More than 40 years after her death, Ayn Rand remains an influential figure among American libertarians, responsible for changing a set of ideas about political economy into a general philosophical and ethical system. Born in St. Petersburg in 1905 as Alisa Rosenbaum, she is rarely thought of as a Russian Jewish writer, but that is what she was. Gary Saul Morson notes, however, that Rand “never identified with Judaism and after she arrived in America in 1926 assiduously avoided mentioning it.”
Morson dismantles a recent attempt to demonstrate that there is anything especially Jewish about Rand’s work or thought. Instead, Morson argues that “her thought was Russian to the core,” a product of a radical tradition that insists on unquestionable more absolutes:
Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. . . . Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.
Morson also comments on the absence of children in Rand’s work:
Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike [her fictional hero] Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.
Read more at Jewish Review of Books
More about: Capitalism, Russian Jewry, Russian literature