Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it….Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too….All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the […]
From the FB page of my graduate student Dan McCool… Paul Ryan: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.” Update (9:15 pm) Another FB friend, Kevin Fathi, points me to this letter from Cornell political scientist Ted Lowi to the New York Times, reminiscing about what Hayek said about Rand: Back in 1961, Friedrich A. […]
Over at The American Conservative, political theorist Sam Goldman offers a thoughtful response to The Reactionary Mind. Among its many virtues, Goldman’s post manages to get my argument right. As we’ve seen, that can be something of a challenge for some reviewers. Goldman also agrees with me on some fundamentals. Conservatism, he says, is a reactionary ideology. It is a defense of hierarchy against emancipatory movements from below. It’s not a disposition or an attitude; it’s not a philosophy of liberty or even of limited government. (It supports the idea of limited government, Goldman says, but that’s a consequence, not a premise, of the theory.) It is first and foremost a coherent set of ideas about inequality that gets […]
-
Categories
Political Theory, The Right
-
Tags Alex Gourevitch, Antonin Scalia, Ayn Rand, Bentham, Carl Schmitt, Diderot, Edmund Burke, Foucault, Joan of Arc, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Mark Lilla, Nietzsche, punishment, Robert Nozick, Samuel Goldman, Sankar Muthu, Sarah Palin