Revisiting Ayn Rand

Allan Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand. You would have thought that. Rand quit speaking to William F. Buckley after his National Review published Whittaker Chamber's scathing review of Atlas Shrugged. I remember that controversy when Chambers, in effect, rode Rand out of the conservative movement. What a review!

"Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned 'higher morality,' which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world."

"Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained."

Oh to be back in a world where the critics wrote better than the authors!