Ayn Rand and murderer William Edward Hickman
A friend on Facebook lamented the fact that academics tend to equate libertarian thinking with Ayn Rand - “And it’s never her ideas of anything like self-ownership or individuality that get cited either. It’s always her batshit personality quirks,” like “Her creepy admiration of William Edward Hickman, a serial killer.”
My reply:
I’ve heard that something like 80% of serious libertarians originally came to these ideas via Ayn Rand’s novels - though their intellectual development hardly stopped there, of course - so perhaps it’s not surprising that many people, especially those who aren’t familiar with the genre, associate her ideas with libertarianism.
The Hickman criticism is unfortunately a case of critics dropping any semblance of intellectual context. Her journal entries about Hickman were written during an early period in her development as a philosopher, when she was going through a Nietzschean phase. So she admired the radical strengths of an Übermensch, while acknowledging his faults? How scandalous! Presumably Nietzsche would come in for even more criticism on this front, but somehow he remains perfectly respectable.
Interestingly, as Ronald Merrill observes in The Ideas of Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead is at root a dramatization of the female protagonist Dominique’s (and thus Rand’s own) progression from nihilism (loving Keating) to Nietzscheanism (loving Wynand) to Objectivism (loving Howard Roark) - culminating in the portrayal of an ideal man who “neither sacrifices himself to others nor others to himself.”
And so the criticism of Rand as a Hickman “admirer” amounts to saying her philosophy is too Neitzschean when, in fact, she explicitly grew to reject Neitzscheanism in favor of her own philosophy which eschews sacrifices in any form. Her two primary novels are quite explicit about this - which the Hickman criticism ignores entirely. Could one be any less fair in one’s criticism of a philosopher?
I do believe Rand had some bat-shit moments, to use your phrase. I also think it’s a mistake to give in too easily in our defense of her. Sometimes simply restoring a little intellectual context, and reading her actual words, is enough to reveal her as far more thoughtful than her critics would suggest. Given her truly massive role in promoting libertarian ideas, we do ourselves a disservice if we are too quick to push her to the back of - or throw her under - the intellectual bus.
I truly believe we undermine our cause if we’re too quick to allow some of the more ridiculous criticisms to take root.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.