Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 Rand's 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 Rand's 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
Trade ReviewDerek Offord’s lively, authoritative and controversial book underscores Ayn Rand’s 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 Offord’s 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Ayn Rand and her Russian Background 2. Rand and the Russian Intellectual Tradition 3. Rand and Russian Literary Models 4. Ethical, Metaphysical, and Epistemological Questions 5. Politics and Economics 6. Geopolitics Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index
