.
This book was originally written by the late Ronald E.
Merrill under the title The Ideas of Ayn Rand (1991). In 2013 Marsha Familaro Enright revised and
updated it under the present title.
.
Rand was one of my earliest philosophical teachers, waking me
up to the awareness of rigorous rationality as an all-important human virtue
and to a new respect for science (for this poetic mind). I had already been a radical individualist,
contemptuous of coercion against any peaceful pursuits of happiness, and from
early on I have been an extreme advocate of equal freedom for all, as well as a
lover of heroic esthetics (e.g., Zorro, Robin Hood, etc.), so those parts of me
were only reinforced by her similar tastes and her writings.
.
I still am fond of reading about Rand’s life and the cultural
movement created in her trail. Since I
have read most of her primary published works, both fiction and non-fiction, as
well as a lot of the secondary literature of Objectivism and its history, her heritage
is one of my main specialties on both philosophical systems and in the study of
mass movements.
.
Objectivism has had its cultic, true believer aspects right
from the start – but that contradicts the very heart of ‘objectivism’ as a standard
of sovereign individual judgment and intellectual honesty, doesn’t it? Rand herself is not above criticism here, as
she helped create that culture of ideological ‘conformity’ sometimes seen
within this movement of ‘individualists’.
Merrill/Enright sees this and doesn’t brush it aside, but they instead
balance their portrait of praise and blame rather well – rather ‘objectively’,
I think. No one will agree with
everything they say – and I certainly don’t – but the book is a good read for
anyone curious about Rand or already knowledgeable about her ideas.
.
Spoiler Alert!
Merrill/Enright gives away important plot details from Rand’s fiction,
so if you haven’t already read her major fiction you might put reading this
book on hold until you do.
.
The book’s chapters are:
The Controversial Ayn Rand; Who Was Ayn Rand?; Ayn Rand in Person; The
Young Nietzschean; Scourge of the Second-Handers; The Book that Changed the
World; Rand the Philosopher; Rand’s Politics; and Ayn Rand’s Revolution.
.
I stalled out at ‘Rand the Philosopher’. I had already read and digested so much of
this in my youth – and, since technical philosophical arguments and logical
entanglements are not my favorite part of the discipline, they often bore me to
death. (Yet the chapter is very well
done.) I got distracted and read other
things before returning to the book. I must
read this book again to savor the parts I liked most and the information that I’d
never heard before. I may revise parts
of this review later.
.
-Zenwind.
.
