Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  But Toohey also symbolizes the essence of the Russian sobornost’ against which Rand was reacting. In Russian thought, sobornost’ signified a mystic or spiritual union of all people in society. Individuals would allegedly retain their uniqueness, but in practice, the Russian ideal involved the dissolution of the individual into an organic totality. The communists merely secularized this vision of conciliarity; they retained the Russian impulse toward the material and spiritual subordination of the individual, but substituted the State for the body of Christ.

  Toohey’s newspaper column, “One Small Voice,” features endless attacks against individualism that reek of Russian sobornost’. In many ways, he extols the virtue of the cultic loss of self, a theme that was prominent in the writings of the Nietzschean Russian Symbolists. But Toohey goes further: he advocates the sacrificing and subordinating of the individual to the almighty One. Rand uncovers this pretentious use of altruistic language as an ideological tool to conquer the human spirit, to make men small and insignificant, to rule the masses by elevating mediocrity and ridiculing greatness.

  In her portrayal of Toohey, Rand also continues her literary policy of integrating the traits of mind and body. She depicts her chief villain as a repulsive swine. She writes in her outline, that Toohey’s “puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.”42

  Despite her emphasis on the individual’s ego as the fountainhead of human progress, Rand had provided a far more complex psychological portrait of the mass men as fragmented and incomplete. In opposition to this splintered picture of a human being, Rand began to articulate a nondualistic, nonatomistic view of the genuine individual.

  While writing The Fountainhead, Rand continued her paean to individualism in her novelette, Anthem, originally titled Ego (Reedstrom 1993b). Written in 1937, first published in England in 1938, Rand’s futuristic story offers an alternative to Zamiatin’s visions of a technologically advanced collectivist dystopia. Rand projects the primitive conditions that must predominate in any social order that destroys the individual. In Anthem, total collectivism has led to the obliteration of industry and the distortion of human relationships. Peoples’ names have been replaced by euphemistic code words and numerical notations. Even the word “I” has been lost. The rediscovery of this word by the protagonist of the story is one of Rand’s most poetic tributes to individualism. Foreshadowing the egoistic ethical credo of Atlas Shrugged, uniting body and soul through secular means, Equality 7-2521 proclaims:

  “I am. I think. I will. What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.… This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.… My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.”43

  At the end of the novelette, Rand’s protagonist has renamed himself Prometheus. He escapes the collectivist society with the woman he loves to build a new individualist culture. In her elevation of Promethean individuality, Rand inherits the Nietzschean-Symbolist leitmotif, without its penchant for Dionysian emotionalism, organic collectivism, or the cultic loss of self.44 The genuine individual is neither slave nor master; he does not submit to, or seek self-assertion through, the rule of the collective.

  EARLY NONFICTION

  Mixed reviews of The Fountainhead did not block Rand from achieving commercial success. In the early 1940s, Rand was planning to write her first nonfiction work, “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” She wrote a condensed version called, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” which appeared in Reader’s Digest. Rand considered the essay a “bromide” to serve as the credo for a broad union of Old Right intellectuals committed to capitalism. The group never materialized primarily because of its ideological diversity (B. Branden 1986, 163). Nevertheless, during this period, Rand had the opportunity to interact with several conservative and libertarian thinkers and activists, including Channing Pollock, Albert Jay Nock, Ruth Alexander, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the father of the contemporary Austrian school of economics and the teacher of the renowned Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek (163, 188). Rand championed the Austrian school of economics in her later nonfiction essays. Though she shared much in common with her procapitalist political contemporaries, she was often disappointed by what she perceived as their cynicism, subjectivism, and mysticism.

  Despite its political clichés, “The Only Path to Tomorrow” provides a first peek at Rand as a public philosopher. In the essay, Rand argues that totalitarian ideology is the greatest threat to civilization. She posits a historical antagonism between “Active Man” and “Passive Man.” “Active Man” is another name for Howard Roark. “Active Man” is the individualist. He is a producer, creator, and originator. He requires independence and “neither needs nor seeks power over other men—nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion” (Rand 1944, 89).

  “Passive Man” was another name for Peter Keating. He dreads independence and “is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told” (90). Collectivism breeds upon such passivity. It is an ideology that unites the masses through “the ancient principle of savagery.”

  Interestingly, Rand does not argue that the needy are parasites on the wealthy. She states emphatically that “Passive Man” can be rich or poor. Coming from all social classes, the “Passive Man” is a parasite on the genuine productive achievements of the “Active Man.” This theme reappears in much more sophisticated form in Rand’s mature critique of contemporary statism.

  Rand’s well-known antipathy for Soviet collectivism enabled her to contribute an anticommunist tract to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Written in 1946, the “Screen Guide for Americans” followed the same form as her earlier Reader’s Digest article. Rand supported the communists’ right to express their ideas, but argued that moviegoers and producers should not be obligated to patronize and sanction projects that aimed to corrupt American institutions.

  In the pamphlet, Rand posited a stark battle between Freedom and Slavery, between republican government and dictatorship. Of greatest philosophical relevance is Rand’s contention that the dictator is not an individualist. He is “by definition … the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collection of men” (Rand 1947, 49). Rand had transferred her insights on the “soul of the collectivist” into a successful piece of political propaganda for the Hollywood film industry.

  Throughout the 1940s, Rand wrote several screenplays, including the film version of The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey; You Came Along, starring Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott; and an especially romantic Love Letters, with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.45 These works adumbrate typically Randian themes, but they are of little or no independent philosophical interest. The 1940s were marked by something much more important to Rand’s intellectual maturation. The celebrated author began working on the magnum opus of her literary career.

  ATLAS SHRUGGED

  In The Fountainhead, Rand focused on the principles of individualism and collectivism as manifested within the individual’s soul. The personal conflicts faced by each of her characters are primarily internal. Each character is a mixture of two extremes symbolized by Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. The characters are defined not by their relations to one anot
her, but by their specific natures. Their social ties were secondary and derivative of the central theme.

  In 1945, Rand began to outline a new novel, initially called The Strike. She wanted to change her focus radically by delving deeply into the dialectical interrelationships between characters, social structures, and institutional processes. She wished to proceed “from persons, in terms of history, society, and the world.” Her emphasis was not on Active Man or Passive Man, not on prime movers or second-handers. Rather, “the story must be primarily a picture of the whole,” Rand stated in her journal.46 For Rand, Atlas Shrugged was “to be much more a ‘social’ novel than The Fountainhead.” First and foremost, the novel had to focus on the cluster of relationships that constitute the social totality:

  Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are out consciously to destroy him. But the theme was Roark—not Roark’s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation. (x)

  As a novel, Atlas Shrugged explores these relations in every dimension of human life. Rand traces the links between political economy and sex, education and art, metaphysics and psychology, money and moral values. She concentrates extensively on the union of spiritual and physical realms, on the specific, concrete means by which certain productive individuals move the world, and by which others live off of their creations. She attempts to show the social importance of the creative act by documenting what would happen if the prime movers, the “men of the mind,” were to go on strike.47

  No summary of Atlas Shrugged could possibly unravel its intricacies. The book boasts a long list of protagonists and villains, but it centers around the exploits of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, two industrialists who attempt to keep their respective businesses afloat in a global economy plagued by extensive government intervention and growing social chaos. The economic devastation wrought by growing statism is made worse by a conspiracy of omission. As the state becomes more intrusive, creative thinkers and producers from every profession begin to disappear. They unite secretly behind John Galt, a brilliant inventor, who leads a “strike of the men of the mind.” These people of creative ability desert their businesses and leave the statists nothing to loot. They retire to a capitalist utopia in the mountains of Colorado known as Galt’s Gulch.

  It takes Dagny a long time to realize that she is fighting to keep her transcontinental railroad alive in a parasitical society that is slowly consuming her. As the world heads toward cataclysm, the leader of the United States government takes to the airwaves to issue a call for calm. Using specially developed technology, Galt interrupts the broadcast and proceeds to explain the cause of the decline of civilization. His speech touches on nearly every major branch of philosophy; it is the essence of Rand’s Objectivist worldview. Galt asks the remaining producers to stop permitting their own victimization and join the strike. When the strike succeeds in stopping the motor of the world, the people of creative ability return on their own terms, to rebuild a truly human society.

  Integrating science fiction and fantasy, symbolism and realism, philosophy and romance, Rand’s novel inspires passionate responses from admirers and critics alike. Admirers see the book as the credo of a new intellectual movement, but critics from both ends of the political spectrum are repulsed. Left-leaning reviewers abhorred Rand’s preoccupation with capitalism, whereas conservative columnists were sickened by Rand’s atheism. Granville Hicks (1957) asserted that “the book is written out of hate.” He condemned Rand for “cheerfully” celebrating “the destruction of civilization.” And Whittaker Chambers, writing for National Review, sensed that Rand was heavily indebted to Nietzsche. But he believed that in her atheism and “materialism,” Rand had greater affinity with Marx. Chambers wrote: “Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Chambers believed that in the “dictatorial tone” and “overriding arrogance” of the book, one can hear a voice “from almost any page … commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”48

  These hostile reviews from the left and the right partially reflected Rand’s own belief that she had finally achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis that was neither Marxist nor religious. In her philosophic journals, Rand explained that her novel had to “vindicate the industrialist” as “the author of material production.” Rand wished to secularize the spiritual, and spiritualize the material:

  The material is only the expression of the spiritual; that it can neither be created nor used without the spiritual (thought); that it has no meaning without the spiritual, that it is only the means to a spiritual end—and therefore, any new achievement in the realm of material production is an act of high spirituality, a great triumph and expression of man’s spirit. And that those who despise “the material” are those who despise man and whose basic premises are aimed at man’s destruction.49

  For Rand, the “spiritual” did not pertain to an otherworldly faculty, but rather to an activity of human consciousness. Reason, as “the highest kind of spiritual activity,” was required “to conquer, control, and create in the material realm” (ibid.). Rand did not limit material activities to purely industrial production. She wished to “show that any original rational idea, in any sphere of human activity, is an act of creation and creativeness” (ibid.). This applies equally to the activity of industrialists and artists, businessmen and intellectuals, scientists and philosophers. Each of these spheres is accorded epistemological significance.

  By connecting reason and production, thought and activity, theory and practice, Rand intended to uncover the “deeper, philosophical error” upon which these dichotomies were based. As such, Atlas Shrugged was designed to “blast the separation of man into ‘body’ and ‘soul,’ the opposition of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’” Rand rejected the metaphysical dualists who had bifurcated human existence. She proclaimed in her journals that “man is an indivisible entity.” Mind and body “can be considered separately only for purposes of discussion, not in actual fact.” In reality, the human individual is an integrated whole.

  This vision is central to Galt’s sixty-page speech, which took Rand two years to complete (B. Branden 1986, 266). It abounds with ideas and principles that served as the basis for Rand’s formal philosophical totality. But Rand’s transcendence of dualism is just as obvious in those sections of Galt’s speech which were edited out of the final manuscript. Rand writes:

  You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?50

  Rand’s revolt against dualism was motivated by a profound desire to exalt a heroic and integrated view of human existence. Even in the sex act, Rand’s characters show a passionate spirituality that is not cut off from intense physical pleasure. In her journals, Rand explained that she wanted to dramatize the “essential, unbreakable tie between sex and spirit—which is the tie between body and soul.” The religionists damned human beings for the sins of the flesh, whereas the materialists divorced man’s mind from the functions of his body. Rand proclaimed that her morality of rational selfishness was designed for human life on earth. In her ethos, sex is as much a spiritual celebration as it is a physical one.51

  Rand projects this mind-body synthesis in a fictional representation of the “ideal man.” She explains that her chief protagonist, John Galt, “has no intellectual contradiction and, therefore, no inner conflict.” He experiences a joy in living that is not determined by pain or fear or guilt.52 Each of Rand’s heroes ref
lects this same “worship of joy” to a lesser degree, but all are united by Galt’s oath, one that is similar to the credo enunciated by Equality 7-2521 in Anthem. Galt states: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (1069).

  After years of literary and philosophic integration, Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957. She credited herself with having created a new, nonreligious morality through an aesthetic medium. She aimed to bridge the gap between art and entertainment. She wrote in her journal that traditional morality sees “art” and “entertainment” as polar opposites. Art is supposed to be “serious and dull.” Entertainment is enjoyable, but superficial. No serious work of art, in such a traditional view, could possibly be both entertaining and “true to the deeper essence of life.”53 Rand rejected this distinction, and presented her novel as an organic totality, a work that fused action, adventure, and sensuality with philosophy, contemplation, and spirituality.

  THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER

  After Atlas Shrugged, Rand turned toward a more systematized presentation of her philosophy in essays, books, and lectures. As early as 1958, a year after the publication of the novel, she was planning a book on her philosophy, which she had named Objectivism.54 Its subtitle was to be “A Philosophy for Living on Earth.” In her journal, Rand wrote: “The purpose of this book is to make its sub-title redundant.”55 Though Rand never authored such a systematic formal treatise, much the same could be said about the subtitles of her anthologies, particularly The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand sought to make these books’ subtitles redundant too. She labored for many years as the champion of both “rational selfishness” and “laissez-faire capitalism.” Her concept of egoism conjoined the adjective “rational” to the noun “selfishness” in such a way to collapse their distinctions. Human beings are most selfish when they are pursuing their own rationally defined values and interests. Human beings are most rational when their values and interests are self-motivated. Likewise, Rand sought to collapse the distinction between the adjective “laissez-faire” and the noun “capitalism.” Capitalism was an unknown ideal for Rand, because it had yet to be discovered in its purest and only legitimate form.