Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (26 page)

Although Rand disliked him at first, Alan Greenspan soon became one of her favorites. For ten months he was married to Joan Mitchell, Barbara’s closest friend, and through her met Rand a few times. Once their marriage was amicably annulled, the former couple grew closer as friends, and Greenspan began joining Rand’s circle on a regular basis. Even Joan’s subsequent marriage to Allan Blumenthal, Nathan’s cousin, did little to disturb Greenspan or discourage his interest in Rand’s group. At early meetings he was quiet and somber, earning the nickname “the Undertaker” from Rand. Heavily influenced by logical positivism, Greenspan was unwilling to accept any absolutes. He became legendary for his confession that he might not actually exist—it couldn’t be proved. Hearing this, Rand pounced: “And by the way, who is making that statement?” To Greenspan it was a deep exchange that shook his relativist beliefs to the core.

By many accounts Rand excelled at the kind of verbal combat that impressed Greenspan. Hiram Haydn, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill and later Random House, marveled at Rand’s ability to conquer sophisticated
New Yorkers in any argument: “Many are the people who laughed at my description of her dialectical invincibility, only later to try their hands and join me among the corpses on the Randian battlefield.” Rand began with the basics, establishing agreement on primary axioms and principles. She came out on top by showing how her opponent’s ideas and beliefs contradicted these foundations. This approach was particularly effective on those who prided themselves on logic and consistency, as did Greenspan. He remembered that “talking to Rand was like starting a game of chess thinking I was good, and suddenly finding myself in checkmate.” Greenspan was hooked.
⁴²

Greenspan’s attraction to Rand was fairly standard for those drawn into her orbit. As she had for Rothbard, Rand exposed Greenspan to previously unknown intellectual treasures, “a vast realm from which I’d shut myself off.” Before meeting Rand, Greenspan was “intellectually limited . . .”: “I was a talented technician, but that was all.” Under Rand’s tutelage he began to look beyond a strictly empirical, numbers-based approach to economics, now thinking about “human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think.” His graduate school mentor, Arthur Burns, had given Greenspan his first exposure to free market ideas. Rand pushed him further, inspiring Greenspan to connect his economic ideas to the big questions in life. Now he found that morality and ethics had a rational structure that could be analyzed and understood, just like the economy or music, his first passion. Primed to accept Rand’s system by his devotion to mathematical thought, Greenspan was soon an enthusiastic Objectivist. His friends noticed the change immediately, as he began flavoring his conversations with Objectivist vocabulary and the Randian injunction “check your premises.”
⁴³

Unlike most members of the Collective, who were students, Greenspan stood out as an established professional with a successful economic consulting business. He was in the rare position of being able to teach Rand something. While she dominated the others, when it came to Greenspan “it was the reverse, he was the expert, she was learning from him,” remembered a friend.
⁴⁴
His firm, Townsend-Greenspan, charged huge sums for the information it synthesized about all aspects of economic demand. Greenspan was legendary for his ability to comb statistical data, analyze government reports, and ferret out key figures from industry contacts.

Rand turned to him for information about the steel and railroad industries, using his knowledge to make
Atlas Shrugged
more realistic. The two shared a fascination with the nuts and bolts of the economy, the myriad daily processes that meshed into a functioning whole.

The position of Leonard Peikoff was more precarious. He met Rand while visiting Barbara, his older cousin, in California. Their first meeting was revelatory. Torn by his family’s desire that he study medicine, a field he found unappealing, Leonard asked Rand if Howard Roark was moral or practical. Both, Rand replied, launching into a long philosophical discussion about why the moral and the practical were the same. Her answer spoke directly to Peikoff’s conflict, and “opened up the world” for him. He left thinking, “All of life will be different now. If she exists, everything is possible.” Within a year he had abandoned medicine for philosophy and moved to New York to be near Rand. She took a motherly tone toward “Leonush,” one of her youngest fans. But Peikoff’s occasionally incurred Rand’s wrath when he showed interest in ideas she disapproved of. Over time, as Peikoff’s expertise grew, Rand came to depend on him for insight into modern philosophy.
⁴⁵

Rand saw nothing unusual in the desire of her students to spend each Saturday night with her, despite most being more than twenty years her junior. The Collective put Rand in the position of authority she had always craved. She initiated and guided discussion, and participants always deferred to her. It was a hierarchical, stratified society, with Rand unquestionably at the top. Closely following her in stature was Nathan, then Barbara, with the other students shifting status as their relationship with Rand ebbed and flowed. Rand carefully watched the balance of power, openly playing favorites and discussing her preferences with Nathan and Barbara. Because conversation revolved around Rand’s ideas and the novel-in-progress, the Collective was valuable fuel for her creative process; she could rest from the rigors of writing without truly breaking her concentration. The Collective was becoming a hermetically sealed world. Within this insular universe dangerous patterns began to develop.

Murray Rothbard caught a glimpse of this emerging dark side in 1954. In the years since their first meeting, Rothbard had gathered to himself a subset of young libertarians who attended Mises’s seminar and carried on discussion into the early hours of the morning, often at Rothbard’s
apartment. Energetic, polymathic, and erudite, Rothbard dazzled his retinue, mostly young men who were students at the Bronx High School of Science. This group called themselves “the Circle Bastiat,” after the nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat, and looked to Rothbard as an intellectual leader. When the Circle Bastiat discovered he knew the famous Rand, they clamored to meet her. Rothbard reluctantly agreed. First he went to her apartment with two students, and then a week later brought the whole gang.

Both visits were “depressing,” Rothbard told Richard Cornuelle in a lengthy letter. The passage of time, and the presence of reinforcements, did not help. Rand argued vigorously with George Reisman, one of his group, subjecting him to a barrage of vitriol. According to Rothbard, Reisman was the only one to “realize the power and horror of her position—and personality.” The rest of the high school students were captivated by Rand and eager for more contact. Rothbard, however, was secretly relieved that Reisman’s battle with Rand provided the perfect excuse to avoid seeing her again. Even better, he would no longer have to deal with the Collective, a passive, dependent group who “hover around her like bees.”
⁴⁶

Rand was bad enough, but Rothbard was truly horrified by the Collective. “Their whole manner bears out my thesis that the adoption of her total system is a soul-shattering calamity,” he reported to Cornuelle. Rand’s followers were “almost lifeless, devoid of enthusiasm or spark, and almost completely dependent on Ayn for intellectual sustenance.” Rothbard’s discomfort with the Collective masked his own conflicting emotions about Rand and her circle. After all, Rothbard had also gathered to himself a set of much younger students over whom he exercised unquestioned intellectual authority. He freely used the word “disciple” to refer to both his and Rand’s students, a word she eschewed. Now some of Rothbard’s own students were feeling the magnetic pull of Rand. Even Rothbard, as he later confessed, was subject to the same response. Many years later, speaking of this time, he told Rand, “I felt that if I continued to see you, my personality and independence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous power of your own.”
⁴⁷
Rand was like a negative version of himself, a libertarian Svengali seducing the young.

Rothbard fortified his emotional distaste for Rand with intellectual disagreement. By the time of his second encounter with her, Rothbard
was close to finishing his doctorate and increasingly certain about his ideas. He explained to Richard Cornuelle, “my position—and yours too, I bet—is not really the same as hers at all.” The strength of Rand’s system, he argued, was that it treated ethics as a serious field, in contrast to the void of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism. Apparently after his first meeting with Rand, Rothbard had credulously accepted her claims to originality. Now he discovered that “the good stuff in Ayn’s system is not Ayn’s original contribution at all.” There was a whole tradition of rational ethics, and “Ayn is not the sole source and owner of the rational tradition, nor even the sole heir to Aristotle.”
⁴⁸
Moreover, Rand’s interest in liberty was only superficial, Rothbard believed. A few of his disciples continued to meet with Rand and reported back that she claimed Communists should be jailed. They also introduced Rand to Rothbard’s anarchism, and his idea of privately competing courts and protective agencies that could replace the state. Rand responded swiftly that state action was necessary to hold society together. For Rothbard, an anarchist who believed the state itself was immoral, all this merely confirmed his differences with Rand.

More seriously, Rothbard teased apart Rand’s system and discovered that it meant the very negation of individuality. Rand denied both basic instincts and the primacy of emotion, he wrote Cornuelle. This meant, in practice, that “she actually denies all individuality whatsoever!” Rand insisted that all men had similar rational endowments, telling Rothbard, “I could be just as good in music as in economics if I applied myself,” a proposition he found doubtful. By excising emotions, asserting that men were only “bundles of premises,” and then outlining the correct rational premises that each should hold, Rand made individuals interchangeable. Therefore, Rothbard concluded, in an eerily perceptive aside, “there is no reason whatever why Ayn, for example, shouldn’t sleep with Nathan.” The proof of Rothbard’s analysis lay in the Collective, a group of lifeless acolytes who frightened Rothbard in their numb devotion to Rand.
⁴⁹

Always a charismatic and dominant personality, Rand now began to codify the rules of engagement. Richard Cornuelle was among the first to experience this treatment. He enjoyed the certainty he found in Rand, the sense that he “suddenly had an answer for practically anything that might come up.” He was both drawn to Rand and unsettled by her. Pecking away at his Calvinist shell, Rand would ask him psychologically probing questions about sexuality and his feelings. “I think she might
have been wanting to help me, I think . . . and wanted to contribute to my relaxing about that kind of thing,” he reflected later. But at the time he felt “terribly uncomfortable.” Another violent clash between her and Mises spelled the end of their relationship. Rand and Mises argued over conscription, which Rand saw as tantamount to slavery. Mises, his eyes on history, argued that only conscription could prevent the rise of dangerous mercenary armies. After the argument Rand telephoned Cornuelle. She wanted him to make a choice:

“You have to make a decision. You’re either going to continue to be my disciple or his.” I said, I’d rather duck. She said, “you can’t.” And that was it. I never spoke to her again after that. . . . She didn’t want me to agree with her. She wanted me to discontinue my relations with von Mises as a way of showing I was on her side.
⁵⁰

Rand now began to demand allegiance from those around her. She had made “the most consistent arguments” on behalf of a fully integrated system and cast out those who did not acknowledge her achievement.

The Collective, and Nathaniel Branden in particular, were her replacement. The bond between the two had grown fast and thick. In New York Branden became not only Rand’s “brain mate” but her teacher, as he began to push her philosophical ideas into the realm of psychology. Branden’s major innovation was the theory of “social metaphysics.” He developed this concept to describe a person whose frame of reference was “the consciousness, beliefs, values, perceptions of various other people.”
⁵¹
Branden translated the qualities Rand had celebrated in her novels into psychological terms. In
The Fountainhead
Howard Roark’s stoic disregard for the opinions of others could be understood as a dramatized ideal, a standard that could inspire despite its unreality. Recast as a psychological syndrome, the same idea became dangerous, because it suggested that the abnormal should be normal. Essentially, “social metaphysics” made everyday human concern with the thoughts and opinions of others problematic and pathological. It was a judgmental and reductive concept, a pejorative label that both Branden and Rand began using freely.

Branden’s new idea was doubly destructive because he employed it during therapy sessions with members of the Collective and other interested patients. Indeed, Branden had first derived the idea after
conversations with fellow Collective members whom he deemed insufficiently independent. His credentials in the area of counseling psychology were slim, to say the least; he had only an undergraduate degree. But with Rand’s system behind him, Branden felt qualified to promote himself as an expert. Rand had always enjoyed talking to people about their personal problems, urging them to apply rationality to any problem in life. Now Branden picked up this habit, his authority buttressed by Rand’s obvious respect for him. In tense therapy sessions, during which he paced the room “like a caged tiger,” as one patient remembered, Branden demanded that members of the Collective check their premises and root out all traces of irrationality from their thinking.
⁵²