Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (31 page)

It was Barbara who suggested the tape transcription idea that led to the rapid expansion of Nathaniel Branden Lectures, soon incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI). The idea seemed preposterous at first: Branden would record his New York lectures and send them to approved representatives across the country. These representatives would then charge an admission fee for the twenty-week series. Enrolled students would gather around a tape recorder to listen to Branden and take notes. Again, the unlikely idea had wings. Soon Barbara had quit her publishing job and was working full time for NBI.

These new ventures strained the already stressful relationships in Rand’s inner circle. Despite their new business partnership Nathan and Barbara’s marriage was deteriorating fast. Weepy and lethargic, Rand called an effective stop to her sexual relationship with Nathan. She had no appetite for love but hoped their affair might resume in the distant future. The return to platonic relations was a relief to Nathan, whose ardor for Rand had dimmed considerably. No longer her lover, he now became her psychologist. Swamped by melancholy, Rand turned to Nathan as her lifeline. Following her own philosophy she strained to rationally understand the source of her negativity. John Galt wouldn’t have felt this way, she was sure. More often Rand focused on the deficiencies of the culture around her, working with Nathan to find explanations for the state of the world. She was in a state of crisis, her home a “hospital atmosphere,” as Nathan remembered it.
²⁵

Unable to help Rand shake off her darkness, Nathan compensated by becoming her bulldog. He began answering Rand’s correspondence from persons who offended or attacked her, making himself a buffer between her and the world. He wrote angry letters to magazines and newspapers
that reviewed her work unfavorably. The rest of the Collective followed suit, leaping to the defense of their leader. But Collective members themselves were on uncertain ground. In Galt’s speech Rand had made judgment into a virtue, telling her readers, “To withhold your contempt for men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting” (946). Now if a member of the Collective offended, Nathan would “invite that person to lunch, and, in a quiet but deadly voice, I would inform him or her of the nature of the transgression.”
²⁶
Serious offenses could mean an appearance before the entire Collective, a sort of show trial with Branden or Rand presiding. Defendants who promptly confessed their guilt and promised to work harder at living Objectivist principles were let back into the fold.

Murray Rothbard was again one of the first outsiders to witness this new direction. He had reconnected with Rand after reading
Atlas Shrugged,
a work he considered “not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction.” In an extraordinarily frank letter Rothbard not only sang the praises of Rand’s novel, an “infinite treasure house,” but apologized for avoiding her in the past. Trusting that the author of
Atlas Shrugged
would receive his confession in the proper spirit, he told her how their previous meetings had left him depressed. It was not her fault, but his. He admitted, “I have come to regard you like the sun, a being of enormous power giving off great light, but that someone coming too close would be likely to get burned.” Although his words revealed some lingering trepidation, Rothbard was eager to close the gap he had created between himself and Rand. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to promote the sale of the novel,” he wrote, and enclosed as a peace offering a letter attacking one of the book’s unfavorable reviews.
²⁷
Within weeks the Collective and the Circle Bastiat were back in close contact.

Once again Rothbard tried to keep his intellectual distance from Rand but was psychologically vulnerable to her powers. After an all-night session between the two groups he reported to a friend, “As clear and rational as she is in so many matters, she is clearly muddled as a legal and political theorist, where the Circle takes primary rank.”
²⁸
Still, Rothbard was being drawn into the Objectivist universe. For years he had suffered from a variety of phobias, the most crippling being a fear of travel that kept him from leaving New York. When Nathan promised that he could cure this phobia in a manner of months, Rothbard eagerly signed up for
therapy. As a condition of his therapy Rothbard was required to take the Principles of Objectivism course. He and his wife, Joey, began socializing on a regular basis with Rand and the Collective.

Before long Rothbard tired of the Randian routine. He was annoyed when others questioned him after he skipped an occasional Objectivist gathering. He began to doubt Nathan’s effectiveness as a therapist, especially after Nathan criticized his marriage to Joey, a Christian. A union of two people who held conflicting premises was inherently unstable, Nathan lectured Rothbard. He should seek a partner who held rational premises instead. Still hoping that his travel phobia could be overcome, Rothbard stayed in therapy even as he wondered whether Nathan could really help him. Nathan promised the two of them would venture outside city limits together, but the trip never materialized. Meanwhile Rothbard signed up to deliver an academic paper in Georgia, believing he would be cured by the time of the conference.

Instead, the academic conference became the grounds for a bitter final breakup between Rothbard and the Rand circle. Tensions had been building over Rothbard’s stubborn allegiance to anarchism. After almost six months of regular contact Rand and the Collective expected Rothbard to be convinced that anarchism was unworkable. In July 1958 a special Saturday night session was scheduled for Rothbard and Rand to debate. By then Rothbard had realized, “I hated the guts of [Nathan] and Ayn and the rest of the gang.” After a stormy appointment with Nathan he decided to terminate therapy and all relations with Rand’s group. The next day Nathan called to summon him to another meeting, this time with Rand alone. At issue was the paper Rothbard had written for his upcoming conference, which Nathan accused him of plagiarizing from both Rand and Barbara Branden. Outraged, Rothbard hung up the phone “on that tin Jesus.”
²⁹
That evening’s mail brought a special delivery letter from Rand’s lawyer, outlining in detail the accusation of plagiarism and threatening a lawsuit against both Rothbard and the conference organizer, the German sociologist Helmut Schoeck.

The confrontation soon spilled out into open warfare between the Collective and the Circle Bastiat. George Reisman and Robert Hessen, formerly Rothbard loyalists, took Rand’s side in the plagiarism dispute. After a tense showdown Rothbard kicked Reisman out of his apartment. Angry phone calls flew back and forth between Rand, Nathan,
and the remaining members of Circle Bastiat. When the dust settled, Rothbard had lost both Reisman and Hessen to the Collective. In a gesture of high drama Joey Rothbard mailed each a torn dollar bill, symbolizing their broken connection. Filled in on the accusations, outsiders like Schoeck, the
National Review
editor Frank Meyer, and Richard Cornuelle dismissed Rand and her group as “crackpots.” They found her accusations of plagiarism groundless. The ideas that Rand claimed as her own, Schoeck noted, had been in circulation for centuries. Still constrained by his phobia, Rothbard was unable to attend the conference as planned.
³⁰

The incident left Rothbard with a deep hatred of Rand and her followers. He was profoundly traumatized by the hostility of Nathan, with whom he had shared deeply private information during therapy. Just as bad was the defection of Reisman and Hessen, longtime friends who now accused him of immorality and intellectual dishonesty. Rothbard was shaken to the core. He scrawled a lengthy memo to himself, outlining nine “flaws of Randianism” and a separate list of Randian heresies. He consoled himself with the idea that Nathan’s letter was so unreasonable his accusations would never be taken seriously. “It is now obvious to me and everyone else what a contemptible clown Branden is,” he wrote his parents, concluding, “I’m certainly glad I’m free of that psycho.” Looking again at Whittaker Chambers’s review of
Atlas Shrugged,
Rothbard discovered that he had been warned. He sent Chambers a second, appreciative letter, apologizing for his first attack and marveling at Chambers’s ability to identify Rand’s dictatorial nature. Later he would write a satirical play about Rand,
Mozart Was a Red,
and a pamphlet titled
The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult
.
³¹
He was a powerful enemy who did everything possible to turn fellow libertarians against Rand.

Despite her longing for recognition, Rand found intellectual interchange hard to manage. When she did have contact with those prominent enough to enhance her reputation, she rarely made a positive impression. It did not take long for her to repel Sidney Hook, a prominent anti-Communist philosopher at NYU. Hook first heard of Rand through Barbara Branden and Leonard Peikoff, two of his students. He was suspicious of the great power Rand held over her followers, who
seemed “
begeistered
” or hypnotized by her ideas. Then Peikoff, teaching an introductory philosophy course as part of his Ph.D., caused a furor by replacing a unit on Immanuel Kant with a unit on Objectivism. Rand was embarrassed by the uproar but used the occasion to strike up a correspondence with Hook. She professed to admire his views and was clearly interested in establishing a rapport, but he declined her request to meet. When the two were finally introduced in person at the University of Wisconsin as co-panelists at an ethics symposium, Hook was unimpressed. He later told Barbara, “It seemed to me that when I spoke she did not so much as listen as wait for me to cease talking, in order to resume the thread of what she was saying. At the time she did not appear very analytical in her responses.”
³²
Rand’s desire for complete agreement with her ideas and her single-minded focus on consistency were distasteful to Hook.

During this time Rand continued reaching out to professional philosophers, trading books and brief complimentary letters with Brand Blanshard, a Yale professor and leading interpreter of Aristotle. Later she would also connect with the head of the Philosophy Department at Hobart College, George Walsh, who became a dedicated NBI student in the late 1960s.
³³
But neither had the promise of John Hospers, a young rising professor with a doctorate from Columbia. Rand and Hospers met when she spoke at Brooklyn College, where Hospers was teaching. A specialist in ethics, Hospers was struck by her unusual perspective and the two spent the night deep in philosophical conversation. When Hospers relocated to California they corresponded in long letters. He was smitten by Rand’s work and cried upon reading
The Fountainhead
.

This appreciation kept him tethered to Rand even as she denigrated his profession. Hospers found Rand’s blanket condemnation of all modern philosophers difficult to take. He told her, “I see on the students’ faces that it is all beginning to jell in their minds, that the ‘integration— experience’ is now theirs, thanks to my careful presentation and probing questions. And then I go home and get a letter from you, for which I AM very grateful, but in it you condemn all modern philosophy—which presumably includes everything that I have been laboriously doing throughout so many of my waking hours.”
³⁴
Still, Hospers found Rand a stimulating sparring partner. Although they often disagreed, he remembered that “I wasn’t so concerned with what conclusion we ended up
with, as with the route by which we got there: no circularity of reasoning, no begging the question, no smuggling in a premise under another name, and so on.”
³⁵
Rand helped him clarify his political views, moving him to a libertarian position.

Rand’s attack on modern philosophy was inspired by Leonard Peikoff, who for years had been telling her it was still the age of “pre-reason.” This was not a message she wanted to hear while toiling on her rationalist novel. After its publication, however, Peikoff seemed to have a point. He identified Kant as the source of all error in modern thought, an opinion Isabel Paterson had also held. To Peikoff, Kant’s argument that the means of perception structured humans’ sense of reality undermined objective reality, reason, and all absolutes. Kant’s ideas had opened the philosophical gates to destructive ideas like relativism and existentialism, which created the poisonous atmosphere that greeted
Atlas Shrugged
. Rand began to listen more seriously to Peikoff’s opinions about philosophy.

In a pivotal conversation, Peikoff argued that she had a significant contribution to make. He told her that no philosopher had claimed her rendering of “existence is identity,” an idea she considered a self-evident update of Aristotle. The deciding factor was her meeting with Hospers. Conversations with him convinced Rand that there were indeed enormous holes in the contemporary approach to philosophy. She decided that her ideas about the proper approach to universals and concept formation were new and valuable. If she were to work them out systemically she could prove “why conceptual knowledge can be as absolute as perceptual evidence.” She had the feeling of “taking on a big assignment.” Imagining herself as an intellectual detective, chasing down the logical errors and frauds perpetrated over the ages, she became increasingly interested in meeting professional philosophers.
³⁶

Hospers scheduled a meeting with Rand that included Martin Lean, a Wittgenstein expert and chair of the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. It was a rowdy session, with Rand even calling Lean a “shyster” when he made a favorable comment about the USSR. Lean enjoyed their combat immensely, telling Rand afterward in a lengthy letter, “For my
part I
cannot recall having argued with anyone as intellectually dynamic, challenging, and skilled as you since my . . . Fulbright year at Oxford.” He admitted to some pretensions about his own dialectical
ability, yet acknowledged Rand as his equal, perhaps even his superior: “The combination of intellectual vigor and native logical acuity which you possess are truly awesome. It is academic philosophy’s loss that you did not choose this as the field of your concentration.”
³⁷
He went on to express disagreement with Rand’s political and economic position, noting that her arguments were thought-provoking, if not convincing.