Below The Beltway

Adam Kirsch reviews Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made in yesterday’s New York Times and makes this curious statement

Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. . . .

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

As others have noted elsewhere, this constitutes a complete misunderstanding of Rand’s philosophy and turns it into what most liberals seem to believe about people who support free-market capitalism — that all we care about is the accumulation of dollars.

Rand herself provided an answer to Kirch’s confusion when she discussed the concept of value in The Virtue of Selfishness:

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

In other words, Rand obviously placed more value on her ability to keep the entirety of Galt’s speech intact than she did about the 7 cents per copy in royalties that the publisher required to agree to include it in full in the book. There’s nothing contradictory about that, and if Kirsch had taken the time to read The Fountainhead, he would have realized that making money while sacrificing your artistic principles would have been the true contradiction for Rand.