WEBVTT NOTE Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.480 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:10.480 --> 00:00:13.840 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:19.240 As I reported last week, there are two new books about Ayn Rand's life and work that 4 00:00:19.240 --> 00:00:26.100 are currently out in the bookstores and being reviewed in the media, both online and off. 5 00:00:26.100 --> 00:00:31.820 These are Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, by University of Virginia 6 00:00:31.820 --> 00:00:38.500 history professor Jennifer Burns, and Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by journalist 7 00:00:38.500 --> 00:00:41.380 and editor Anne C. Heller. 8 00:00:41.380 --> 00:00:46.420 Of the two, I'd say Anne Heller's is the better one, despite the fact that Heller was 9 00:00:46.420 --> 00:00:52.060 denied an opportunity to conduct research in the Ayn Rand Institute archives and to 10 00:00:52.060 --> 00:00:55.460 examine Ayn Rand's personal papers. 11 00:00:55.460 --> 00:01:00.320 It seems she wasn't deferential enough when applying to Leonard Peikoff. 12 00:01:00.320 --> 00:01:05.040 She seems to have given the impression that there was at least some chance that she might 13 00:01:05.040 --> 00:01:09.180 actually say something critical of Rand in her book. 14 00:01:09.180 --> 00:01:14.080 And Peikoff and Company obviously couldn't run the risk of letting that happen, and then 15 00:01:14.080 --> 00:01:18.380 having it get out that they had let her into the archives. 16 00:01:18.380 --> 00:01:22.380 Better to just keep her out in the first place. 17 00:01:22.380 --> 00:01:27.660 The fact is that Peikoff and company are far too paranoid to be able to recognize who their 18 00:01:27.660 --> 00:01:29.900 real friends are. 19 00:01:29.900 --> 00:01:36.000 Anne Heller is not an objectivist, true enough, but she has legitimate literary credentials. 20 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:41.380 She's a former fiction editor of both Esquire and Red Book, magazines that published some 21 00:01:41.380 --> 00:01:45.100 of the finest short fiction of the 20th century. 22 00:01:45.100 --> 00:01:50.640 Anne Heller knows good fiction when she sees it, and she's willing to go to bat for Rand 23 00:01:50.640 --> 00:01:57.200 as a fiction writer. This is a rare and valuable thing. For as Jennifer Burns notes in the 24 00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:03.040 introduction to her book, Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, there is 25 00:02:03.040 --> 00:02:09.720 a nearly universal consensus among literary critics that Rand is a bad writer. But Heller 26 00:02:09.720 --> 00:02:17.040 rejects this consensus. She writes of Rand that her ability to spot and skewer cowardice, 27 00:02:17.040 --> 00:02:23.220 and Justice and Hypocrisy is at least as keen and passionate as that of her ideological 28 00:02:23.220 --> 00:02:26.020 opposite Charles Dickens. 29 00:02:26.020 --> 00:02:31.300 Heller writes of Rand that she had the remarkable ability to write more persuasively from a 30 00:02:31.300 --> 00:02:37.060 male point of view than any female writer since George Eliot. 31 00:02:37.060 --> 00:02:40.020 The fact is that Anne Heller is right. 32 00:02:40.020 --> 00:02:45.580 Ayn Rand was a much better writer than most literary people give her credit for. 33 00:02:45.580 --> 00:02:51.420 And at her best, in, for example, the satirical parts of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, 34 00:02:51.420 --> 00:02:56.380 she was brilliant, one of the most powerful and accomplished writers to work in English 35 00:02:56.380 --> 00:02:58.740 during the 20th century. 36 00:02:58.740 --> 00:03:04.940 She was also, of course, a major figure in the recent history of the libertarian idea. 37 00:03:04.940 --> 00:03:10.900 The fact is that you can't hope to understand the contemporary libertarian movement, the 38 00:03:10.900 --> 00:03:16.900 that got underway in the 60s without understanding the importance of Ayn Rand in the development 39 00:03:16.900 --> 00:03:18.780 of that movement. 40 00:03:18.780 --> 00:03:25.460 Any serious student of libertarian intellectual history will want to own both of these volumes. 41 00:03:25.460 --> 00:03:31.820 And this brings me to exactly what Mars Jennifer Byrne's book, Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand 42 00:03:31.820 --> 00:03:38.820 and the American Right, exactly what makes it inferior, if only slightly, to Anne Heller's 43 00:03:38.820 --> 00:03:41.980 Ayn Rand and the World She Made. 44 00:03:41.980 --> 00:03:47.500 In a word, the big problem with goddess of the market, Ayn Rand and the American right, 45 00:03:47.500 --> 00:03:48.900 is confusion. 46 00:03:48.900 --> 00:03:55.220 Specifically, the state of utter and abject confusion which Jennifer Burns seems to wander 47 00:03:55.220 --> 00:04:03.660 around in whenever she tries to focus her mind on terms like right, and left, and conservative. 48 00:04:03.660 --> 00:04:10.100 are the terms she needs to be most rigorously clear about if she proposes to conduct a discussion 49 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:14.340 of the sort she does, in fact, propose to conduct. 50 00:04:14.340 --> 00:04:19.620 She gives her book the subtitle, Ayn Rand and the American Right. 51 00:04:19.620 --> 00:04:25.060 You'd think, then, that she'd make some effort to explain what exactly she means by terms 52 00:04:25.060 --> 00:04:29.660 like right, left and conservative, wouldn't you? 53 00:04:29.660 --> 00:04:35.660 Otherwise, how is she going to make sure that her meaning is clear, rather than muddled and vague? 54 00:04:35.660 --> 00:04:44.660 Now Rand herself was quite unequivocal and quite insistent that objectivists were not conservatives. 55 00:04:44.660 --> 00:04:57.660 This is how she responded to a question on that topic when it was posed in January 1964 by an interviewer for the Columbia University campus radio station, WKCR. 56 00:04:57.660 --> 00:05:03.660 Objectivism, most emphatically, is not a form of conservatism. 57 00:05:03.660 --> 00:05:09.660 I am not a conservative, neither is objectivism a conservative philosophy. 58 00:05:09.660 --> 00:05:17.660 To begin with the positive, I would say that I describe myself as a radical for capitalism. 59 00:05:17.660 --> 00:05:26.820 Objectivism. By radical I mean the respectable or original dictionary sense of the word radical 60 00:05:26.820 --> 00:05:36.020 means fundamental. Objectivism starts from basic fundamental premises in almost all cases 61 00:05:36.020 --> 00:05:42.740 diametrically opposed to the premises of today's so-called conservatives. So that to begin 62 00:05:42.740 --> 00:05:54.940 It's true that in this excerpt from her 1964 interview Rand does not deny that she's on 63 00:05:54.940 --> 00:05:56.160 the right. 64 00:05:56.160 --> 00:05:59.380 She only denies that she's a conservative. 65 00:05:59.380 --> 00:06:02.500 And that's not exactly the same thing, is it? 66 00:06:02.500 --> 00:06:04.940 Jennifer Burns thinks it's not. 67 00:06:04.940 --> 00:06:10.500 She told a live audience at the Cato Institute in late October that she has bent over backward 68 00:06:10.500 --> 00:06:15.420 to avoid using the word conservative to describe Ayn Rand. 69 00:06:15.420 --> 00:06:21.780 Throughout the book I juxtapose Rand to conservatives, but I don't call her a conservative and I 70 00:06:21.780 --> 00:06:27.180 don't identify her as a conservative because there are a multiplicity of reasons why she 71 00:06:27.180 --> 00:06:29.500 doesn't fit in that category. 72 00:06:29.500 --> 00:06:33.820 The most obvious one would be her atheism, but there's a whole host of other reasons 73 00:06:33.820 --> 00:06:38.580 which I'm sure you're all thinking of now which make her really incompatible with this 74 00:06:38.580 --> 00:06:43.580 and the synthetic modern American conservatism we know today. 75 00:06:43.580 --> 00:06:51.580 I'm not sure how successful Burns has been in her quest to avoid describing Rand as a conservative, however. 76 00:06:51.580 --> 00:06:56.580 Burns writes on page 209 of her new book, for example, 77 00:06:56.580 --> 00:07:02.580 that Rand was blazing a trail distinct from the broader conservative movement. 78 00:07:02.580 --> 00:07:08.220 Would this sentence make any sense at all if we didn't take it to mean that Rand was 79 00:07:08.220 --> 00:07:12.540 herself part of the broader conservative movement? 80 00:07:12.540 --> 00:07:18.020 It would be like writing, Elvis Presley was blazing a trail distinct from the majority 81 00:07:18.020 --> 00:07:21.460 of operatic tenors of his time. 82 00:07:21.460 --> 00:07:27.640 Burns writes on page 189 of her book that Rand's following among college students during 83 00:07:27.640 --> 00:07:33.240 During the 60s was a new generation of campus conservatives. 84 00:07:33.240 --> 00:07:41.360 On page 202, she describes the same group as a segment of the conservative youth population. 85 00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:48.440 On page 194, Burns explains the rapid growth in Rand's popularity during the 60s by noting 86 00:07:48.440 --> 00:07:54.720 that the more the guardians of respectability criticized Rand, the more irresistible she 87 00:07:54.720 --> 00:08:01.720 We became two conservatives who loved thumbing their noses at the ascendant liberal order. 88 00:08:01.720 --> 00:08:08.640 On page 204, Burns writes that, like most conservatives, Rand was energized and excited 89 00:08:08.640 --> 00:08:15.100 by Barry Goldwater's battle for the 1964 Republican nomination. 90 00:08:15.100 --> 00:08:21.060 If this is indicative of the restraint Burns imposed on herself by her determination not 91 00:08:21.060 --> 00:08:26.080 not to identify Rand as a conservative. I wonder what the book would have been like 92 00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:32.880 if Burns had given her impulse to call Rand a conservative utterly free rein. Burns went 93 00:08:32.880 --> 00:08:39.780 on in her comments this past October at the Cato Institute to offer a sort of explanation, 94 00:08:39.780 --> 00:08:45.060 something she never does in her book, of why she thinks of Ayn Rand as being a part of 95 00:08:45.060 --> 00:08:48.140 something called the American right. 96 00:08:48.140 --> 00:08:53.660 I place her instead on this broader category of the American right. 97 00:08:53.660 --> 00:08:59.540 And when I use the term American right, I'm not being pejorative, this isn't a code word 98 00:08:59.540 --> 00:09:07.580 for fascism, simply choosing the term the right to draw our attention to this broader 99 00:09:07.580 --> 00:09:13.540 ideological field that includes conservatives but is not limited to them, that includes 100 00:09:13.540 --> 00:09:20.060 and other groups, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, regular capitalists, classical liberals, all 101 00:09:20.060 --> 00:09:25.300 those who are interested in limited government and the promotion of capitalism as a social 102 00:09:25.300 --> 00:09:28.540 and economic system. 103 00:09:28.540 --> 00:09:34.460 I submit that this explanation is, if not totally vacuous, then at least profoundly 104 00:09:34.460 --> 00:09:35.920 unhelpful. 105 00:09:35.920 --> 00:09:40.980 It does not encourage the belief that Byrne's understanding of the phrase, the American 106 00:09:40.980 --> 00:09:44.780 and Right is in any sense coherent. 107 00:09:44.780 --> 00:09:49.400 Anarcho-capitalist, after all, is merely a subset of libertarian. 108 00:09:49.400 --> 00:09:55.080 An anarcho-capitalist is merely a libertarian who sees the implications of his principles 109 00:09:55.080 --> 00:09:58.860 and remains un-terrified by what he sees. 110 00:09:58.860 --> 00:10:03.980 If you say that libertarians are part of the right, then anarcho-capitalists are part of 111 00:10:03.980 --> 00:10:06.220 the right by definition. 112 00:10:06.220 --> 00:10:12.140 The same is true for classical liberals, otherwise known as limited government libertarians or 113 00:10:12.140 --> 00:10:19.580 minarchists, people like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Ayn Rand. 114 00:10:19.580 --> 00:10:24.620 If libertarians are part of the right, then classical liberals are part of the right by 115 00:10:24.620 --> 00:10:26.380 definition. 116 00:10:26.380 --> 00:10:30.340 But when did classical liberals get kicked out of the left? 117 00:10:30.340 --> 00:10:34.140 It's easy enough to find leftist writers who still claim them. 118 00:10:34.140 --> 00:10:36.900 Why are these writers wrong? 119 00:10:36.900 --> 00:10:39.860 What are regular capitalists? 120 00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:46.160 In what sense can anarcho-capitalists, or any anarchists of any kind, be said to be 121 00:10:46.160 --> 00:10:49.260 interested in limited government? 122 00:10:49.260 --> 00:10:55.560 More fundamentally, what do any of these libertarians have in common with conservatives, in virtue 123 00:10:55.560 --> 00:11:01.300 of which they are lumped together as part of the American right? 124 00:11:01.300 --> 00:11:06.580 The conventional answer to this question, of course, is that both conservatives and libertarians 125 00:11:06.580 --> 00:11:13.580 advocate individual freedom and free markets. In fact, this is not the case. 126 00:11:13.580 --> 00:11:18.580 As Ayn Rand told that WKCR interviewer back in 1964, 127 00:11:18.580 --> 00:11:26.580 A conservative today is supposed to be someone who is opposed to the welfare state and therefore 128 00:11:26.580 --> 00:11:52.300 Nor should this surprise anybody. 129 00:11:52.300 --> 00:11:58.060 For historical reasons, dating back to the political shifts of the New Deal era, American 130 00:11:58.060 --> 00:12:01.540 conservatives use libertarian rhetoric. 131 00:12:01.540 --> 00:12:07.060 But it is nothing but rhetoric, nothing but wind. 132 00:12:07.060 --> 00:12:12.420 Conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush do not shrink government, 133 00:12:12.420 --> 00:12:14.020 they expand it. 134 00:12:14.020 --> 00:12:19.600 They do not lower taxes, they raise them, or they increase deficit spending, thereby 135 00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:22.000 raising future taxes. 136 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:27.840 They are just as much proponents of big government as the liberal democrats they deride for their 137 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:31.200 taxing and spending ways. 138 00:12:31.200 --> 00:12:35.960 Conservatives tax and spend every bit as liberally as their supposed opponents. 139 00:12:35.960 --> 00:12:42.780 They merely spend their ill-gotten gain on a slightly different set of programs and causes. 140 00:12:42.780 --> 00:12:48.500 Nor do conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Jr. advocate individual freedom 141 00:12:48.500 --> 00:12:49.800 and free markets. 142 00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:55.600 Oh, they say they do, but every time they're pressed on a particular issue, it swiftly 143 00:12:55.600 --> 00:12:57.840 becomes apparent that they don't. 144 00:12:57.840 --> 00:12:59.300 Not really. 145 00:12:59.300 --> 00:13:05.600 For them, as for the politicians, libertarian rhetoric is just a kind of surface polish 146 00:13:05.600 --> 00:13:11.080 designed to make them look different from their liberal opponents, from whom, in fact, 147 00:13:11.080 --> 00:13:14.040 they aren't all that different. 148 00:13:14.040 --> 00:13:20.200 Anyone who wants to understand how and why modern American conservative republicans, the 149 00:13:20.200 --> 00:13:26.160 descendants of the Federalists and the Whigs, came to talk the language of libertarians, 150 00:13:26.160 --> 00:13:32.520 has only to read Murray Rothbard's seminal essay on intellectual history, Left and Right, 151 00:13:32.520 --> 00:13:34.400 The Prospects for Liberty. 152 00:13:34.400 --> 00:13:37.240 Or, if you prefer, listen to it. 153 00:13:37.240 --> 00:13:44.280 You'll find it in both print and audio versions at this website, Mises.org. 154 00:13:44.280 --> 00:13:47.700 Conservatives are not advocates of individual liberty. 155 00:13:47.700 --> 00:13:54.480 They are advocates of statism who hide their true program behind libertarian slogans. 156 00:13:54.480 --> 00:14:02.320 Just as today's phony liberals are conservative statists hiding behind a smiling liberal mask, 157 00:14:02.320 --> 00:14:09.280 The American right is made up of people who can find common cause behind what is and always 158 00:14:09.280 --> 00:14:12.640 has been the conservative program. 159 00:14:12.640 --> 00:14:19.000 Big intrusive government that hobbles both international and domestic trade and production 160 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:24.320 in an effort to advance the interests of the big businesses whose contributions keep the 161 00:14:24.320 --> 00:14:28.320 conservatives themselves both rich and powerful. 162 00:14:28.320 --> 00:14:34.320 Ayn Rand is not now and never has been a part of the American right. 163 00:14:34.320 --> 00:14:42.320 Yet, according to Jennifer Burns, in the late 60s, when an independent libertarian movement began to take shape, 164 00:14:42.320 --> 00:14:49.320 at just about the same time Rand's break with Nathaniel Brandon destroyed the burgeoning objectivist movement, 165 00:14:49.320 --> 00:14:57.320 it was Ayn Rand who was instrumental in keeping this newly independent libertarian movement on the right. 166 00:14:57.320 --> 00:15:25.440 Here's how Burns expressed her idea to the Cato Institute audience this past October. 167 00:15:25.440 --> 00:15:30.520 How does Burns figure the early libertarian movement had the potential to become a part 168 00:15:30.520 --> 00:15:34.600 of the American left instead of the American right? 169 00:15:34.600 --> 00:15:41.380 Well, many libertarians looked, sounded, and maybe even smelled like the new left. 170 00:15:41.380 --> 00:15:42.380 They were hippies. 171 00:15:42.380 --> 00:15:45.020 They didn't like the draft. 172 00:15:45.020 --> 00:15:51.000 But their encounter with Rand, their vision of gulch-gulch, which once imagined could 173 00:15:51.000 --> 00:16:11.000 Fortunately, as Burns sees it, Ayn Rand came riding to the rescue. 174 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:17.000 What is the significance here of Rand's presence among this new libertarian movement? 175 00:16:17.000 --> 00:16:22.900 Well, it was really significant because it kept the libertarians from becoming just another 176 00:16:22.900 --> 00:16:26.060 wing of the new left. 177 00:16:26.060 --> 00:16:30.960 And what have libertarians become instead, as a result? 178 00:16:30.960 --> 00:16:34.160 Just another wing of the American right? 179 00:16:34.160 --> 00:16:36.800 Is that an improvement? 180 00:16:36.800 --> 00:16:38.820 Burns seems to think so. 181 00:16:38.820 --> 00:16:44.880 Because you see, the American right believes in capitalism, and the only way libertarians 182 00:16:44.880 --> 00:16:50.640 could have been accepted on the left as if they had abandoned their commitment to the free market. 183 00:16:50.640 --> 00:16:58.160 Could libertarianism have found allies on the left if they dropped capitalism? Yes. But that wasn't 184 00:16:58.160 --> 00:17:05.200 going to happen. According to Burns, when Murray Rothbard attempted in the late 1960s and early 185 00:17:05.200 --> 00:17:12.080 1970s to create a coalition between the newly established libertarian movement and elements 186 00:17:12.080 --> 00:17:25.080 I do think that capitalism, commitment to markets remain this fundamental stumbling block. 187 00:17:25.080 --> 00:17:31.080 Rothbard was more willing than Rand to say, let's kind of put that aside and attack the state. 188 00:17:31.080 --> 00:17:38.080 He was focused on state power, he was an anarchist and whatever way you could attack the state was welcome to him. 189 00:17:42.080 --> 00:17:48.080 Berns is softer on free markets than Ayn Rand was, and no more eager than Rand was to give them up. 190 00:17:48.080 --> 00:17:55.080 Nor would he have had to, necessarily, to consummate the relationship he sought with certain new leftists. 191 00:17:55.080 --> 00:18:02.080 Berns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives, or liberals, for that matter, 192 00:18:02.080 --> 00:18:07.080 refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. 193 00:18:07.080 --> 00:18:25.080 They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism, a system in which huge corporations aided by the state dominate a heavily regulated and centrally directed economy. 194 00:18:25.080 --> 00:18:32.080 This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate. This is what the New Left opposed. 195 00:18:32.080 --> 00:18:53.080 One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me 30 years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labor, specialize in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. 196 00:18:53.080 --> 00:19:01.080 Bookchin told me he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions. 197 00:19:01.080 --> 00:19:03.560 Indeed, there are. 198 00:19:03.560 --> 00:19:10.000 But if you pay no attention to this elementary fact, as Burns does, if you follow her example 199 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:15.480 and make no distinction between what Rand meant by a word and what others have meant 200 00:19:15.480 --> 00:19:21.880 by it, if you don't define your terms and use them consistently, you will produce a 201 00:19:21.880 --> 00:19:26.240 confused mishmash rather than a useful study. 202 00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:30.880 It's too bad that this should be the case with regard to Jennifer Burns. 203 00:19:30.880 --> 00:19:37.140 Mises is likeable and obviously intelligent. She takes Rand and libertarianism seriously. 204 00:19:37.140 --> 00:19:42.620 She does not condescend to her subject matter. She has read widely in the relevant literature 205 00:19:42.620 --> 00:19:48.240 and has dug through the private papers of Rand, Rothbard and others important to her 206 00:19:48.240 --> 00:19:54.980 story. She has made an honest effort to understand this body of work, this movement of ours, 207 00:19:54.980 --> 00:20:00.680 and to a large extent she has succeeded. It's just a pity she didn't take the time and 208 00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:07.060 and put in the effort to achieve a comparable understanding of basic political terminology 209 00:20:07.060 --> 00:20:09.360 and history. 210 00:20:09.360 --> 00:20:10.360 This is Jeff Rigenbach.