Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Origins of an Icon of the American Right

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This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rands conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rands writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

Reviews

Derek Offords lively, authoritative and controversial book underscores Ayn Rands Russian intellectual roots and more importantly the habits of mind that she applied later in writing her famous American novels. Offord highlights aspects of American (and not only American!) radical libertarian politics that have been little recognized up to now but deserve remembering. * Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas, Claremont McKenna College, USA *
The high priestess of American capitalism was actually a Russian Nihilist gone rogue. That is the unlikely message of Derek Offords challenging and engrossing study, which shows how Ayn Rand turned upside down the utopian dreams and literary traditions of Russian radicals and wrote a series of capitalist realist novels. Although living more than fifty years in American emigration, she remained, Offord argues, a typical representative of the Russian intelligentsia. * Geoffrey Swain, Emeritus Professor (School of Social & Political Sciences), University of Glasgow, UK *

Author Bio

Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at University of Bristol, UK. His publications include Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy (1999), and (with W. Leatherbarrow) A Documentary History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (1987).