Hardly anything else in the world can be interesting if you are reading Jennifer Burn’s biography of Ayn Rand called Goddess of the Market. It’s the kind of book that while reading a bomb could go off around you and you wouldn’t notice. It is that engaging, page after page. She manages to be once objective and compelling, reconstructing Rand’s amazing life and work along with her relations with colleagues. It is also a fascinating psychological portrait of an ingenious but fallible self-made intellectual who had a far larger impact on American life than most people know.
For our own part, the Mises Institute gave her complete access to Rothbard’s papers and Mises’s too. She handled that part of the story with utmost professional and scholarly responsibility. In fact, I learned so much from her book about Rothbard’s own dealings with Rand. She has the timeline figured out in a way that has always eluded me: how their relations went from warm to cold to hot to frigid in the end. I think I see now.
The author permits the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about Rand’s ideas. For my part, I realized just how central the notion of intellectual property is for her understanding of how society works. She had this idea that all ideas had owners, and, as a result, spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what belonged to whom. This ultimately did in her relationship with Isabel Paterson. What’s striking is that there really wasn’t anyone around at the time to debate her on this point. Everyone in those days believed in IP to some extent, even Rothbard. Rand, as was typical, took the idea further than anyone else.
In any case, even the most dedicated opponent of Rand will come away from this biography with new respect for her and her contribution to the world of ideas. As for the dedicated partisans, there is much to learn here too, about the dangers of insularity in intellectual life and what precisely led to the famous defensiveness of the Rand circle in later years.
The author has a blog in which she provides first-hand reports from her work at the Ayn Rand Institute. Most interesting is that reality compared to the reputation. She reports that far from being a cult-like place of purges and fanaticism, it is staffed by serious professionals who are dedicated to integrity in scholarship. They gave her complete access just for the asking, no restrictions except the usual concerning living persons.
