The Enduring Legacy of Ayn Rand
Monday marked 121 years since the birth of Ayn Rand (b. Feb 2 1905). While relentlessly condemned and distorted by the mainstream media, Ayn Rand was one of the most important thinkers in the history of capitalism. The reason is that as a novelist she romanticized and idealized the entrepreneur in her masterpiece Atlas Shrugged (1957), thus providing an inspired ethical defense of capitalism. Influenced by the Romantics like Victor Hugo – as well as Dostoevsky – Atlas Shrugged is a hymn to capitalism and the entrepreneurs who make it go.
Economics is a pretty dry subject. Its origin is generally dated to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) – not the most exciting read. Classical economics ran through other treatise writers like David Ricardo, Jean Baptiste Say and John Stuart Mill.
In the 20th century, the two great schools of free market economics were the Chicago School, headlined by Milton Friedman who wrote books like Capitalism and Freedom and Free To Choose, and the Austrian School, headlined by Ludwig von Mises best known for his treatise Human Action. Friedrich Hayek also deserves mention among the latter for his The Road to Serfdom among many other works.
While all of these are enduring classics, they were all nonfiction, complex, methodical explications of the working and defense of the free market system. None of them wrote a work of fiction that brought to life the inspiring work of the entrepreneurs who make capitalism go – except for Ayn Rand.
As a result, as Jerome Tucille famously titled his memoir of the Libertarian movement, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. I read Human Action cover to cover while I was in college – but I didn’t get much from it. But the reason I tried in the first place was because I had been inspired by Atlas Shrugged – which changed my life. And that is the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand: she wrote the greatest book on the moral foundations of capitalism which has inspired so many – especially among young people who have been exposed to it.
Inevitably criticized, dismissed, neglected and distorted in the mainstream media, Rand’s defense of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged stands alone for its moral clarity and power to inspire.
