How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis

(Paperback)

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Description

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author. A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policieshis attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rands Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rands Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevskys What Is to be Done (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspans ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking the virtues of selfishness, even in fiction.

Reviews

Weiners is an intellectual history told as a horror story. The history is a deliberately ironic one: how "rational egoism," the doctrine of Nikolai Chernyshevskys 1863 novel/manifesto "What Is to Be Done," which was the inspiration for Russian revolutionaries from Bakunin to Lenin, migrated to the United States in the guise of Ayn Rands far-right objectivism. Weiner rises to the challenge of paraphrasing Chernyshevsky and Rand and illustrating the clumsiness and incoherence of their books. * New York Times Book Review *
Weiners literary criticism, focusing on political and philosophical themes, is solid up to and including his explication of Rands Atlas Shrugged, written by a woman who, Weiner reminds us, grew up in St. Petersburg at a time when Chernyshevskys influence there was ubiquitous and unassailable. Weiners conclusion that unfettered capitalism is no more a utopia than the chained collective effectively damns both Chernyshevsky and Rand in one sentence. * Publishers Weekly *
[Shows that] appalling fiction by an appalling woman is not only a reliable shelf-scanning test when sizing up dates for arrogance or stupidity, but literally toxic. Weiner's pugnacious look at the bad, bad, morally and stylistically bad books of Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum pans back to show us Alan Greenspan and the crash on one end of a comedy of horrors, and a key Rand influence, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, on the other, via Nabokov and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. You've got to love a scholar who starts with On the Dubious Virtues of Selfishness - and ends with In the Graveyard of Bad Ideas, a closing shot of Atlas Shrugged's chain-smoking ghouls, a crack about lung cancer and the words The vulture will always come home to roost. -- Karen Shook * Times Higher Education Supplement *
Weiners book succeeds in offering an entertaining, if sensationalist, introduction to the politics of literary radicalism for a non-academic audience. * Modern Language Review *
An enormously helpful study ... This book is essential reading for understanding the growth of Russian literature in its golden period during the nineteenth century and for exposing the surprising origin and unsuspected genesis to the ideology behind Greenspan and Trump. * The Heythrop Journal *
Weiners key insight is connecting Rands ideas and the Russian literary intellectual lineage she emerged from with the 2008 financial collapse ... Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. But Weiner, a scholar of Russian literature, appears to be far more interested in one of Rands antecedents than Rand herself. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist best known for his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done, written while its author was imprisoned in a St. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject ... Weiner deftly handle[s] the contradiction here: a bad novel could not only become ideologically potent, but it could also inspire people who would not recognize each other as fellow travelers. * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Author Bio

Adam Weiner is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College, USA. He is the author of By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (1998).