‘Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right’ Is Worse than Incompetent

Who was Ayn Rand? In 2009, as if to confirm the unmet demand for a Rand biography, two books about her life were published: Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Marketed as objective, non-partisan accounts, both garnered extraordinary acclaim. Burns’s book was hailed as “an important study” (Times Literary Supplement),  “groundbreaking” (New York Times), and “excellent” (Time magazine). Heller’s was crowned a Bloomberg Best Book of the Year.

Fifteen years later, both are widely cited in scholarly works, university courses, and the media. Both, however, are worse than merely incompetent. Neither is worth reading.

In this essay, I will analyze the irredeemable problems in Burns’s celebrated Goddess of the Market (I’ll comment on Heller’s appalling book in a separate article). What Burns promises is a study of Rand and her interface with the American right, but what the book in fact delivers is an anti-intellectual biography of an intellectual.

What Is “Goddess of the Market” Actually About?

Published by Oxford University Press, Goddess of the Market claims to be a work of scholarship. Burns writes that her goal is to study Rand “within the broader intellectual and political movements that have transformed America since the days of the New Deal.”(4)¹ The book’s ostensible focus is on Rand’s “contributions as a political philosopher, for it is here that she has exerted her greatest influence.” Burns writes that Objectivism has not impacted the philosophy profession, but that she is a “veritable institution within the American right.”(4)

We’ll return to consider this delimitation of scope, but taking it at face value for now, there are two crucial facts that belie the book’s declared purpose.

The first is an unscholarly engagement with Rand’s political thought. On page 3, for instance, we’re told: “In [Rand’s] work, the state is always a destroyer, acting to frustrate and inhibit the natural ingenuity and drive of individuals” (emphasis added).

This is false.

To ascertain Rand’s actual view of government, no archival research is needed, nor is it necessary to deploy a professional historian’s interpretive skills. Anyone with an undergraduate-level reading comprehension can turn to Rand’s widely available book The Virtue of Selfishness (more than 1.3 million copies sold), and flip to the essay “The Nature of Government.” Rand’s view is that government is a necessary good; and it is the deviation from government’s proper moral function, the protection of individual rights, that’s destructive.

Worse, Burns appears to know that her characterization of Rand’s view (“the state is always a destroyer”) is false. Burns’s claim implies that Rand was a libertarian or anarchist. Rand not only rejects anarchism as inimical to freedom, she also explicitly disavowed libertarianism (see “Man’s Rights” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). Burns knows this, because she writes about Rand’s opposition to both. Moreover, Burns also seems to be aware that Rand has a positive conception of what a government should do – indeed, that it is not, in fact, “always a destroyer” – because elsewhere she mentions Rand’s essay on this subject and quotes from it on government’s vital role (212, 252).

Let me underscore that this false claim appears not in some throwaway footnote, but the book’s introduction. To put it kindly: for a purported work of scholarship, this kind of slipshod editing is beyond negligent.

The second thing to notice about Goddess of the Market is that it exhibits a stunning lack of interest in the interface between Rand’s political thought and that of the twentieth-century political right in America.

For instance, given William F. Buckley’s prominence in conservatism, it would be fascinating to compare his analysis in Up from Liberalism (1959) alongside Rand’s assessment of “liberals” from that era. Buckley complains that “liberals” tend to “believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason.”² By contrast, Rand argues that “liberals” exhibit a growing contempt for facts, truth, and reason. In her analysis, “liberals” were animated by an inhuman moral ideal: “They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery. So they evade the issue, for fear of discovering that their goal is evil.”³ Because they lied to themselves about the nature of their goals, they were on a downward spiral of cognitive disintegration, becoming ever more anti-intellectual.

This is a philosophic disagreement, and it flows from Rand’s distinctive intellectual framework. But this is not a point featured in Burns’s account. (Noting the growing religiosity on the right and Rand’s repudiation of it, Burns at one point regales us with an anecdote about Rand’s comment to Buckley at a cocktail party, when she reportedly told him that he’s too intelligent to believe in God [139–140].)

Another obviously fertile topic for Burns’s study is Rand’s understanding of the dynamics between conservatism and liberalism as movements. Her analysis of that dynamic was distinct from the perspectives offered by conservatives and libertarians. It reflects her view of the fundamental (and unappreciated) power of philosophic ideas.

Why had liberals made significant advances politically? Because, in Rand’s analysis, conservatives had paved the road for statist policies, through their failure to question conventional moral ideas.

Altruism . . . is incompatible with capitalism. Even the feeblest semi-advocates of “reformed” semi-capitalism are dimly aware of this conflict; the majority of the rightists accept altruism as the unchallengeable moral code – and are unable to reconcile it with their political views. No man and no group can have or inspire confidence without a moral base. Hence the timidity, the evasiveness, the anti-intellectuality of the Right – and the loud, aggressive moralizing of the Left. While the Right cringes, apologizes, and mumbles about “techniques” and “practicality” – the Left proposes monstrously inhuman programs (e.g., egalitarianism) in the name of the altruist code, and hears no sound of moral protest.⁴

Given the book’s ostensible purpose, it’s astonishing that Burns declines seriously to explore this issue.

What’s more, for anyone even slightly curious about Rand’s political thought, there’s much to be learned from her observations of the fundamental ideas shaping the conventional left-right political landscape. Consider, for instance, her essay dealing with Supreme Court decisions related to freedom of speech, “Censorship: Local and Express.” This essay, I should emphasize, is readily available in the book Philosophy: Who Needs It. So, the fact that Burns overlooks it cannot be explained by insufficient archival research. In that essay Rand argues that conservatives and liberals share a philosophic premise about human nature. Both accept the “mind-body dichotomy – but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy.

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirit, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (note their concern with “academic freedom”).

[. . . E]ach camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. Observe that the conservatives insult and demean the rich or those who succeed in material production, regarding them as morally inferior – and that the liberals treat ideas as a cynical con game. “Control,” to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.⁵

This is a unique, confronting, and philosophic analysis. For Rand, philosophic ideas fundamentally shape the direction of political groups, of the culture, of history, of human life. This is a point not merely in one or two of Rand’s essays; it is a pervasive theme of her thinking. But this is not a theme studied in Burns’s book. That’s not a minor omission; it’s an oceanic gap. Rand took ideas (including her own) seriously. Her conviction that ideas matter impacted how she engaged with “the American right,” including conservatives, libertarians, the Republican party, and presidential candidates.

While posturing as an intellectual study, Goddess of the Market evades the responsibility of seriously engaging with Rand’s thought and how it guided her political commentary and analysis; how it shaped her evaluation of allies and enemies; and how it informed her decisions about whom she supported and refused to support. Where Burns does relate Rand to “the American right,” it’s in the main a shallow chronicle of her interactions with right-leaning writers and activists, salted with accounts of political factionalism.⁶

The book, therefore, is misleading. In reality it is not an intellectual study. It is a book unworthy of its subject, “Ayn Rand and the American Right,” because it drains Rand’s life and thought of intellectual substance.

A Competent Biography?

Goddess of the Market fails to live up to its subtitle or Burns’s stated purpose. But some readers likely take it to be a simple biography of Rand, the famous author and public figure. When read that way, is it at least competent?

Let me begin by addressing a possible worry about objectivity. Since I work at the Ayn Rand Institute, you might think: “He’s a superfan, so, of course, he’ll only accept a hagiography.” No, I would be equally critical of a “hagiography,” because that term typically denotes a work that’s non-objective in its own peculiar way, showering undeserved praise on its subject. I have a dismal assessment of Burns’s book even if read as a simple biography of an intellectual and public figure, but not because she reaches conclusions or evaluations that I disagree with. It’s because her methodology fails to meet reasonable, uncontroversial standards, which are applicable universally, not uniquely to Rand. The evaluative criteria I’ve deployed would apply equally to a biography of, say, Karl Marx or George Orwell or Sigmund Freud.

First, the biography needs to recognize the subject’s own self-conception, insofar as he or she has spoken about the arc of their own life and work. What does the subject regard as essential to their character, their thought, their career? A biographer’s task is to evaluate the evidence for the subject’s self-conception and justify their own assessment. It’s silly to think a biographer has to agree with let alone admire their subject’s ideas and theories. So, for example, a capitalist can write an accurate biography of Karl Marx, even if he disagrees with Marx’s self-conception and regards his doctrines as pernicious to human life.

Second, the biography needs to exhibit a basic understanding of the subject’s work, so that at minimum a reader is offered an accurate presentation of it. A biographer of Orwell, say, need not have a Ph.D. in literature or history or political thought. What’s required is attentive engagement with Orwell’s novels and essays. Absent that baseline grasp of his work, we can have little or no confidence in a biography’s interpretation of its subject, or the themes, issues, and concerns that animated him. If a biography portrays Orwell as an irritable writer, with nothing significant to say about totalitarianism, then it betrays a failure to comprehend his work.

Third, the need of objectivity in research and writing – a necessary condition of all nonfiction – gains added importance with controversial figures, such as Rand or Freud or Orwell. This is a considerable responsibility. It includes being rigorous in evaluating historical sources; weighing their credibility and limitations; and, crucially, guarding against (and offsetting) whatever biases may be present in a given source and the biographer’s own thinking. For instance, it would be non-objective for a biographer with a bleak view of psychoanalysis to short shrift Freud’s own arguments and theories, but uncritically present as fact the opinions of Freud’s vociferous and least scientific critics. Whatever you might think of Freud, such a biography would be vitiated.

Failing to meet these three criteria, Burns’s Goddess of the Market is marked by a basic non-objectivity even if read as a simple biography of Rand the intellectual. Imagine a life of Orwell without serious consideration of his writings on totalitarianism, of Marx without Das Kapital, of Freud without his psychoanalytic theory. What emerges from the pages of Burns is not the intellect behind The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and the Virtue of Selfishness, but an effigy.

Major Features of Rand’s Self-Concept

What are major features of Rand’s self-concept as a writer and thinker that a biographer would need to engage with? How did Rand herself view the arc of her career? How did she describe her motivation?

In her own words: “The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself – to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.” Rand described her approach to literature: “I write – and read – for the sake of the story.” Her “basic test for any story is: Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life?”⁷

Neither “the philosophic enlightenment” of her readers, nor the “beneficial influence” her books may have on people, nor the fostering of a reader’s “intellectual development”: none of these is primary. Though important, these were all “secondary considerations” and “merely consequences and effects, not first causes or prime movers.” Her novels, she holds, allow the reader to experience in vivid, concrete form the full, immediate reality of abstract ideals, embodied in such characters as Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart. The importance of this experience is not in what a person “learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic ‘message,’ but the life-giving fact of experiencing” a moment “of love for existence.”⁸

A second major feature of Rand’s self-concept (mirrored in her philosophy and art) is the power of choice, the fundamental role of free will, in human life as such – her own life and that of every person. She upheld the view that as “man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul”: through our choices, each of us “must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining.”⁹ Notice how she describes her lifepath in a postscript to Atlas Shrugged (with my emphasis added in italics):

I decided to be a writer at the age of nine, and everything I have done was integrated to that purpose. I am an American by choice and conviction. I was born in Europe, but I came to America because this was the country based on my moral premises and the only country where one could be fully free to write.

At university she had chosen to study history “to have a factual knowledge of men’s past, for my future writing” and took a special interest in philosophy “to achieve an objective definition of my values. I found that the first could be learned, but the second had to be done by me.”

In her self-concept, Rand is an individual in command of her own trajectory. She chose her values and ideas, formed her own convictions, set her own direction. Having immigrated to America, “I had a difficult struggle, earning my living at odd jobs, until I could make a financial success of my writing.”¹⁰ Rand persevered in a chosen course of action, because she was dedicated to a positive aim: achieving her literary goal. Fundamentally, Rand saw herself as a sovereign being.

Closely integrated to the role of volition in life is a third major feature of Rand’s self-concept (which, again, is reflected in her work): her emphasis on the role of philosophy in life. Whereas many philosophers in the twentieth century obsessed over esoteric puzzles and irrelevant-to-daily-life moral dilemmas, Rand regarded the subject of philosophy as both fundamental and inescapable in life. In her view, it “deals with the most crucial, the life-or-death issues of man’s existence,” offering needed guidance for thought and action in everyday life.¹¹

Precisely because she saw philosophic ideas as so influential, they pervade her thought and her fiction. The literary goal of projecting an ideal necessarily depends on a moral foundation. What drove her to formulate her own moral ideals is the goal of realizing her literary vision.

In the post–Atlas Shrugged phase of her career, Rand focused on the nonfiction articulation and application of her philosophy, reflecting her view that “There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible.” “Moral values,” she wrote, “are the motive power of a man’s actions.”¹² By choice and lifelong conviction, Rand is a consummate idealist.

Disregarding Rand’s Self-Conception

What explains Rand the bootstrapping immigrant, the bestselling novelist, the thinker defying millennia of philosophic thought? What we find in Burns is a non-answer.

Instead of engaging with Rand’s self-concept and weighing it critically, Goddess of the Market brushes it aside. There are perfunctory, fleeting comments on how Rand viewed herself, but no sustained argument that she was wrong and the biographer’s assessment is right. Burns does not trouble herself to seriously engage with, let alone attempt to refute, Rand’s explicit position and arguments that human beings have free will, that determinism is false and incoherent. Yet Burns portrays Rand as buffeted and essentially shaped by outside forces.

Centrally important to understanding Rand, Burns insists, is a childhood trauma during the Soviet takeover in Russia. Burns writes: “Rand’s defense of individualism, celebration of capitalism, and controversial morality of selfishness can be understood only against the backdrop of her historical moment. All sprang from her early life experiences in Communist Russia and became the most powerful and deeply enduring of her messages” (2–3; emphasis added). A searing event, we’re told, was the Soviet expropriation of the pharmacy belonging to Rand’s father.

From early on, external factors defined Rand: “Consistency was the principle that grabbed her attention, not surprising given her unpredictable and frightening life” under the Soviets (13). While attending Petrograd State University, Rand “was immune to the passions of revolutionary politics, inured against any radicalism by the travails her family was enduring” (15). The New Deal, we’re told, reminded Rand of “those soldiers who had taken over her father’s business.” Moreover, the (supposedly naive) Rand “could see little difference between armed Communist revolutionaries and Roosevelt’s expansion of the federal government.”(38) During her years in Hollywood, Rand “remained committed to the competitive market system her father had thrived under during her youth” (35), and her interest in the American political scene was a return to the “fascination with revolution and her father’s political ideas that had marked her years in Russia” (65).

Certainly, Rand’s experiences under the Soviets, including the seizure of her father’s business, were important concrete events that she reflected on. Every thinking person’s “historical moment” is obviously relevant to understanding them. But Burns repeatedly surfaces the notion of Rand as a woman defined by a lifelong anti-communist grudge. In this telling, Rand is primarily, even fundamentally, animated by the negation of a negative.

None of this integrates with the evidence of Rand’s intellectual development and her writings. The hallmark of Rand’s work is an unflagging dedication to a positive moral ideal, rather than the negation of its enemies, of which communism was one of many. Nor does Burns argue for the irrelevance of Rand’s turning-point choices in life; for instance, forming her basic philosophic premises (well before the Communists seized power) and choosing to become a writer at age nine (again, years before the expropriation of her father’s business) because she loved telling stories to her siblings; choosing to leave Soviet Russia, where she wasn’t free to write; or choosing to endure years of poverty in California while striving to break through as a writer.

The deterministic undercurrent of Goddess of the Market is incoherent. Innumerable other middle-class women born to Jewish families in early 1900s Russia suffered similar and even worse fates under the Soviets. One, and only one, of those Russian-born women victimized by the Soviet regime became a novelist–philosopher championing the supreme power of reason, the sanctity of an individual’s own life, the moral ideal of egoism. Why? No answer.

Disregarding the Philosophic Substance in Rand’s Work

Burns’s neglect of Ayn Rand’s mind pervades the book. Burns is surely aware that Rand commented at length on the relationship between her fiction and her philosophic ideals, including the notion that her work was propaganda. Nevertheless, and contrary to the evidence, Burns wishes to hammer The Fountainhead into the shallow mold of political propaganda. This, even though Rand named its theme as “collectivism and individualism, not in politics, but in man’s soul” (emphasis added). Burns quotes a 1938 letter from Rand to a publisher describing the book as “not political.” But we’re told that while Rand “professed a purely philosophical intent, the book’s very origins suggested its possibilities as political morality play” (43). The character of Ellsworth Toohey, Burns asserts, “promised to transform Rand’s supposedly nonpolitical novel into a sharp satire on the leftist literary culture of the 1930s New York.” (45) Burns acknowledges that the novel was to embody an individualistic ethics, but suggests that this ethics was needed for a political end: “to prevent the triumph of Communism” (43).

Burns rejects Rand’s conception of The Fountainhead without defending her own claim that it is essentially a political work. To defend that claim objectively would entail (at least) arguing why Rand’s view is false and grappling with the abundant counter-evidence to Burns’s assertion. What explains Dominique Francon’s demand for exalted ideals, for perfection – or nothing? What drives her attempt to destroy the man she loves? The answer, integrating with the book’s theme, is not a stand on public policy. The plot shows that it is Dominique’s basic philosophic premise about the viability of ideals in life. What explains the servile architectural conformism that Roark notices in the dean of his university and the leading figures in his field? The answer lies not in some anti-progressive subtext. Roark concludes that the answer lies “in man’s soul”: in elevating other people above one’s own judgment. Why does Roark turn down lucrative commissions for private homes and commercial buildings, even though accepting them might save his business? It is not any coded anti-New Deal propaganda, but as the story makes clear it is Roark’s unbending integrity, a theme that resonates with millions of attentive readers.¹³

Goddess of the Market is fixated on politics, without taking seriously that Rand’s political thought is a consequence of, and has to be understood in the context of, her philosophic system.¹⁴ Rand commented on that systematic integration: “I shall say that I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”¹⁵  

Burns seems to have noticed that Rand saw herself as a systematic philosopher, mentioning it in drive-by comments (e.g., 148, 159, 179, 217), but the book fails to grapple with this aspect of her self-concept. What did Rand herself see as her major intellectual contributions? How did her political principles derive from the deeper ideas in her metaphysics, epistemology (theory of knowledge), and ethics? What arguments did she give for her positions? These are some of the questions that even a simple biography of Rand the intellectual would need to take up.

For example: Rand’s unique moral justification of laissez-faire capitalism is rooted in her radical ethics of selfishness, or rational egoism. For Rand, the principle of individual rights “preserves and protects individual morality in a social context.” It protects an individual’s “freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, furtherance, the fulfillment, and the enjoyment of his own life.”¹⁶ Key elements of Rand’s moral code are spelled out in “The Objectivist Ethics.” Here is Burns commenting on that essay.

When it appeared in 1964 The Virtue of Selfishness brought the political and philosophical ideas expressed in Rand’s newsletter to a much wider audience. Most of the book reprinted articles that had already been published, but it did include one significant new essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” first delivered to a symposium at the University of Wisconsin. The piece reflected Rand’s new understanding of herself as an innovative philosopher. Much of the essay was heavy slogging, with Rand carefully defining such key terms as “percept,” “concept,” and “abstraction.” (211)

This is a bizarrely shallow yet revealing takeaway. Burns has nothing to say about why Rand carefully defined key terms, nor what this essay argues, nor why it is “significant.” The “heavy slogging” comment reads like an unwitting confession from Burns. It sounds like an admission that she’s unqualified to write a biography of an intellectual like Rand, who thinks of herself as departing from the conventional ethical views of her time. For in this essay Rand stakes out positions that challenge longstanding assumptions in philosophy: Rand rejects the “is-ought” gap in philosophy (the idea that facts cannot ground values); she argues that the grounding of moral values is to be found in scientific observation of facts about human nature; she argues that moral values can be objective.

To overlook all of that in “The Objectivist Ethics” is like saying that George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm is about the care and feeding of livestock. Which prompts a question about how attentively Burns has read and understood the material she’s citing. Elsewhere, she seems to notice that Rand viewed her moral theory as objectively grounded, but Burns appears unaware and uninterested that such a claim, if true, is hugely consequential. (199) 

It is irrelevant whether a biographer finds Rand’s essay convincing; the task here at minimum is to report on the nature and significance of what she’s arguing. Burns fails to do that. Instead, she immediately returns to her procrustean treatment of Rand as a political hack:  

From there she quickly translated her ideas into a common idiom: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.” Her elevation of the trader echoed the older libertarian idea of the contract society, in which individuals were finally liberated from feudal hierarchies. As she had in the 1940s, Rand was revitalizing the inherited wisdom of libertarian theory for a new generation. [Emphasis added.] (211)¹⁷

Burns harps on this unsubstantiated claim that, in fact, Rand is an intellectually unoriginal propagandist (more on this in a moment). Rand’s essay (as its title conveys) is not about politics but ethics; it is the foundational piece in her book The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Still more bizarre is the implication that libertarians were (or are) advocates of the morality of egoism, which betrays a misunderstanding of either egoism or the dominant currents of libertarianism, or both. The analysis Burns offers here is not just surface level, it’s non-philosophical.

Take another of Rand’s contributions to philosophy, her theory of concepts (part of her theory of knowledge). This is germane both to her self-concept as a systematic philosopher and to the substance of her ethics and political theory. Her theory of concepts argues for how we can identify objective moral values from observation of facts. This is a cornerstone of Rand’s entire philosophic system, and it’s expressed in a short book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Burns affords this book all of three sentences (227, 250).

Or, finally, consider Rand’s formulation of the principle of the “primacy of existence,” which is a defining feature of Objectivism. It characterizes her entire system of thought, shaping every issue within every branch of philosophy, and her fictional heroes.

The “primacy of existence” holds that “the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity.” A major implication is that “consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists – and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward.” Rand contrasts this with what she argues is a profound error running through Western philosophy, evident in Plato, Descartes, Kant, and religion: “the primacy of consciousness.” The latter, briefly, is the “notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both)” and that to gain knowledge of reality, a person must look “inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).”¹⁸

The “primacy of existence” is another cornerstone of Rand’s fiction and philosophy. One cannot fully understand her uncompromising advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, which she thinks safeguards an individual’s freedom to act morally; nor her ethical code, defining virtue in terms of an individual’s commitment to live by his faculty of reason; nor her view that reason is our only means of knowledge and guide to action; without appreciating Rand’s conception of a rational individual’s fundamental orientation to reality. And it permeates her fiction. For instance, one cannot fully understand the heroism of the character of Howard Roark without reflecting on how his independence of mind, his first-handed orientation to life, is rooted in his giving primacy to existence, not other people. For Burns, however, this holds no interest.

When key political views of Rand are discussed, Burns’s account is unreliable. For example: “Individualism” is a major theme in Rand’s work, but Burns fails to wrap her mind around this idea, presenting a mangled account of it. Individualism, Rand wrote, “regards man – every man – as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” Burns writes:

Rand’s vision of society was atomistic, not organic. Rand’s ideal society was made up of traders, offering value for value, whose relationships spanned only the length of any given transaction. (209)

To characterize Rand’s concept of individualism as “atomistic” (not a term she adopts) is to suggest that it’s incompatible with collaboration, association, and the mutual emotional bonds of friendship and love.¹⁹ To conclude that, however, you have to first grapple with the fierce loyalty of Howard Roark toward his mentor, Henry Cameron; the friendships he develops with a construction worker, Mike Donegan, and the sculptor Steven Mallory; the depth of his feeling for the woman he falls in love with. Burns fails to engage with such counter-evidence.

Then, Burns misrepresents the “trader principle.” Rand observes: “The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader.” Burns describes such “relationships [as] span[ning] only the length of any given transaction.” (209) But Burns never argues for this characterization of Rand’s position, and it is hard if not impossible to square it with Rand’s stated view. It overlooks her distinctive conception of trade as also, and especially, a spiritual exchange of value. “Love, friendship, respect, admiration,” she writes “are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.”

Nothing about that is bound “only the length of any given transaction.” Observe, for example, Roark’s enduring love for Dominique across years, despite her two marriages and attempts to destroy him. Or: how Francisco d’Anconia’s bond with a longtime friend, one he sees at rare intervals, outlasts “the length of any given transaction.” Or consider Rand’s vocal admiration for Aristotle. There’s no way for them to engage in a literal, concrete transaction, yet the “spiritual payment given” is real.

Burns fails to understand Rand’s stated views. And indifferent to the fact that Rand’s philosophy exhibits a systematic integration, Burns tries to portray Rand as a recycler of right-leaning slogans.

Though Burns admits that The Fountainhead “promoted a new morality,” she insists that “politically the novel reaffirmed the wisdom of the old ways” (94). In morality, “Rand was not the first thinker to criticize altruism or to suggest that noble sentiments often cloak base motives” (88). But Rand does not argue that altruism is a noble cloak for base motives. Part of her analysis is that ultimately altruism expresses a form of nihilism, the desire to tear down life-furthering values. Rand not merely refuted altruism, she presented a positive ideal, an alternative moral code. This, again, differentiates Rand as a philosopher (Nietzsche condemned Christianity’s selfless ethics, without articulating a systematic, let alone coherent, positive alternative). And it reflects her lifelong literary goal of projecting an ideal.

Such was the importance of this new moral ideal for Rand that when describing the theme of Atlas Shrugged, she stated that it was “the role of the mind in man’s existence and, as a corollary, the presentation of a new code of ethics – the morality of rational self-interest.” [Emphasis added.] Of course Burns is entitled to reject Rand’s own view of her philosophic contributions, but the first responsibility is to engage with it and then offer counterpoints.

Goddess of the Market drains Rand’s life and work of intellectual substance. The book attempts to transmute Rand’s philosophic radicalness into the anodyne: it’s just warmed over Victorian moralism, larded with libertarian-sounding dogmas, in a glossy wrapper. The result is a one-dimensional character – call her “Ayn Rand” – who recasts right-wing slogans into propaganda-delivery vessels resembling novels.

Flouting Objectivity in Research and Writing

Finally, we come to the third criterion for evaluating a biography of Rand the intellectual: the need for objectivity in research and writing. This is a significant responsibility which, as I noted earlier, includes evaluating historical sources; weighing their credibility and limitations; and, especially in the case of a controversial figure, guarding against and offsetting whatever biases maybe present in a given source and the biographer’s own thinking.

Though Burns documents her research with forty-five pages of endnotes, a bibliography, and an essay on sources, the book falls short of providing an objective reading and presentation of Rand’s work, including archival materials.

Discussing Rand’s thinking-on-paper notes to herself about the state of the culture in the 1930s, Burns tells us that Rand “wondered ‘if there are things in capitalism and democracy worth saving’ and speculated, in a Spenglerian aside, that perhaps the white race was degenerating.”(44). Oddly for a trained historian, Burns manages to sever this comment from its context and to portray Rand as someone who takes seriously racist explanations. What does Rand actually write to herself in that notebook?

The relevant pages are now online:

We have developed technically – oh yes! Spiritually – we’re far below Renaissance Italy. In fact – we have no spiritual life in the grand manner, in the sense it used to be understood. Is it the fault of machines? Is the twentieth century incapable and unfit for any spiritual exaltation? Is the white race degenerating? Or – is it only that little word “I” which, at last, after twenty centuries of Christianity’s efforts, has been erased from human consciousness, and – in going – took along with it everything that was human consciousness?

It will not be the purpose of the book to prove theoretically, point by point, why the morality of individualism is superior to that of collectivism, is, in fact, the only morality worthy of the name. The purpose will be only to show how both of them work in real life. [13–14; all emphasis in original]²⁰

The trajectory of Rand’s thinking in this passage is clear. Rand notes explanations common in the culture voiced by Marxists (“the fault of machines?”); by religionists (“unfit for any spiritual exaltation?”); and by racists. Dismissing all of these, she then develops her own analysis that the morality underpinning collectivism negates the individual (“that little word ‘I’”), that this is a fundamental issue shaping the twentieth century. Given that Rand rejects all three conventional positions, why does Burns lay stress only on the thread about “the white race”? There’s no reason to infer, as Burns evidently does, that Rand finds the latter more plausible than the other two. By flagging it, Burns traffics in innuendo: she nudges the reader toward a false assumption that Rand was one more racist conservative.²¹ Even if we grant that this case is an anomaly, Goddess of the Market is rife with an unadmitted bias against its subject.

There’s a pattern in how Burns tends to treat Rand’s critics. They merit our credence, whereas Rand is usually at fault or wrong. For instance, Burns writes about how Murray Rothbard, an economist, became fascinated with Rand’s ideas for a while, until he became a fierce critic. Rothbard was a professor of economics and libertarian theorist, not a philosopher. Nevertheless, Burns chooses to cite his dim opinion of Rand’s philosophic originality.²²

But it gets worse. For a book on Rand’s life and thought, there could be theme-relevant reasons to write about Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist and associate of Rand. Branden was prominent in the nascent Objectivist movement. He wrote essays for Rand’s periodicals on her philosophy and its applications, he lectured nationwide on her ideas, and he assumed the role of a standard bearer of her philosophy. But having emptied Rand’s life and thought of philosophic substance, Burns dwells on Rand’s personal relationship with the younger Branden.

Branden was Rand’s student, then her associate; the relationship became a romantic affair, which, we’re told, had the consent of their spouses. But Burns offers no compelling justification for why the topic warrants such attention compared to, say, Rand’s thirteen years drafting her magnum opus; or, say, the year-plus of hyperfocus she invested in a single sixty-page section of Atlas Shrugged that culminates so many of her original philosophic identifications.

A further, graver problem with Burns’s fixation on the affair stems from a methodological failure. Burns leans heavily on the accounts written by Nathaniel Branden and his then wife, Barbara, which are, at best, highly dubious sources. In what is surely no accident, the memoirs of the Brandens were released after Rand’s death. In their respective books, the Brandens each portray themselves as victims. Each openly admits to being serially dishonest. They admit that for years they deceived themselves and deceived friends and deceived Rand, while she was a close friend, mentor, business partner.

Burns knows that these sources are problematic. But instead of highlighting that fact in the book’s narrative, the point is relegated to an essay about her sources at the book’s end. There, Burns acknowledges that these works “do not adhere to rigorous standards of accuracy.” For example, she notes of Barbara Branden’s book that it includes “significantly edited and rewritten” quotes as if they were verbatim, and that it is “marred by serious inaccuracies.” Both books, she states, are “marked by a certain amount of score settling” (295). Instead of surfacing that in the main text of the book and assiduously including evidentiary markers, such as “According to Branden,” or “Branden asserts,” the accounts of the Brandens come off as factually reliable. Burns tries to justify her use of these (self-discrediting) sources in part because the Brandens knew Rand for many years and on key elements of the story their memoires align (as if lies never involved collusion) (295–296). Burns seems unmoved by the legal idea that Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, wherein a witness’s unreliable testimony on one matter impugns their credibility on all matters.²³

From a historian, this is lamentably credulous. But it meshes with the pattern I noted earlier, in which Burns privileges critics over Rand. What perhaps explains this prejudice is Burns’s view that “In falling sway to [Rand’s] system and then casting it aside,” many of her readers “learned how to think for themselves” (285). A premise animating the book is that repudiating Rand’s ideas is a marker of objectivity. This reflects the book’s own pervasive non-objectivity. It insinuates that Rand’s ideas are a kind of dogma that all intelligent people should dismiss – without troubling to engage with her ideas, let alone argue against them.

Exploiting Ayn Rand’s Enduring Appeal

Goddess of the Market fails as a study of Rand as a political philosopher interfacing with the American right. And it fails even when evaluated simply as a biography of Rand the writer, intellectual, and public figure.

Positioning the book as a non-partisan, objective account, Burns writes in her opening pages: “Though I was granted full access to her papers by the Ayn Rand Institute, I am not an Objectivist and have never been affiliated with any group dedicated to Rand’s work. I approach her instead as a student and a critic of American thought” (4). Yet a motif in Goddess of the Market is that Rand’s own self-concept and thought deserve no serious attention, but we should turn to and trust individuals who have broken from Rand’s spell.

Diminished to the point of triviality is Rand’s thought, her values, her distinctive idealism. Burns tries to recast Rand’s original, philosophic radicalness as merely the wisdom of the old ways, tarted up. The person we encounter in this book is a cardboard character. Her extraordinary, biography-worthy life and her enduring popularity as an author become less, not more, intelligible. The book trades on Rand’s name, growing fan base, and enduring cultural presence, while erasing what’s essential to this inimitable novelist–philosopher. Whereas Atlas Shrugged dramatizes the role of the mind in human life, Goddess of the Market negates the role of Ayn Rand’s mind in her own life.

I’m grateful to Ben Bayer and Onkar Ghate for their many insightful comments throughout the editing of this essay.

1. Page citations refer to the hardcover edition: Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).  
2. William F. Buckley, Up from Liberalism (no location given: Pickle Partner Publishing, 2016), loc. 19.
3. Ayn Rand, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” [originally published 1962] reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1986).
4. Ayn Rand, “Brothers, You Asked for It!” Part II, Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, No. 15, April 23, 1973.
5. Ayn Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 252–53.
6. See for instance Burns’s fixation on upheavals within Young Americans for Freedom, 253–58.
7. Ayn Rand, “The Goal of My Writing.”
8. Rand, “The Goal of My Writing.”
9. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics.”
10. Ayn Rand, “About the Author,” Atlas Shrugged  (New York: Signet, 1996), 1170.
11. Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It.”
12. Ayn Rand, “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?”
13. Which also accounts for why The Fountainhead is a favorite of assorted celebrities, including various Hollywood figures, who self-identify with leftwing causes.
14. See for instance: “Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles — specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism — as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.” “Choose Your Issues,” Objectivist Newsletter, Vol 1. No. 1, Jan. 1962.
15. Ayn Rand, “Brief Summary,” The Objectivist, Sept. 1971, 1.
16. Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights.”
17. Below I indicate how Burns refers to but fails to understand Rand’s “trader principle.”
18. Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made.”
19. See for example Burns’s claim that Rand’s ideal of individualism clashes with “collaboration and mutuality,” 284.
20. “Blueprints for The Fountainhead,”an online exhibit from the Ayn Rand Archives; section “Early Planning,” ms. pages 13–14.
21. Thanks to Ben Bayer for bringing this example to my attention and for sharing his observations on it.
22. Other examples of this pattern include Burns’s account of a situation involving Jarret Wollstein (221–22), and an open letter by Roy Childs Jr. addressed to Rand (250–51);
23. For telling examples illustrating the unreliability of the respective memoirs by Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, see Shoshana Milgram, “The Life of Ayn Rand: Writing, Reading, and Related Life Events,” in Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., A Companion to Ayn Rand (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 35–38.