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EPILOGUE: AYN RAND IN AMERICAN MEMORY
Democratic administration announced its stimulus plan. A new vogue
emerged for “going Galt,” or restricting production so as to avoid higher
taxes. Her novels touted anew by Rush Limbaugh, Rand was once more
a foundation of the right-wing worldview. 10
Even as she was reclaimed by her most avid fans, Rand’s work transcended
contemporary politics. One of the many ironies of Rand’s career
is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering
new forms of community. Among her high-profi le fans is Wikipedia’s
founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies
of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofi t that depends on charitable
donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of
business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seem to
both embody and defy Rand’s beliefs. The website’s emphasis on individual
empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational
model refl ects Rand’s sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom
of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that
many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict
Rand’s adage “All creation is individual.”
Similar contradictions undergird the response to Rand of Craig
Newmark, the founder of the online advertising site Craigslist. Like
Wales, Newmark was once an active member of the libertarian subculture,
reading “a few things by Ayn Rand, even making a pilgrimage to
her offi ces,” and later becoming a member of the Society for Individual
Liberty. Like so many others, Newmark drifted away from Rand after
a period of intense engagement but still identifi ed himself as someone
who prefers market solutions, a “hybrid libertarian.” 11 Something of
Rand remained in his insistence that people are rational and markets
work. Even as Craigslist feeds on a Randian iconoclasm against established
ways of doing business and her faith in human rationality, it also
undercuts Rand’s individualism through its emphasis on collaboration
and mutuality. In both cases Newmark and Wales built on Rand’s ideas
but married them to a very different theory of human nature, one in
which community and connection are paramount.
It is precisely these contradictions and complexities that make Rand
a source of perennial fascination. Rand insisted that she had held the
essentials of her philosophy since she was a child, and she presented
her ideas as fi xed and unchanging by their very nature. But her work
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