Why Ayn Rand is Hot Again

The unconservative Ayn Rand and her relationship to the American right

Sources from The New York Times to the United Kingdom's Guardian agree that 2009 is the Year of Ayn Rand. Fortuitously surfing the wave of Rand fascination is the first thorough and largely unbiased book about her life and ideas by a serious American academic, one neither a personal friend nor a bitter enemy of the controversial Russian-born novelist and philosopher.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by University of Virginia historian Jennifer Burns, delivers a smart assessment of Rand's life and ideas and how they influenced each other. On what her book's title promises—the connections between Rand and the American right wing—Ms. Burns is less convincing, though she does provide enough data to make it clear why Rand has never really been a "goddess" to the American right.

Why is Rand, dead since 1982, so hot again today? Ironically, big government, one of Rand's betes noires, is stimulating her sales. Her more than 1,000-page 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, sold 25 percent more copies in the first half of this year than it sold in all of last year, shipping a total of 300,000 copies so far this year—tremendous success for a 52-year-old novel.

Readers and pundits alike look at America and see a world scarily reminiscent of Rand's government-choked dystopia in Atlas. It's a world with a struggling economy where political pull matters more than success in the free market, where the government blithely takes over huge transportation industries.

Ms. Burns says Rand was "among the first to identify the problem of the modern state's often terrifying power and make it an issue of popular concern." Seeking the foundation of Rand's ferocious mistrust of government—especially government motivated by altruism—Ms. Burns skillfully re-creates the young Alisa Rosenbaum's (Rand's name before creating the "Rand" identity when she moved to America in 1926) experiences watching Bolshevism destroy her family's way of life in Russia.

Rand saw communism purportedly motivated by a desire to help elevate the downtrodden and, as Ms. Burns writes, became fascinated with "the failure of good intentions." The novelist countered communism with her own moral philosophy that elevated "selfishness"—the belief that your happiness is your proper goal and your accomplishments are a necessary means to happiness. This Randian morality was meant, Ms. Burns wrote, to "eliminate all virtues that could possibly be used in the service of totalitarianism."

Rand came to America hoping to win fame as a Hollywood screenwriter; movies formed her image of a glorious and joyous America, so different from her dismal and deprived Soviet Union. She worked various jobs in the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. After years of struggle (though with more help from family and friends than Rand, queen of the self-sufficient, liked to make people believe) she became a fabulously successful novelist. Her first big hit was 1943's The Fountainhead (the tale of an architect who blew up a housing project he had designed, on the grounds that his rights as a creator had been violated by unapproved changes to the structure) and then Atlas Shrugged.

Rand was more than a teller of tales. She was an exponent of a philosophy she called Objectivism. Ms. Burns explains thoroughly how Rand, through relationships with many other individualist, conservative and libertarian thinkers and activists in the 1930s and '40s, forged her unique approach to small-government individualism, linked with Aristotelian rationalism.

In later life, she tired of communicating with anyone but her continually narrowing circle of acolytes, and after her affair with her chief disciple, Nathaniel Branden, ended in 1968, she largely retreated from any attempt to spread or further her philosophy, embittered with a culture she thought rejected all her values—moral, political, and esthetic.

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