Here’s how you get read out of academia for unorthodoxy. “Right-wing think tanks can have Rand (even if she had little use for them),” Alan Wolfe wrote in an essay which appeared in The Chronicle Review on September 7, 2012 entitled “The Ridiculous Rise of Ayn Rand.”
“In the academy, she is a nonperson,” Wolfe declares. “Her theories are works of fiction. Her works of fiction are theories, and bad ones at that.” Wolfe directs the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College where he is also a professor of political science.
True, a search of web sites of so-called “right-wing think tanks” in which you key in her name will net you many entries but not all of them are favorable. Moreover, to assume that she has been embraced by the right to the degree that the late William F. Buckley, Jr. was is a bit of a leap.
Incidentally, Rand’s own relationship with the founder of National Review was, to put it mildly, strained. “When Buckley first met Rand, her first words to him, heavily accented by her native Russian tongue, were, ‘You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott,’” Buckley’s biographer Lee Edwards wrote. “For the next two to three years, Buckley sent the Russian-born writer postcards in liturgical Latin.”
“But levity with Miss Rand was not an effective weapon,” Buckley later wrote.
Yet and still, to declare all of her fiction off limits is, at best, a risky critical judgment, and, more ominously, as censorious as anything the academic Left has accused conservatives of.
For what it’s worth, yours truly has never been a Randian but would argue that her first novel, We The Living, is the Gone With The Wind of the Soviet Union. The first sentence of WTL really puts you in the scene: “Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid.”
As well, particularly with what we know now of the Soviet Union that Rand left in 1926, her assessment of communism, as she relayed it to a congressional committee in the 1940s is worthy of note:
“Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
