeable use of these words is not intended to collapse the distinctions between each. Rand jealously guarded the word Objectivist when she was alive, but I use the term loosely to encompass a range of persons who identified Rand as an important influence on their thought.
    I was fortunate to begin this project with two happy coincidences: the opening of Rand’s personal papers held at the Ayn Rand Archives and the beginning of a wave of scholarship on the American right. Work in Rand’s personal papers has enabled me to sift through the many biased and contradictory accounts of her life and create a more balanced picture of Rand as a thinker and a human being. Using newly available documentary material I revisit key episodes in Rand’s dramatic life, including her early years in Russia and the secret affair with a young acolyte that shaped her mature career. I am less concerned with judgment than with analysis, a choice Rand would certainly condemn. Though I was granted full access to her papers by the Ayn Rand Institute, I am not an Objectivist and have never been affiliated with any group dedicated to Rand’s work. I approach her instead as a student and a critic of American thought.
    New historical scholarship has helped me situate Rand within the broader intellectual and political movements that have transformed America since the days of the New Deal. At once a novelist and aphilosopher, a moralist and a political theorist, a critic and an ideologue, Rand is difficult to categorize. She produced novels, plays, screenplays, cultural criticism, philosophic essays, political tracts, and commentary on current events. Almost everything she wrote was unfashionable. When artists embraced realism and modernism, she championed Romanticism. Implacably opposed to pragmatism, existentialism, and Freudian psychology, she offered instead Objectivism, an absolutist philosophical system that insisted on the primacy of reason and the existence of a knowable, objective reality. Though she was out of fashion, Rand was not without a tradition or a community. Rather than a lonely genius, she was a deeply engaged thinker, embedded in multiple networks of friends and foes, always driven relentlessly to comment upon and condemn the tide of events that flowed around her.
    This book seeks to excavate a hidden Rand, one far more complex and contradictory than her public persona suggests. Although she preached unfettered individualism, the story I tell is one of Rand in relationship, both with the significant figures of her life and with the wider world, which appeared to her alternately as implacably hostile and full of limitless possibility. This approach helps reconcile the tensions that plagued Rand’s life and work. The most obvious contradiction lies on the surface: Rand was a rationalist philosopher who wrote romantic fiction. For all her fealty to reason, Rand was a woman subject to powerful, even overwhelming emotions. Her novels indulged Rand’s desire for adventure, beauty, and excitement, while Objectivism helped her frame, master, and explain her experiences in the world. Her dual career as a novelist and a philosopher let Rand express both her deep-seated need for control and her genuine belief in individualism and independence.
    Despite Rand’s lifelong interest in current events, the escapist pleasures of fiction tugged always at the edges of her mind. When she stopped writing novels she continued to live in the imaginary worlds she had created, finding her characters as real and meaningful as the people she spent time with every day. Over time she retreated ever further into a universe of her own creation, joined there by a tight band of intimates who acknowledged her as their chosen leader. At first this closed world offered Rand the refuge she sought when her work was blasted