Ayn Rand's sphere of influence
The always brilliant David Bentley
Hart skewers the thought of Ayn Rand in the latest First Things.
The occasion is the release of a
movie based on Rand's 1,000-page novel Atlas
Shrugged. Hart doesn't seem to have seen the new movie, however, devoting
his attention instead to the 1949 film version of Rand's other major novel, The Fountainhead.
No matter. Either is sufficient for
the critic to dissect Rand's aesthetically clunky and morally empty celebration
of capitalist entrepreneurs, whom she imagined to be Nietzschean supermen,
courageously shaping the world according to their own laws and necessarily
trampling on any lesser breeds who get in the way. As Hart says, with what one
takes to be a neat understatement, "I cannot
find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of
human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of
selfishness."
