Know Your Enemy: Ayn Rand Against the World

Know Your Enemy: Ayn Rand Against the World

Matt and Sam talk to historian Jennifer Burns about the fascinating life, and brutal philosophy, of Ayn Rand.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

An atheist, a radical for capitalism, a caricature of a greedy libertarian, a best-selling novelist, a difficult partner and passionate lover, and the self-proclaimed greatest philosopher since Aristotle: Ayn Rand was many things, and we talk about almost all of them in this epic episode. To do so, we called upon historian Jennifer Burns, whose intellectual biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, is enormously helpful in trying to understand an idiosyncratic writer who, both then and now, fits ambiguously into the “fusionist” postwar conservative movement. Rand remains a controversial figure whose ideas permeate our culture and continue to inspire some of the most consequential (and least appealing) political figures in the United States. To understand Rand and her influence, we examine her family’s experiences during and after the Russian Revolution; her journey to the United States and early success in Hollywood; the arduous path she trod to become a writer; Rand’s involvement in anti-New Deal politics in the 1930s and ’40s; her ideas, philosophy, and scandalous personal life; and much more.

Further Reading:

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead  (1943)

— Atlas Shrugged (1957)

— We the Living (1936)

Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009)

— Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)

Whittaker Chambers, Big Sister Is Watching You, National Review (1957)

Murray Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult (1972)

Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)

Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

— Ayn Rand and the Cruel Heart of Neoliberalism, Dissent (2019)

Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

Listen again:

Milton Friedman and the Making of Our Times (2023)