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ESSAY ON SOURCES 297
Another major source of funding for Objectivist scholars is the charitable foundation
of BB&T, one of the country’s largest banks. Run by John Allison, an avowed
Objectivist, BB&T has stirred controversy with its grants to universities that require the
teaching of Atlas Shrugged. Most of the scholars supported by BB&T are also affi liated
with ARI in some capacity, including the Aristotelian scholar Alan Gotthelf and the
philosopher Tara Smith, who holds the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism at the
University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics (2006).
The success of Smith’s book, which received generally positive reviews from her peers,
suggests that Objectivism may fi nally be granted a hearing by the guild of professional
philosophers.
Though orthodox Objectivist scholarship has taken important steps to engage
in dialogue with the broader academic community, it remains hampered by a spirit
of faction. Rand’s emphasis on judgment and moral sanction remains important to
many ARI-funded scholars, who have attacked independent outposts like the Journal
of Ayn Rand Studies and are often unwilling to acknowledge the work of independent
scholars. Until these disputes evolve into the more routine, measured, and impersonal
disputation of scholarly life, Objectivists will remain stigmatized within the intellectual
world.
Finally, Rand has begun to fi nd her place within the literature about conservatism
and the American right that has fl ourished of late in the historical profession. When
historians fi rst turned their attention to the success of conservative politics and ideas,
many have noted Rand’s presence among the thinkers who inspired a rising generation.
Earlier work on conservatism tended to make perfunctory acknowledgment of Rand
or situate her as an irrelevant outcast from mainstream conservatism. George Nash’s
seminal The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1975) framed
Rand as an extremist outsider effectively silenced by Buckley’s National Review, an interpretation
Buckley himself promoted in his fi ctional Getting It Right (2003). Still, for
much of this early work Rand remained a cipher. For example, Lisa McGirr’s excellent
study, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001), inadvertently
quotes Rand several times as she describes the libertarian worldview of Orange County
activists. In one of the few academic discussions of the student libertarian movement,
Jonathan Schoenwald’s essay in the edited volume The Vietnam War on Campus: Other
Voices, More Distant Drums (2001) ignores Rand and identifi es Murray Rothbard as the
sole source of right-wing radicalism. Rand and libertarianism more generally are given
a thorough, albeit brief, treatment by John Kelley in Bringing the Market Back In: The
Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism (1997).
As historians have begun to locate the origins of conservatism in reaction against the
New Deal and thereby accord more weight to business libertarianism, Rand has emerged
as a fi gure of greater consequence. In Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative
Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2009), Kimberly Phillips-Fein asserts the centrality
of libertarian businessmen to the conservative renaissance, an important new
line of interpretation that is being followed by a host of emerging scholars. Phillips-Fein
notes Rand’s popularity among businessmen and describes her early political activism.
Although not academic in nature, Brian Doherty’s celebratory Radicals for Capitalism:
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