Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a piece in The New York Times on Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up going more into exploring Rand's life and values as they are showcased in Heller's book. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's pedestalling of businessman and entrepreneurs. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.