-Caveat Lector- >From http://chronicle.com/colloquy/99/rand/background.htm Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars New books and research projects involve philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and feminism By JEFF SHARLET New York Sipping a drink atop this city's tallest skyscraper, decked out in a gray, pinstriped, double-breasted suit, his brown eyes unblinking as he declares his commitment to "total freedom," Chris Matthew Sciabarra knows that he might easily be mistaken for a "Randroid." "Randroids," he explains, are true believers. They believe in the truth according to Ayn Rand, and only Ayn Rand. Mr. Sciabarra adores the writer best-known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in which she insisted that selfishness is a moral path, and that only capitalism can set the world free. But although he's a card-carrying member of the Ayn Rand Society, he views her with a degree of skepticism. He is Rand's most vocal champion in academe, a status that demands he help to open the long-closed circle of Randianism to new perspectives. Along with a small but growing movement of philosophers, political theorists, and literary critics, he thinks that Rand, who died in 1982, will soon take her rightful place in the hearts and minds of scholars. As co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of the recent Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (Penn State University Press) and author of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State, 1995), Mr. Sciabarra, a visiting scholar at New York University, is riding the crest of a Randian wave. Like born-again Christians recalling the moment of their salvation, many Randians remember their own conversions -- to laissez-faire capitalism, selfishness, atheism, and the objective truth -- with a mixture of reverence and amusement at their former selves. Mr. Sciabarra credits his own first encounter as the source of his ability to distinguish between himself and the uber-men of Rand's novels. As a high-school senior daunted by the heft of The Fountainhead, he was more intrigued by Rand's slim Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. "Unlike virtually everyone who has come to Rand," he says, "I devoured her entire nonfiction before reading any of her fiction. I think that saved me from becoming a true believer." Mr. Sciabarra pauses for reflection, stares into the dusk at the tiny flame of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor beneath the World Trade Center, and takes another drink. He is sipping seltzer, not a martini, and when he says he's a "man of ideas," it comes out Brooklyn-style: "idears." That's fine by him. "I never wanted to be Howard Roark," he says. Howard Roark, the "cold-eyed" and "contemptuous-lipped" architect of The Fountainhead, who designed buildings too beautiful for a mediocre world, is "[m]an as man should be," in Rand's words. "The self-sufficient, the self-confident, the end of ends. ... Above all, the man who lives for himself -- as living for oneself should be understood." If that strikes you as circular logic, you can turn to the book's afterword, by Leonard Peikoff, self-proclaimed intellectual heir to Rand and executor of her estate. "Objectivism," he clarifies, "defines the abstract principles by which a man must think and act if he is to live the life proper to man." Although such phrases make perfect sense to Mr. Sciabarra, he throws his hands in the air when he thinks of how his colleagues in academe must understand -- or misunderstand -- such self-satisfied words. "I know they laugh at Rand," he laments. And even though he's enough of a free thinker to share a chuckle himself from time to time, he'd like the laughter to stop. Randians often have taken comfort in the phenomenal sales of her books -- 30 million and counting, at a pace of several hundred thousand a year. Now her academic followers can point to the sales of Mr. Sciabarra's book as proof that she's not just for the masses. At 8,500 copies sold, The Russian Radical has hardly vaulted to the popularity of Atlas Shrugged, but it's a best seller for a university press like Penn State. Sanford G. Thatcher, director of the press, sees The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations as turning points. "A lot of what had been written before was done from a cultish viewpoint," he says. "The effort here is to bring Rand into dialogue with other thinkers, the way Marx or Jung were brought out of their narrow circle of devotees." He also notes that Rand "sells a lot of books." Other presses want a piece of the action. In addition to Mr. Sciabarra's two volumes, new books are forthcoming or in process on Rand's aesthetics, moral philosophy, relevance to the philosophy of science, and stormy relationship with libertarianism. A journal of Rand literary studies is in the works, and the Twayne Masterworks Studies, published by Macmillan, will soon include volumes on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Gene H. Bell-Villada, chairman of the Romance-languages department at Williams College, has proposed a session on Rand for the next convention of the Modern Language Association. His only problem is avoiding overlap: "Two people want to talk about Rand and Nabokov." He adds that he "rejects everything Rand stands for," but that he can't help being fascinated by her continuing popularity. "It's a part of canon-bashing," says Mr. Bell-Villada, even though Rand was an elitist who scorned modern literature and had no use for other popular writers, like Louis L'Amour, who are also making inroads into academe. According to Tibor Machan, a professor of philosophy at Auburn University and author of an overview of Rand to be released later this year by Peter Lang Publishing, Rand "has actually been in ascendance for some time." In the wake of the Cold War, he contends, "people are more interested in alternative politics. Hers is a voice from outside academe. If academe was the military, you'd say that Rand didn't come from West Point, but from down there with the enlisted." By that reasoning, you might say that Rand's most famous disciple, the Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, has become a four-star general. "People think that if someone of that degree of smarts has some respect for what Rand did," says Mr. Thatcher, "well then, maybe she's worth a second look." Even Rand's coterie sees irony in her star's rising with that of the Federal Reserve, an institution she excoriated. Her philosophy, objectivism (akin to libertarianism, with a romantic twist), embraces absolute capitalism and sees government as good for nothing other than defense. Self-interest, she thought, is the only reasonable guide to life. In light of her fierce individualism, it may seem odd that Mr. Sciabarra locates Rand's roots in the Russian Revolution. But in The Russian Radical, he draws on long-forgotten writing by Rand's professors at the University of Leningrad to illustrate her early exposure to dialectics, the process of overcoming contradiction between a given and its opposite through synthesis of the two. Marx's emphasis on dialectical materialism would have been required reading in the courses she took. Mr. Sciabarra thinks that it helped her to look at ideas in a wider context, and to formulate her rejection of dualism in all its forms, from good versus evil to mind versus body. To some orthodox Randians, the Marx-Rand connection is not as strange as the contortions required to fit Rand into the feminist canon. "Ayn Rand would turn over in her grave!" says Michael S. Berliner, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, about Feminist Interpretations. The institute, in Marina del Rey, Cal., is devoted to the literal interpretation of Rand. When Mr. Sciabarra asked Mr. Berliner if he or anyone else there would contribute to the book, the director told the author that they wouldn't even consider doing so unless the collection were called "Objectivism Vs. Feminism." Ms. Gladstein, the co-editor and associate dean of liberal arts at the University of Texas at El Paso, insists that the match between Rand and feminism is entirely natural. In her contribution to the book, she argues that feminism desperately needs Rand to balance literary depictions of defeated women. She proposes a course called "She Who Succeeds," in which students would read not about suicidal Sylvia Plath, but about Dagny Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged, who "is head of her own railroad," and who "has sexual relationships with three men and retains their love and respect." Judith Wilt, a professor of English at Boston College, agrees with Ms. Gladstein -- but for nearly opposite reasons. Recalling the impression that Atlas Shrugged made on her at age 19, she writes that Rand depicts "the most shattering discovery the awakening womanmind makes -- this world is not the one the vigorous confident girl-child expected to find and help run when she 'grew up.'" "Feminism and Rand share a rejection of dualism," says Nancy Tuana, editor of the series in which Feminist Interpretations appears and a professor of philosophy at the University of Portland. Rand, she says, "provided for many women a line of fault where they started to question the view of mom at home with the kids and dad at work." Nonetheless, she says, some colleagues have questioned her inclusion of Rand in her "Re-Reading the Canon" series. When she asks what they dislike, the most common answer is, "'Oh, I haven't read her.'" In fact, notes Auburn's Mr. Machan, "Rand has always been hovering in the halls of academe." He cites Robert Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State and Utopia, in which Mr. Nozick, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, drew partially upon Rand to develop his concept of libertarianism. Mr. Machan also mentions the work of James P. Sterba, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, who, for his part, says he's surprised by the rise of recent scholarship on Rand, but only because Randians are generally unwilling to connect her to such "irrational" ideas as feminism. In fact, argues Mr. Sterba, one application of Rand's style of libertarianism, with its emphasis on allowing individuals room to flourish, could lead not toward "no government," but to a welfare state. Mr. Machan, a libertarian who equates academic leftists with Stalinists, takes issue with such claims: "Jim thinks everything leads to the welfare state." He adds, though, that he's glad he can finally have such academic discussions about his favorite author without being ridiculed. But Allan Gotthelf, a professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey who is chairman of the Ayn Rand Society, says Mr. Machan's notion of Rand as primarily a political philosopher is "not only wrong, it's damaging." Although his group maintains more distance from Rand than do outfits like the Ayn Rand Institute, Mr. Gotthelf maintains that Mr. Peikoff, chairman emeritus of the institute, has written the only definitive book on Rand, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1991). Most of the other new work on her he dismisses as fanfare. Mr. Gotthelf nonetheless describes himself as cautiously optimistic about the potential for an outbreak of objectivism. He's working on a book he hopes will serve as a bridge between Rand and analytic philosophy, the widespread school of thought which -- unlike the objectivist belief that the truth is available to our senses -- holds that language can conceal logical structure and even mislead us. He also points to the scholarship of young academics such as Tara Smith, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, as representative of the direction that Rand studies needs to take if Objectivism is going to be the big idea of the 21st century. "Having first encountered Rand's work in high school," says Ms. Smith, "then developing an interest in philosophy, and having recently reread her work in stages, my respect has grown. I find myself now going in a direction more ... yes, Randian." Ms. Smith says she plans to put Rand's moral philosophy at the center of her next book, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman & Littlefield). "One of the striking claims that Rand made," she explains, "is that people take ethics for granted. From the time we are little, we get the idea from the grownups that there are certain things you should and shouldn't do, that have this special weight and gravity. What Rand asks is, Why? Where does moral authority come from?" While Rand certainly wasn't the first to pose such a question, Ms. Smith herself returned to Rand after years of reading the major philosophers and concluding that no one had pursued it as far as Rand had. "She found a practical answer," says Ms. Smith. "That is, she claims there's a need to define what kind of actions we should and shouldn't do, because our lives depend on it." In Rand's view, "right" is that which sustains one's own life, and "wrong" is that which does not, Ms. Smith says. Both God and society failed Rand's test of objective sensory perception -- the source, she argued, of reason. Ms. Smith says that her work on Rand probably could not have been published just a few years ago. "It may have had something to do with fear," she says, "perhaps a certain fear that she might upset deeply entrenched, prevailing presumptions of politics, philosophy, everything." Soon there will be more for anti-Randians to be afraid of. In an article titled "A Renaissance in Scholarship," published in the journal Reason Papers last fall, Mr. Sciabarra writes, "in this last decade of the twentieth century, Ayn Rand seems to be everywhere." To the small mountain of new Rand scholarship, he adds her inclusion in new editions of philosophy encyclopedias and textbooks, a forthcoming movie starring Helen Mirren, an Oscar-nominated documentary (Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, 1997), and the scheduled appearance of a Rand postage stamp on April 22. Ayn Rand has arrived, he says. "Nietzsche was once pooh-poohed as a poet," Mr. Sciabarra reminds his colleagues. He predicts that the same canonization and even exaltation with which the academy eventually embraced Nietzsche will soon be Rand's. "I don't want to sound like a Marxist here," he says, "but it's inexorable." Ayn Rand is a fact. 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