Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

• Author: Long, Roderick T.
• Position: Book review

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

By Jennifer Burns

New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Pp. 369. $27.95 cloth.

The title Goddess of the Market is misleading; it prepares the reader to expect a sarcastic hatchet job rather than the serious, even-handed, and engaging book that Jennifer Burns has given us. Yet in another sense the title captures the central riddle with which the book wrestles. Can the market have a goddess? In other words, can one combine the free-wheeling, exploratory, individualistic character of voluntary exchange--the market--with an insistence on intellectual submission to the theoretical system of a single person--the goddess? The tension between, on the one hand, the freedom and independence that Ayn Rand so eloquently championed and, on the other hand, the often rigid and incurious manner in which she championed them is a central theme of Burns's book.

The subtitle seems more straightforward. The book is neither a study of Rand's personal psychology in the manner of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009) nor an intellectual biography in the manner of, well, none as yet. Instead, Burns's focus is on "Rand in relationship, both with the significant figures of her life and with the wider world" (p. 5). What Burns has to say about Rand's personal relationships is largely familiar material; Burns's more distinctive focus is on Rand's relationship with the American "Right," a term that for Burns encompasses both conservatism and libertarianism.

But there are puzzles here, too: Is there indeed a "Right" that includes both of these groups? Given the standard libertarian charge that conservative enthusiasm for free markets is mere lip service or a cover for probusiness regulation, does "the market" mean the same thing for both? Some libertarians identify with the Right, and others (fewer, but increasing) with the Left; still others, perhaps the majority, claim to be neither Left nor Right. Burns traces some of these strands, too, but pays rather less attention to the question of just how the term right is to be understood.

Burns's book follows Rand's career from her early enthusiastic engagement with other market-oriented thinkers to her later years of increasing intellectual isolation and paranoia about the "theft" of her ideas. Rand's greatest influence was paradoxically on thinkers and movements she disowned. This attitude of protective secrecy against a hostile world, encouraged by Rand during her later years, unfortunately survives among many of her students; Burns documents some of the disturbing alterations that have been made in the publications of letters, journals, and lectures (pp. 291-93; see also p...