Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia

Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia PDF Author: Derek Offord
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350283932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia

Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia PDF Author: Derek Offord
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350283932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World PDF Author: Adam Weiner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501313118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and potentially destructive power of terrible literature.

We the Living

We the Living PDF Author: Ayn Rand
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101137665
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Ayn Rand's first published novel, a timeless story that explores the struggles of the individual against the state in Soviet Russia. First published in 1936, We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three human beings who demand the right to live their own lives and pursue their own happiness. It tells of a young woman’s passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state. We the Living is not a story of politics, but of the men and women who have to struggle for existence behind the Red banners and slogans. It is a picture of what those slogans do to human beings. What happens to the defiant ones? What happens to those who succumb? Against a vivid panorama of political revolution and personal revolt, Ayn Rand shows what the theory of socialism means in practice. Includes an Introduction and Afterword by Ayn Rand’s Philosophical Heir, Leonard Peikoff

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Ayn Rand and the World She Made PDF Author: Anne C. Heller
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385529465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
Ayn Rand is best known as the author of the perennially bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Altogether, more than 12 million copies of the two novels have been sold in the United States. The books have attracted three generations of readers, shaped the foundation of the Libertarian movement, and influenced White House economic policies throughout the Reagan years and beyond. A passionate advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, Rand remains a powerful force in the political perceptions of Americans today. Yet twenty-five years after her death, her readers know little about her life.In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller traces the controversial author’s life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Heller reveals previously unknown facts about Rand’s history and looks at Rand with new research and a fresh perspective. Based on original research in Russia, dozens of interviews with Rand’s acquaintances and former acolytes, and previously unexamined archives of tapes and letters, AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand PDF Author: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271061219
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet, despite the sale of over thirty million copies of her works, there have been few serious scholarly examinations of her thought. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual roots and philosophy of this controversial thinker. It has been nearly twenty years since the original publication of Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Those years have witnessed an explosive increase in Rand sightings across the social landscape: in books on philosophy, politics, and culture; in film and literature; and in contemporary American politics, from the rise of the Tea Party to recent presidential campaigns. During this time Sciabarra continued to work toward the reclamation of the dialectical method in the service of a radical libertarian politics, culminating in his book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State, 2000). In this new edition of Ayn Rand, Chris Sciabarra adds two chapters that present in-depth analysis of the most complete transcripts to date documenting Rand’s education at Petrograd State University. A new preface places the book in the context of Sciabarra’s own research and the recent expansion of interest in Rand’s philosophy. Finally, this edition includes a postscript that answers a recent critic of Sciabarra’s historical work on Rand. Shoshana Milgram, Rand’s biographer, has tried to cast doubt on Rand’s own recollections of having studied with the famous Russian philosopher N. O. Lossky. Sciabarra shows that Milgram’s analysis fails to cast doubt on Rand’s recollections—or on Sciabarra’s historical thesis.

What's to be Done?

What's to be Done? PDF Author: Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


Objectively Speaking

Objectively Speaking PDF Author: Marlene Podritske
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073913194X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Readers and students of Ayn Rand will value seeing in this collection of interviews how Ayn Rand applied her philosophy and moral principles to the issues of the day. Objectively Speaking includes half a century of print and broadcast interviews drawn from the Ayn Rand Archives. The thirty-two interviews in this collection, edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz, include print interviews from the 1930s and edited transcripts of radio and television interviews from the 1940s through 1981. Selections are included from a remarkable series of radio broadcasts over a four-year period (1962-1966) on Columbia University's station WKCR in New York City and syndicated throughout the United States and Canada. Ayn Rand's unusual and strikingly original insights on a vast range of topics are captured by prominent interviewers in the history of American television broadcasting, such as Johnny Carson, Edwin Newman, Mike Wallace, and Louis Rukeyser. The collection concludes with an interview of Dr. Leonard Peikoff on his radio program in 1999, recalling his 30-year personal and professional association with Ayn Rand and discussing her unique intellectual and literary achievements. Ayn Rand is the best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living. Fifty years or more after publication, sales of these novels continue to increase.

Cement

Cement PDF Author: Fedor Gladkov
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810111752
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
**** Reprint of the Ungar edition of 1960 (which is cited in BCL3). Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand PDF Author: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271063742
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet, despite the sale of over thirty million copies of her works, there have been few serious scholarly examinations of her thought. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual roots and philosophy of this controversial thinker. It has been nearly twenty years since the original publication of Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Those years have witnessed an explosive increase in Rand sightings across the social landscape: in books on philosophy, politics, and culture; in film and literature; and in contemporary American politics, from the rise of the Tea Party to recent presidential campaigns. During this time Sciabarra continued to work toward the reclamation of the dialectical method in the service of a radical libertarian politics, culminating in his book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State, 2000). In this new edition of Ayn Rand, Chris Sciabarra adds two chapters that present in-depth analysis of the most complete transcripts to date documenting Rand’s education at Petrograd State University. A new preface places the book in the context of Sciabarra’s own research and the recent expansion of interest in Rand’s philosophy. Finally, this edition includes a postscript that answers a recent critic of Sciabarra’s historical work on Rand. Shoshana Milgram, Rand’s biographer, has tried to cast doubt on Rand’s own recollections of having studied with the famous Russian philosopher N. O. Lossky. Sciabarra shows that Milgram’s analysis fails to cast doubt on Rand’s recollections—or on Sciabarra’s historical thesis.

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand PDF Author: Aaron Weinacht
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793634785
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America argues that the core commitments of the nihilist movement of the 1860’s made their way to 20th century America via the thought of Ayn Rand. While mid-nineteenth-century Russian nihilism has generally been seen as part of a radical tradition that culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the author argues that nihilism’s intellectual trajectory was in fact quite different. Analysis of such sources as Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What is to Be Done? (1863) and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), archival research in Rand’s papers, and broad attention to late-nineteenth century Russian intellectual history all lead the author to conclude that nihilism’s legacy is deeply implicated in one of America’s most widely-read philosophers of capitalism and libertarian freedom.