jbgotmar

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
LOVE IS EXCEPTION MAKING 227
inner emotional states. Although she called Frank a hero, in truth he was
a passive and withdrawn man whose brief renaissance as an artist had
been snuffed out by alcohol and old age. The idea of man worship was a
wishful fancy, as unattainable for her as the svelte physiques and Aryan
features of her heroines. Still, it was a fantasy that satisfi ed. Rand identifi
ed Nathan as a hero, a paragon of morality and rationality. Such beliefs
made it impossible for her to let go of him as a lover or to suspect him
of duplicity. “That man is no damn good!” Frank stormed after one of
their counseling sessions. 30 But Rand continued to take Nathan’s words
at face value.
As these tensions simmered under the surface, Objectivism continued to
grow rapidly. Ayn and Nathan renamed the newsletter The Objectivist in
1966, adopted a more professional magazine format, and saw paid subscriptions
surge to a high of twenty thousand. 31 The new format marked
Rand’s deepening interest in philosophy, as demonstrated by a series of
articles titled “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” later released
as a book. Rand’s disillusionment with Goldwater, and her ongoing conversations
with Leonard Peikoff, shifted her interest away from politics
and cemented her new identity as a philosopher. Over time her most
loyal students would identify Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology as
her most signifi cant work. In the short run, however, she remained far
better known for her politics than for her philosophy.
Rand’s intellectual stature was enhanced during these years by the
widespread sense that Atlas Shrugged was a prophetic work. She made
few public comments about President Johnson and the Great Society,
but many of her readers thought Atlas Shrugged had predicted the rapidly
expanding welfare state. A Texas newspaper quoted Rand’s statist
villain, Wesley Mouch, and observed, “Readers of Ayn Rand’s prophetic
novel, ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ have seen increasing signs recently of the conditions
predicted in the novel”; the Orange County Register chimed in
with an editorial querying, “Atlas Shrugged Coming True?” This sense
of the novel’s predictive power stretched from the grassroots to national
fi nancial magazines. A circular letter distributed by the Michigan-based
Muskegon Manufacturers Association told its readers, “The book, published
seven years ago, took 12 years to write. Yet in it, the steel incident
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com