Not every famous philosopher had a degree in philosophy or formal training in the field.
We define philosopher based on demonstrated rigor of thought and systemic reasoning. A philosophical system reflects coherent theories and models, regardless of the school of philosophy or sub-discipline. Ideally, the system respects known science and social science research at the time of the philosopher.
Ayn Rand was not a philosopher.
What bothers me about this is that many progressives and liberals hold out Ayn Rand as an example of libertarian philosophy or conservatism. Rand was neither libertarian nor conservative.
She was a writer with strong opinions, often contradictory. She aspired to be accepted as a philosopher without engaging in the rigorous analysis required. The only thread linking her thoughts is Rand herself: she was her own “philosophy” through readers who don’t understand the nature of philosophy as a discipline.
Libertarianism exists on a spectrum, from left to right, from individualism to collectivism. The coherence begins with utilitarianism and incorporates ethical egoism. The more utilitarian model, often a more “left-leaning” libertarianism, supports maximizing benefits for a majority of people. The egoists focus on the self, and that is why they are often conflated with Randian greed.
What libertarians agree on:
- You, the self, are sovereign over the mind and body that belong to you. Mill wrote that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
- You, the individual, should be free to pursue any occupation or craft, feely choosing regardless of community pressures.
- You have the right to express any idea, theory, or belief you embrace, without penalty, as long as those expressions don’t limit the freedom of others.
- You have the right to the fruits of your labors.
Libertarians disagree on some rather significant matters, too. These include:
- Natural resources cannot be “owned” according to the libertarians considered “leftists.” The Libertarian Party of the United States and the scholars to whom they turn believe that since creative thought extracts the resources, one can and should benefit from the extraction of resources.
- Sovereignty of the self depends on intellectual capacity, according to some libertarian ethicists. One must have active self-awareness, sentience, to be a self.
Rand didn’t have such foundational, consistent, philosophical foundations for her ideas. She was not an ethical egoist.
I’ve written about the problems of Rand and conflating Rand with libertarians in the past. Recently, Scotty Hendricks offered a detailed explanation of why Rand shouldn’t be considered among libertarian philosophers or Austrian economic theorists.
The problem with Ayn Rand? She isn’t a philosopher
January 29, 2018 by SCOTTY HENDRICKS
Ayn Rand’s philosophical work is not taken seriously by academia because it isn’t very good…. Before the flame war starts, let me explain why.
Ayn Rand’s fundamental problem is that her arguments aren’t great. They often don’t support the conclusions she wants them to, or they reach conclusions that seem incoherent. Well-reasoned arguments are the critical difference between a person giving their opinion and a philosopher, and she often failed to provide them.
This isn’t to say that a person cannot be a respected philosopher while not working at a university and primarily writing books that are fun to read. Albert Camus stands out as an example of it being very possible.
Exactly. Brilliant philosophical thinkers exist without academic credentials. Camus was a philosopher. I would argue Dostoevsky was a philosopher and so was Kafka. These literary thinkers proposed coherent views of life as experienced and coherent value systems. You do not need a doctorate in philosophy to be an important thinker in the discipline. Likewise, we often forget that Adam Smith predated degrees in economics and John Maynard Keynes did not complete his degree in economics. Degrees are not the only marker of expertise.
Rand should never be held out as an example of deep thought, any more than I would cite Marx as an example of precise scholarship. But at least Marx had a coherent framework onto which he grafted some scholarly errors. Rand was no Marx, regardless of what her cult might believe. Marx’s errors might have been from ignorance, honest mistakes made when offering examples from history.
I can respect Marx. He made mistakes and misstated some history, but he aspired to scholarship and studied the works of other scholars. There’s little evidence Rand truly understood the schools of thought to which she aspired to respond. She was a sloppy thinker, period.
In his essay ‘On the Randian Argument’ libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out that Rand’s meta-ethical arguments were unsound and didn’t resolve the is-ought problem as she’d hoped. Libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer has suggested that her ethics are incoherent. Her arguments for what the chief goal of human life is all use changing definitions constantly and seem to drive towards three incompatible ends rather than the one she said she was driving at.
As I mentioned above, Marx — whom I consider extremely problematic — studied other disciplines to the best of his ability. He understood other perspectives and engaged them vigorously. Though I find the labor theory of value to be flawed, Marx was working from a contemporary understanding of what constitutes a product. Today, we know that labor can be conceptual, which is why a Facebook or Twitter might be more valuable than a General Motors or Ford.
Knowing current scholarship and knowing opposing perspectives — and respecting those with whom you disagree — is necessary within an academic discipline. Philosophy should be more than name-calling and fallacious arguments. Rand, however, was against other ideas, but what was she for? And her writings rarely manage to defend her own ideas against scrutiny. Any first-year philosophy student should be able to dissect Rand the “philosopher” if not Rand the creative writer.
Being aware of and accepting towards potential objections to your work is philosophy 101. Even Plato, who was very bad at it, did it from time to time. But any outside observer would think that Rand found disagreement to be objectionable in itself.
Murray Rothbard, William F. Buckley, and many other thinkers on the right disliked Ayn Rand and her greedy, self-serving pseudo-philosophy. Buckley famously compared reading Atlas Shrugged to self-flagellation. And, for an atheist, Rand’s followers are cultish in their passion. They don’t like to analyze her works, any more than she wanted to have her works subjected to analysis.
Many people have written on how her followers regarded her every word as truth, and how little tolerance she had for disagreement. Most prominent among these criticisms are those of anarcho-capitalist philosopher Murray Rothbard, who discussed the cult-like behavior of both Rand and her followers back in 1972.
Philosophers, economists, psychologists, and political scientists exist within academia who hold libertarian and conservative values. These scholars work at major universities, and many have been honored. In economics, in particular, scholars have honored peers on the left and right. While some fields lack political balance, overall that is not a problem in economics or quantitative philosophy.
It also isn’t the case that her ideas are so radical or politically incorrect that she is censored by left-wing academics who disagree with her. The highly regarded American philosopher Robert Nozick came to very similar conclusions on capitalism, the state, and society but did so with much better arguments. Likewise, even philosophers looking to argue for ethical egoism rarely make reference to her. The idea that she isn’t taken seriously because her ideas are of the “wrong sort” is easily refuted by the number of libertarians, ethical egoists, and free-market capitalists that still hold esteem in the academic community.
If academic scholars associated with libertarianism and conservatism reject Ayn Rand, that should signal to others that Rand is not a serious philosophical figure. I wish I could claim that no major economists or philosopher who supports market-based economic models cites Rand as an inspiration. Unfortunately, we have Alan Greenspan as the outlier who did embrace Ayn Rand. We also have too many politicians in the Republican and Libertarian parties claiming Rand as an inspiration.
Popular interest in her ideas continues, although this interest is, as suggested by libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer, geared more towards her skills as an author than as a philosopher. While she does have merit as an author, she does not have similar merit as a serious philosopher.
One book, and only one book by Rand, The Fountainhead, deserves respect as an example of ethical egoism. Everything else she wrote is painful to read, as Buckley suggested. She was a hack writer who appealed to a specific audience. Too often, the young students embracing Rand are also those who misinterpret Nietzsche.
As Whittaker Chambers wrote in the National Review, Ayn Rand’s fear of the masses exposes the greatest flaw in her thought — and that of too many “conservatives” now in power:
In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as “looters.” This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the plaguey business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.
Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.
Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.
— December 28, 1957, The National Review
By making “things” her primary focus, and the ownership of things a “good” value, Rand falls into the same trap as Marx. Unlike Marx, however, Rand doesn’t seem to comprehend that if things are how we value people, then ideas aren’t worth much at all.
Marx was writing during the Industrial Revolution. He was analyzing history. Rand was simply arguing that the wealthy are somehow morally superior because wealth must come from creation. Rand’s theories on materialism are several magnitudes more erroneous than anything Marx or later Marxists have proposed.
My libertarianism is of the left-leaning sort, which makes Rand’s association with libertarianism even more troubling to me when I try to explain the philosophical ideals that underpin my analyses of cultures and their structures.
If uninformed politicians (and voters) in the GOP and Libertarian Party didn’t mention Ayn Rand, that would be a huge step forward. She was not a disciplined thinker and should not inform any political conversation.