and many other booktv programs on line. go to booktv.org. type the name of the author or book in the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured video box to find recent and featured programs. a annheller and jennifer burns present their biographies of ayn ran rand. this heller researches the author's childhood and upbringing. >> today we are going to talk about two major new books on the line ran -- ayn rand. in the past 66 years, twenty-five million copies of ayn rand's book have been sold. sales have surged recently perhaps in response to the financial turmoil and the takeovers and bailouts and expansions of government. ayn rand remains a major influence on the libertarian and conservative communities. these two new studies illustrate the growing scholarly interest in her work. steven cox wrote in liberty magazine recently, ayn rand remains america's most influential libertarian with the possible exception of milton friedman and america's most influential novelists of ideas. in the second category there is no contest because there is no runner-up. i know that some of you wince when i say ayn rand was a libertarian. she insisted she wasn't and many of her fans maintain that point even now. when i published my book the libertarian reader which is a collection of classic writings on liberty from the bible to milton friedman and beyond and wanted to include a couple but the high priests of her estate would not allow that. they would not allow ayn rand appear in a book with a libertarian in the title. but anyone who believes in individual rights, free enterprise and limited government is a libertarian and ayn rand certainly did. as i said once to and ayn rand fan who didn't want to read knit was a libertarian quote another great woman of the 1940s, but you are, blanch, you are. she had a major impact on the libertarian movement in two way is. first is just a numbers. has any libertarian book sold as many copies as atlas shrugged? made the declaration of independence if you consider that a book. it was selling 200,000 copies a year. ayn rand has brought more people to libertarian ideas than anyone else in our time. and the passion, the people who read ayn rand and got the point didn't just become aware of costs and benefits and incentives and trade offs, their passionate advocates of liberty. they believe in individual rights and justice. sometimes their passion got the better of them. one of the reasons libertarians are scoffed at is the typical libertarian and the typical professor is a 19-year-old mail, the only rational person in the classroom and would not let you forget that. most are stalwarts of the libertarian movement and not to mention the goldwater/reagan movement. it is con -- to prefer the subtlety or positive rigor of friedman and it is more fashionable to sneer at ayn rand with her massive books and purple prose. the highbrow reviewers would rather read books about which no one would ever say i couldn't put it down. i guess i am a the prototypical phyllis seen. i don't know much about literature but i know what i like. i picked up at less shred in high school and read its 1,168 pages in four days. it was the most fascinating thing i had ever read. it had plot and characters and narrative force along with powerful ideas. today there are no ad campaigns for atlas shrugged, no literary critics recommending ayn rand. she just keeps selling by word of mouth and through the efforts of a few institutes devoted to her ideas. now these two books provide further evidence of a growing impact and interest in the life and ideas and impact of ayn rand. both these books are available in every bookstore and we have copies here and the authors would be happy to sign them after a formal session. i will introduce both authors and let them speak and we will open the floor to questions. in goddess of the market:ayn rand and the world she made the beetle jennifer burns from the university of virginia looks at the development of ayn rand's ideas and her alliances and clashes with other intellectuals. heller draws on interviews with her acquaintances and other resources to develop the first complete and independent biography. to begin our program please welcome the author of a goddess of the market: ayn rand and the american right, jennifer burns. [applause] >> thank you. can everybody hear me? i have a lapel mike and i don't know if it is working. it is not working. i will go back to this one. is this working? okay. it is great to be here. as i am sure many of you are aware there is a direct line that can be drawn from ayn rand to kato. there is a certain wariness and importance to being invited to speak here and i can't imagine a more informed audience. because this is an unusual crowd i will do an unusual talk. typically in my book talks i will make sure to give a lot of background about ayn rand and the details of her life. but i want to spend most of my time laying out three arguments about the influence and impact of ayn rand on the american right. the primary arguments i want to lay out are in terms of how ayn rand influenced the right. first of all, we should consider her the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right. as david said she had an incredible impact on her readers when they moved on from her, the basic framework of ideas stayed with them. i want to argue she was a major reason for the emergence of an independent libertarian movement of which kato is the full list flowering. i want to argue that her popularity among libertarians particularly her emphasis on capitalism and short this independent libertarian movement when it emerged remained more to the right side of the spectrum instead of becoming a left-leaning ideology as it has the potential to do. this brings me to the title of my book. goddess of the market: ayn rand of the american right. i told -- chose this title deliberately. throughout the book i juxtapose ayn rand the conservative but i don't call her a conservative or identify her as a conservative because there are multiple reasons why she doesn't fit in that category. the most obvious would be her atheism but there is a host of other reasons which i am sure you are thinking of now which make her incompatible with the synthetic modern american conservatism we know today. i placed her instead on a broad category of the american right. when i use the term american right i am not being pejorative. this isn't a code word for fascism. simply choosing the term the right to draw our attention to this broader ideological field that includes conservatives but is not limited to them. that includes other groups, libertarians and regular capitalists, classical liberals and all those interested in liberal government and the promotion of capitalism as a social and economic system. some readers of my book object to the fact that i put her on the right saying she really transcends all political categories. i get the point on this line of argument. this was my first book. i am going to work with the political categories we know and perhaps 8. around to attacking the categories themselves. i may not need to because they are shifting. one reason i think this is the in land we have seen in the last year. i think of iran as a canary in the ideological gold mine. a sign that things are changing. interest in her is a sign that tectonic plates are shifting under the surface. people are going back to the fundamentals and asking what really matters, what really counts, what do they really believe. this happened first and most notably in the 1950s when the conservative verdict came out and it was mostly negative. this was what i was drawn to study ayn rand because i was interested in conservatism in the 1950s in this critical decade as it developed. this link christian morality to free-market capitalism was developed. ayn rand played this critical role as a joker in the deck, the one that might have set the park. she might have been set to the side. the point is in periods of ideological formation ayn rand emerges as a person and an influence that has to be considered. something along those lines is happening right now. i want to encourage you to think with me about what does it mean that we are all talking about ayn rand so much right now? given this crowd, it might not just be an academic exercise. we might not be thinking, we might be deciding. let me start with the basics. the question is who is ayn rand? she was born in petrograd, russia, in 1905. when she was 12 years old her family lived through the russian revolution. i want to read the opening scene in my book where i describe this experience. it was a winter day in 1918 when the red guard pounded on the door in her chemistry shop. they nailed a sign on the door signalling it had been seized in the name of the people. the mad world of revolution had taken only his property, not his life but his eldest daughter, 12 at the time burned with indignation. this shop was her father's. study long hours at universities predicted dispensed medicine and advice to customers. now it was gone, taken to benefit nameless faceless peasants, strangers who could offer nothing in return. the soldiers had come in boots carrying guns making clear that resistance -- they had spoken the language of fairness and equality. their goal, to build a better society for all, listening and absorbing, she knew for certain those who invoke such ideals were not to be trusted. talk about helping others was only a thin cover for force and power. it was a lesson she would never forget. i will fast-forward from this point on because it is all in a book. her decision to leave. success as a screenwriter and early triumph with a fountain head, her career making books like atlas shrugged in 1957. i return to these very well-known novels and show how deeply ayn rand understood them to be political texts. bringing in unpublished material from her archives i show the extent of ayn rand's activism in the presidential campaign, how steinbeck of her side, how she understood the fountain head not just to be a thrilling story about collectivism but how she hoped it would be an impact on the new deal order itself and rows to the barricades of political activism and capitalists eager to roll back what she thought was the legitimate and immoral reforms of franklin roosevelt. this is where ayn rand made her fame. i turned to the question of how did she affect the american right. i spend a good deal of time detailing her connection to other pivotal figures. she knew every one. she pretty much got in a fight with everyone. i want to focus not so much on these luminaries but on the rank-and-file, the libertarian movement or the american right. what kind of impact did she have on those people whose names we don't remember today? the metaphor i like to use is ayn rand as the gateway drug to life on the right. there was a fee freshness and intensity, it is singular and unique. some of this comes out in a letter in the book that she received from a young fan who told her, quote, a month ago i noticed how much i was talking about your books to my teachers and classmates. as a result of my enthusiasm i have lost two friends. i am beginning to realize how unimportant these people are. what i want to stress here is this type of encounter, but many readers described as a spiritual experience was linked immediately to political awareness to personal political consciousness and activism. i turn to another excerpt from the book. ayn rand ideas haunted young americans for freedom. the brainchild of william f. buckley, the group drew up its founding principles during a meeting at the connecticut estate in 1960. there were young activists who influence the political future. buckley's new intellectuals would swear allegiance to god and country rather than reason and capitalism. although buckley intended the organization to reflect confusion as to consensus of national review not all members were willing to go along. the organization's student head had written rand a fan letter a year earlier telling her, quote, at was shrugged was the fulfillment of a literary promise i began to see in the fountain head. a logical view of existence based on experience which i always held but was never able to verbalize. he and a few others fought to make secular libertarianism a prominent part. in a dispute over the proposed organizations they prevailed against the suggested -- the statement had a libertarian cast. for other secular libertarian's brand's pro capitalist philosophy was exciting and her atheism and remarkable. this type of conviction hit like a thunderbolt might take students to a group like why a half. it was more than likely to take them to the 1954 presidential campaign of barry goldwater. rand was, at the start of his presidential campaign, and added goldwater fan who broke from the traditional stance of neutrality to urge readers of her primary as republicans to vote for barry goldwater. she felt that passionately -- the enthusiasm slowly began to flag as her enthusiasm for when the willkie flag at the same moment. and wanted barry goldwater to talk about capitalism and fundamental principles. she wanted him to make clear the importance of the separation of church and state. she felt he began to muddy his message and lose his appeal and and in the end she blamed him for losing the election. before she had her final disillusionment -- in his newsletter, member interested in followers were as enthusiastic about goldwater as they were about ayn rand. i read another excerpt that speaks to this. young enthusiasts notice he seemed to embody ayn rand's iconography of the independent manly hero. and at the libertarian remembered, quote, more important than his message was the fact that goldwater looked a part. one look at him and you knew he belonged surrounded by striking heros with blazing eyes and swirling capes. the campaign students are was saturated with ayn rand fans. he joined students for goldwater only to find most of the key people in both groups which mostly overlapped were objective tests. i kept getting into discussions of ayn rand's ideas without having read the books. the connection between ayn rand and goldwater's campaign was cemented by a dedicated student, one of his chief speech writers. liberally for his boss's speeches the girl armstrong echoes from ayn rand's capitalist speech. after goldwater's failed campaign for the presidency, this intensity and enthusiasm that he and ayn rand aroused continued to build. the 1960s where rand's heyday primarily through the nathaniel brandon institute and an organization formed by the right hand man. the institute in combination with ayn rand's newsletter and steady stream of nonfiction she produced and her commentary on current events made objectivism into its own subculture. ayn rand was the first to do a successful end run over the mainstream media. she got terrible reviews for atlas shrugged so she set up her own infrastructure, her own organization and went from there. the dissolution of the nathaniel brand institute in 1958 among recrimination and scandal and deep dark secrets meant this ideological energy that had been concentrated in the object of this movement had to find other outlets. one of the outlets it found was the modern libertarian movement which broke away from young americans for freedom in the late 60s. i will give you a prelude as i describe how ayn rand's ideas became reclaimed and used when she was no longer around as the figurehead of an organized institution. ayn rand's ideas were a powerful of the student right referenced by a popular symbol. the black flag of anarchy modified with a gold $ $ the flag had multiple meanings. the totem of john golf and atlas shrugged was a clear allusion to ayn rand. its juxtaposition of the flag of anarchy indicated allegiance beyond ayn rand usually to anarchy. whatever its exact meaning the black flag looked menacing to conventional conservative as it spread beyond the subculture into the wider conservative movement. reporting on the southern california young americans for freedom conference held in conjunction with the radical libertarian, gary north peterson late writer for the conservative newsletter was dismayed by what he found. instead of studious conservatives the crystal the conference was filled with eccentrics awaiting the black dollar-signs. to create offshore tax havens and argued over the finest points. when the talk drifted into a debate over whether or not riordan was the total hero, given the world in which we live on left. he concluded, quote, i think it is safe to say that it is drifting. it was and it was drifting in the direction of ayn rand's anarchist blend of both of those. this combustible mixture of objectivism and traditional conservatism would be wrapped in full fury in the same louis convention of young americans for freedom. that is a good place to date the emergence of modern libertarianism. a lot of my research in the later stages of the book is drawn from records of this movement in the hoover institution library in california and when i went into these archives i had a feeling ayn rand was important. she was so important i faced this serious challenge of figuring out what to put in the book because there was so much material. i had so much to choose from. i picked up this story after one of the key planks that libertarians brought to the americans for freedom conference. this was about draft resistance. not only was it condemning the draft defeated by the larger convention but draft resistance itself was condemned. a small pack of students gathered in a conspiratorial not. one had a draft card. the conservative within him lived still for he was unwilling to sacrifice the actual draft card. another dissident seized the microphone and announced that any person had a right to defend himself against violence including state violence. then he raised the card and touch the with the flame from a cigarette lighter and it burned freely into a curling black ash. a hand holding the torch of liberty was openly mocked. after a few moments of shocked silence pandemonium erupted. kill the connie's yelled the the facsimile draft card burners were ejected from the floor. 300 of the ideological brethren fall of the rebels out of the convention and out of young americans for freedom. a chasm separated the libertarians and the traditionalists. by the end of the year substantial number of chapters have either left the organization or had their charters rescinded. california lost 24 chapters. so here is the moment where we see ayn rand as an inspirational force, inspiring and encouraging libertarians to break away from conservatism to say no to this alliance which had become increasingly uncomfortable in the context of the 60s. the breaking point was the draft and the vietnam war. most saw the draft as an imposition on personal freedom and the war on vietnam, most conservative seeing the war as necessary to maintain the u.s. position against communist tyranny across the globe. in the aftermath of this convention ayn rand's influence on libertarianism becomes most obvious and is most easy to here is where i think ayn rand's influence is really key. she kept libertarian as some through her affection for capitalism more to the right side of the spectrum. let me read a final passage. immediately after the convention they attempted to put the exodus of libertarianism to the left but it was ayn rand who emerged as the more divisive influence. rejected by libertarian caucus organizers. in an open letter distributed in st. louis, the small group in new york told him to join the left if you will but don't try to hand us that crap about the forces of freedom being there. your view is pure negation. they put together some conferences in the year following st. louis but the radical libertarian alliance was short lived. more durable were the many objective is to groups that emerged in the fall of 1969. the ucla chapter put out some volatile stuff. one california libertarian inf impose the director, quote, black flags with dollars signs. a student reported the local leader, quote, changed her chapter into an open group and had been holding extensive and intensive study groups sponsoring speakers on campus. what is the significance here of ayn rand's presence among the libertarian movement. it was significant because it kept the libertarians from becoming just another wing of the new left. many libertarians looked, sound and smell like the new left. they were hit the east. they didn't like the draft. it ensured they were not interested in collective solutions to social problems. they were not interested in socialism. they were interested in trade and free markets. i think this is really significant because ayn rand keeping libertarianism on the right rather than the left is what made possible but political alliance with the republican party for the past 30 odd years. capitalism became the touchstone allowing gop rhetoric about markets, low taxation and binge is business friendly policy to win the day no matter what else they did or what else they talked about. that brings us to the question of ayn rand's place in culture today. the alliance between libertarians and conservatives has always been uneasy. it is a marriage of convenience. louder during the bush presidency. they were quieted by the need to unify against a liberal administration. the ubiquity of ayn rand makes me think this is a temporary peace and it tipped us off that something fundamental is changing. i am intrigued by the question that keeps coming up which is why are today's conservatives not so concerned about ayn rand's atheism in the way that a figure like buckley was. there are several answers to this question but on all it has to do with the shifting balance between conservatives and libertarians. what we're seeing now in american politics is the unfolding of a new kind of culture war predicated not on issues of sexual morality or religious belief that economic issues. the kinds of things ayn rand tackles in atlas shrugged. production and distribution and redistribution. ayn rand offers heroes and villains. whether she offers us a way out of the current crisis remains to be seen. thank you very much. [applause] >> now please welcome the author of ayn rand and the world she made, ann heller. >> hello. glad to be here tonight. i am going to come at the subject from a different perspective and probably briefly because i would like to hear questions. i always love to hear questions. my interest in ayn rand is how her ideas were influenced by her personal history and how that personal history reveals itself in her novels. she loves to save her ideas had been developed logically, that they were self-evident and nothing more needed to be known then what she thought. i am going to get some water. . she was careful not to reveal much about her background. nobody knew her real name except for her husband and his brother. no reader knew that she was russian. she said in her afterward this is a letter to readers, don't ask me about my hobbies or interests or where i was born and what i do. asked me about my ideas. i wanted to ask about her friends, family, emotion this the personal the texture of her life and put some flesh on those ideas. she put flesh on the bones of those ideas and that is what we love her for. her characters can be seen as avatars of ideas, characters that participate in the plot in order to advance it and represents the revelation of her ideas. what i found was very interesting. like the rest of us, ayn rand took what she lived through, even the details of her early life and put them in the middle of her novels. i am interested in ayn rand from a literary point of view because that is my particular interest but it was through her novels that she developed her ideas. the speech at the end of fountain head formed the basis on which nathaniel brandon systematized her ideas into what they call objectivism. one example of this, her first hero, you probably know about this character, cyrus, who was in a children's adventure story but ayn rand fell in love with it. she never forgot anything that made a deep impression on her and as it turns out, the translation was published, which she wasn't able to look at after the age of 12 you will see frank o'connor and howard work and john golf at to the place where they have hair over there i. similarly when you think about hank riordan and his response to the effort to get him to sign away the patent you see re-enactments of what happened to her father and the russian revolution. you should have been able to say no. he couldn't. in ayn rand's world he does. if the details of her life that i was most interested in, i discovered many things and i hope he will ask me questions about it but i will leave it at that. thank you. [applause] >> we will open it to questions now. please wait for a microphone so we can get you on tape. since i don't see a hand i will ask a question. one of the things i found interesting about your book was -- i have read things from both of them. one of the things i learned from your book is i got a better sense of ayn rand's marriage. i always wondered what is going on? why is this guy being dragged across the country? why does she want a man who is good looking but not intellectual equal? i got a better sense from your book. >> i called romantic life of ayn rand as another aspect of her life. she married a good wife who was loyal to hurt and followed her -- her own interests in acting in order to promote her career because she believed she was the genius and had to be supported. that was not something ayn rand could say. frank o'connor, her husband, she wrote this many times. she was a hero like howard work on strike against a corrupt world. the world wasn't good enough for him to participate in it. she said this over and over again. i picture him printing as she talked about this. she misrepresented the real character of frank o'connell who was elegant and gracious to herself and others. she went on -- a successful person in his middle years. she came to america to write with a purpose and a mission and accomplished it and put everything else aside to do that. her marriage had to conform to that pattern. >> a question in the back. a microphone is coming. i am going to ask jennifer a question. one of the things i found interesting in your book was your discussion of a ayn rand s.a. the manifesto of individualism and particularly the changes from the first to second draft. can you talk about that? >> it was something ayn rand road immediately after her first period of political activism in 1940. when this campaign was over she joined the club's which eventually dissolved. let's form our own group. we found one partner who needed a statement of principles. basically two days straight, 36 hours straight pounding out this document. the manifesto of individualism was meant to be an inverse communism manifesto. it did not include the word altruism more than twice. there was no development, no change in her thought at all so it came out full deformed. she sounds more like a classical liberal talking about individual rights and quoting patrick henry. she is not pushing against traditional morality. she is more tentative in her ideas. this was intended to bring people to her political side. that is the idea that turns up in the fountain head. then you are seeing more emphasis on this important theme of reason coming to the surface. i hope that gets at what you are talking about. >> i was one of those who thought i was the only rational person on the earth. one of the things that put me off was this religious fervor and dedication to her ideals which seems contrary to the idea of individualism and so forth yet ayn rand herself seemed to encourage and even demand this from her followers. >> how did she justify this? this is one reason for the title of my book picking up on this theme of religious intensity and her work. one of it is she provides an answer to the system. she definitely insisted on conformity to her views or agreement with her views from an early period but you see this changing throughout the 40s and it really changes and the 50s when she formed an alliance with nathaniel and barbara brandon. when she gets the unquestioning loyalty and affirmation from someone she considers her intellectual equal and she is no longer willing to tolerate dissent. how did she justify it? i and packed this long exchange between her and one of the last independent intellectuals she had a peer relationship with. he went to an early lecture and was horrified by what he called like being in a church and tried to argue with her what is going on. if you read the letter closely, seems to assume that if people read atlas shrugged and disagree with that they didn't understand it. >> so there's this great quote from jane alpert who read "the fountainhead" and said she learned from transcendent that it was moral to blow up buildings. [laughter] >> so she absolutely did have that effect on the left, and i think that -- that's one reason why i think some of her could have been pulled to the left. you know, i don't think there's a book in her influence on the left. i think there's a good article i think you can find a lot of quotes like that. another hunter s. thompson loved her. she's a real figure in 20 senter coulter. every -- so me people are reading or. you can read people's notes and diaries and excavate a lot of that. it was the selfishness, although that really stood as a barrier. you have to make up your mind were you going to buy this part of her? if you're going to buy this part of her you are not going to be on the left anymore. >> go ahead to expect i understand that most of rants papers are in the ayn rand institute archives. can both of the authors talk, say something about their dealings with the ayn rand institute archives? >> let me begin because i was denied access to the ayn rand papers, which are separate from the archives, as i understand it. and i'm told now after my book was published that i could have had access to the ayn rand archives if i've asked in a different manner or been there at just the right moment that i'm not sure. it doesn't make sense to me. >> so i was granted ask -- access that i was granted access that i would be writing what was called a special study. they told me at the time that somebody else was writing an authorized biography. and that for that reason, they were not letting projects that could conflict with his authorized biography percy. i assume that's one of the reasons they presided to anne heller. >> but it wasn't the only one. [laughter] >> and there are many -- i think the whole thing is kind of in motion and in play, and i was honestly very anxious about this. and i've been blogging about it in a series of postings at my website which is jennifer burns.org because only people have been asking me how did this happen. i don't even know how it happened. i'm delighted it did. i think if i had produced a manuscript that focused on the branden affair come at the centerpiece, i would've had trouble publishing what i did see. so i think the tenderness is about the personal aspects of brand. and i don't really know what their policy will be going forward. >> let me say one more word about that. jennifer, i think you are a graduate student when you first asked to look at the papers in the archives. i think that makes a difference. graduate students are encouraged to come and look at the materials, and know more about ayn rand. people who are writing books, as i assume were not in. are not. >> i think that's true. >> a question on the isle. and then we will take one here. >> i am steve from johns hopkins university and new america foundation. i like the image of brand, the religious figure. the other thing i was thinking of and i think of rand sometimes i think of the movie semi-tough with is one of the things at the core, they're going to this project called pyramid power, right? they're not doing this long football think at this period permit our thing and people keep asking did you get it. i don't know. i'm not sure i got it or not. one of the other metaphors, as kind of a leader of a personal potential kind of cold, i use cold in a very neutral sense in that. but this is a phenomenon we've seen starting really in the '50s and going all the way to the present, self-help qaeda organization that involved arguments about people's personal potential but almost always have certain kind of qualities that in common right to attribution that there is weak people are trying to hold you down here can any be able to stand up against those weak people, you can call them second hand is, call them what everyone. i'd be interested in both of your sense of how rand fits into that pantheon of self-help profit as well as quasireligious process. >> i'll give you one answer. because so many people read her at such a young and tender age, i think they react very viscerally to her defiance. whenever favorite words is arrogant in her early writings. and a singular heroes. and much of the soap philosophy rolls up in those heroes, especially in howard roark. and so i think that the young people who joined her in the '50s and '60s were particularly susceptible to that kind of emotional reaction to her. and i think they didn't go away. they were told not to read certain things. they were more and more, they were isolated. and so they -- they made themselves a cult. >> so one of the things that drew me into this project when i was considering it was actually nathaniel branden's post-rand career as the guru of self-esteem movement. you know, and he actually was someone who several of my friends had read, to great profit and great benefit. and i thought wait a second. he's connected to an right? how weird is that? that's not something i was able to really fully trace out. i think there's some good work coming out now about sort of 70s self-actualization. i think it very much in the american individualist tradition, even the mystical encounter with the cell. i think there's a lot you can do there. the other thing i would say is libertarians kind of tend to the sort of mystical self actualization and self-exploration ideas. there's a lot of the libertarians who encountered rand in the '40s by the '50s were some of the early people in this country to start taking lsd. these are business conservatives. they sort of go off the deep end and go off that. there's something about her work and individualistic tradition, i didn't focus on the. i think it's interesting that i think what branden to out of her work and how he popularized that became kind of pop psychology in the '70s. it really, really interesting that i would love for someone else to write about it so i can learn more about it. >> will take a question here and then take the mic way in the back quarter. >> i am from the atlas society. my question for both authors, concerned what you see in the terms of the separation of ayn rand's personality from the progress of ayn rand's objectivist ideas. because of rand was in office, of course she inspired many others, including myself, with a vision of the world, an exciting vision of the world. however, you can also look at the idea that we are separate from the novels. what do you see -- though i fighter and safety be very exciting as well and insightful. what do you see in terms of the future of a lot of the ideas that rand really focused on in her philosophy, such as the awareness of the producer, of his own virtues? things of that sort that certainly you see in politics and perhaps other areas. >> well, i think it will go forward. i think they can stand alone very well. but i don't think that they will be part of an integrated ayn rand philosophy, that isn't work upon by others. i think that the libertarianism we see today has been influenced by milton friedman and by many other thinkers. and it's in that context, i think, that ayn rand's ideas will be used and will live on. >> yeah, i would say it may be a benefit that she has less control over them now. and that the inheritors of her work seem to be losing some of the reins of control. i think synthesizing her ideas with other prospective mate create an even more powerful brew than what you came up with herself. >> back there. >> george mason university. what can you say about rand relationship with the two other great women of her era, rose wilder lane and isabel paterson, both personal relationship, if any, and intellectual influenced one way or the other? >> so, this is actually for the pet project of mine, and i almost stopped writing about ayn rand and starting writing about these three. and i have now been working on the rudiments of an article that kind of brings these three together. i think pattersons influence on rand has really been underestimated and underappreciated because i think their initial encounter is lost in history because it was mostly verbal or oral. i see so much in paterson that in rand. she is, talk about reason being important. all her ideas about the fosters, they go right into rand. in terms of lame, i find it did have a long relationship, and that was in had a argued about religion and parted ways that i detailed this is summed up in the book. what's interesting to me about laying and rant is to have such the ways of looking at the world. lane is a libertarian that has a strong belief in human interdependence and mutuality and connection. and rand just didn't get that and they couldn't see eye to eye. after some friendly letters, this quickly emerged as a flashpoint. been animating it took the form of religion. been a never met again. then lane would criticize rand and thought some of our ideas are good but she's as a worship of man is no answer to the current. that was her phrase in fact he said. i think there's a lot of really interesting parallels between them. the fact that three women played a huge role as an intellectual history, fascinating to me. that's something i'm still pursuing. >> with isabel paterson, i think they had a long relationship, and it came down to the fact that isabel paterson wanted to reserve judgment on a is a. and a. is everything. she wanted to leave a little opening for the possibility that there were things we didn't know. let me ask a double pronged follow-up to that question. first, it's my impression that rand is not much studied in women's studies classes. and here is a woman, who was the most influential novelist of ideas, a woman whose books sell forever, better than anybody else's. a woman who wrote a strong heroine, a woman who runs a real road, a woman who twist powerful businessmen around her finger. am i right that they don't talk about her in women's studies courses? and why not? dnssec and i will ask the question, most of the people in the audience are men. but both of your women and so is the authorized biographer that we're all waiting to hear from, as well as the original, semi-authorized biographer. talk about some of those gender issues. >> first of all, feminists tend to be liberals. and i think feminism and socialism share some assumptions, and i think it's very difficult for women's studies, professors, to accept, you know, to take what they need and leave the rest. the second thing is that ayn rand herself did not agree herself that she was a feminist. she wrote a very famous column in "the los angeles times" about -- i think maybe it was cosmo, about how a woman should not be president. because women should be man worshipers. and by that she didn't mean they should subjugate themselves to men. but that they should look up at the values that men have in comparison to women. and if they weren't looking up, then they were missing something. >> yeah, i would just add that rand, dennis have addressed a. susan brownell called her a traitor to her sex. [laughter] >> and there's a lot of difficulty moving past the rape scene in "the fountainhead." that doesn't mean you couldn't talk about rand as someone who expresses may be proto- feminism and a very retrograde ideas of gender. it hasn't happened yet. maybe it will. >> all right here i will take a question from a well-known randian feminist here on the corner. >> follow-up to that question, two things. one is one of the founder of the national women's history museum, in fact we talk today that rand will be going in. really what it comes down to is that most women's studies, most women historians, are victimhood proponents. which rand is anti-victimhood. that's one of the reasons she could never be studied in women's studies, because it would be a contradiction to the basic core of their approach. but beyond that, you know, what you see there about her not being a feminist, i think joan kennedy taylor, if she were still with us, which i did that is not correct that in fact, in joe's work, reclaim the mainstream should make a case that rand in fact is the quintessential individualist feminist. >> one could say she insisted all her life she was a libertarian but that doesn't stop us. [laughter] >> why can't the feminists have the same independent insight? i don't understand that. okay. we have lots of hands in the internet that i will take a question right here and then one right here. [inaudible] >> going back to being allowed into the archives of ayn rand, if rand were alive at the time that you came in looking for that, do you think she would have agreed with their position of not letting you having access because they might disagree with theirs? in the other question that tags onto that is, you know, i can back remember when they would not export anything beyond her written words. and now that they have gone into this, new, what they've done is really sort of driven more out of business. you have to admit it. that's a business out there and they need to make money just like anybody else. so now they are not as pristine, i think, as they would like to claim to be. i was wondering if i could have her thoughts on that. >> inspired by the fact that i think the ayn rand institute wouldn't approve of either of our books, they are probably glad to have been published because they can't help it increase sales of her books. and that's a large source of income for the ayn rand institute. i don't think she would want me to look at her papers. she was very much against getting to be any. not that i'm in me, but i'm sure she could find something about me that was in any light. [laughter] >> she was very, very very private. she wanted to leave her papers, as i understand, to the library of congress. that was her stated wish. it wasn't in her will, and so it didn't happen. but i'm very surprised by that. given that she wanted to get into the libra congress, perhaps i'm wrong, but i don't think she would deal much with us while she was alive. >> i read ayn rand as a freshman in high school, and a picture in "the new york times" book review, the greenspan's and the rands in the oval office, could either of you talk further about her influence on alan greenspan, etc.? and also, she was russian before she was american. how much dinner ideas get to the russian underground or something, ussr? are there any literary russians that admire? >> i would just say one thing about greenspan. in 1963, he contributed an essay to the objectivist newsletter against antitrust regulation. and he argued that businessmen who must have their long-term interest at heart have to be honorable and maintain their reputations in order to succeed. i heard him, i don't know whether anybody else did, retract that statement last october before the congressional committee. almost word for word. and it was very interesting to me that he kept that idea for so long. >> yeah, i would say so greenspan was a member of the collective, which was a small group that gathered around new york and the 1950s. he had an unusual plate in the collective. he was really struck by his -- her philosophy, but if rand treated him with an unusual amount of respect. i think she genuinely respected him. he actually provide a lot of the research that went into atlas shrugged in terms of how the economy worked. he was older. he was successful. she did have the ability, if you really stood on your own 2 feet when you interacted with her to kind of be okay with that but it was a younger student who really put her in a position of power that she then developed these very unequal relationships with. i think, this is a question we'll argue about for ever, the connection i see is the facing human rationality. and inhuman integrity and honesty that yes, people in ayn rand's novels are all honest and you have integrity and to care about the reputations. when we step outside of that fictional world, things can be very different. >> anne, you interviewed a lot of people for your book that you interviewed all the jewish cousins in chicago that you interviewed the housekeeper. was there anybody you could interview that you wanted to? >> there were two people who i wanted to interview, and could not. one was alan greenspan. i contacted him multiple times with multiple sterling recommendations from friends of his. and each time i was told he was too busy to talk with the. once, the secretary told me he would get right back to me. and a day and a half later i got an e-mail saying that he was very busy right now. and he couldn't talk to me that the other one was leonard. >> okay. up there in a purple shirt. hi. will wilkinson of the cato institute. jennifer burns, you had mentioned at one point in your talk that nathaniel branden was responsible for part of the system of the systematization of rand is explicit philosophy. and i've always wondered to what extent objectivism as a system, new, delivered as a complete coherent whole, how much that was a product of nathaniel branden and how much of it was a product of ayn rand? is branden the paul to ayn rand's jesus? [laughter] >> my understanding is that rand had her system pretty much set, even before she met brandon. i mean, there's a lot of people who matter in california, young college student in california. she was trying to bring them over to her system. she already knew what it was, should try to convert the. what brandon did was add the psychological component, and i think that was one of the most destructive elements of organized objectivism. he took objectivism and sort of brought into psychology and tucker characters, not as idealized projections of qualities we might want to further develop in ourselves, but as examples of psychological health. and john gold woodside as a example of psychological help both in the counseling sessions and hit in his lectures. so i see that as a major thing he added. i think was an unfortunate detour. i think the first person to say that would be nathaniel branden himself. who has put much retracted a lot of what he taught people in his nbi lectures and has describing his later career, as depended for that and to help heal people from some of the attitude he feels he encouraged them to adapt. >> right there. >> in the back row there. the back row of the section. >> al milliken, a.m. media. what did whittaker chambers considered the wickedness of atlas shrugged when he wrote about the book in the national review? >> you know, the real wickedness was rands atheism which was a huge preoccupation of chambers. he had been a communist in the 1920s. he had been a spy. he had been close enough to the communist party to know people who were purged and murdered. and he ultimately chose to interpret this communism, most famously, as man without god. and therefore, man needed god, and without god, man became convinced of his own powers and created despotic schemes like communism. so when he looked at rands fully integrated philosophical system, he saw the same thing happening again. he saw pride, he saw the danger of man trusting in rationality and achievement without the tempering influence of a spiritual side or an emphasis on man's innate sense. so that has to be read and interviewed in the contest of the cold war when we were facing godless chimerism. and chambers look at this and thought oh, no, here is godless capitalism. this isn't going to do at all. >> i would only add to that that many people have read atlas shrugged, and can choose the tone of voice, the authoritarian tone of voice with the ideas themselves. and i think whittaker chambers fell into that trap to some degree. >> right here. >> george mason university. just a question primary to jennifer burns. i met your book and i found the majority of it persuasive. one area wasn't i was a persuaded your contention that it was ayn rand support for capitalism which prevented sort of a libertarian leftist alliance. it seemed to me to take support for capitalism. another factor is on the sure there was much edges on the left in this kind of coalition. so i wonder if you could elaborate on that further. and also, am i wrong, was there some genuine interest in the left in the '70s and in particular what are people on the left, were they making some sort of concession to libertarians to make the lifework? >> so i do think that capitalism, commitment to markets remained this fundamental stumbling block. rothbard was more willing than rand to say let's kind of put that aside and attack the state that he was focused on state power. he was in an artist. and whatever way you could attack the state was welcome to him. i think in a lot of history about libertarianism, rothbard, mr. libertarian and. i just don't see it. i went in the archives that i look at people who are reading, they were referencing and i feel like this is a pr campaign on rothbard's behalf to say that i was the one who did all this, because what i saw was a lot of criticism and not a lot of references to him. so were there other factors that kept libertarianism on the right for sure? i think my focus is on the movement. so there's libertarian, there's thinkers and his right and there's these movement guys writing the pampas and arguing in the conventions. it really seem to be that rand is who they point to. when they talk about where this libertarianism go next. and a pointer to rand because she offered an capitalism as a moral, and that she offered them this rationale as a moral system. so i see her as a huge piece of why it developed. could libertarianism have found allies on the left if they drop cap wasn't? yes. but that wasn't going to happen. were left us looking around for new recruits? in the late 60s, the new left was having enough trouble staying sober enough to figure out what it actually wanted to. >> i'm going to take the last question right here. >> i'm from nowhere in particular. i was reading "the new york times" book review. one thing i can thing struck me here. no genuine capitalist would have done the following which was to give up part of the proceeds from each book sale in order to retain the entirety of the speech. and it seems to fundamentally misunderstand ran? >> would you repeat the question. >> the author of "the new york times" book review on your book talks about how rand gave up seven safar book sale. he goes onto say that no genuine capless would have done this. that seem to completely misunderstand ran. >> i agree. . .