#457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom

Why do you think that Ayn Rand is, maybe you can correct me, but as far as I can see, never mentioned in the list of great thinkers in history or even the great thinkers of the 20th century or even the great female thinkers of the 20th century.

So you have somebody like Simone de Beauvoir, uh, Hannah Arendt.

I almost never see her in the list.

Yeah.

If you Google those silly lists, top whatever, [laughs] top thinkers of the 20th century, she's not mentioned.

Why is that?

You know, a lot of people just deeply dislike Rand.

They deeply dislike her ideas, and they don't think they're profound because their disconnection from other ideas and other understandings of human society, I think, I think where you could look at them and say, these are ve- these ideas are very provocative and they're very deep 'cause she's not taking anything for granted, and she's flipping everything around and forcing you to really think.

To a lot of other r- readers, to her critics, they just look absurd.

Like, how could you even make these contentions? Um, and I think that because she, she's not without precedence, and she's not without followers, but she doesn't knit herself into an intellectual community, um, the way that these other thinkers do very naturally, that, that can...

You can see who they influence.

You can see who they're in dialogue with.

You know, I think my book was one of the first to really take Rand and say, "She's a figure in American history.

Here's who she's connected to.

Here's who she's influenced." And I got a lot of pushback for that, you know? I think now people are more open to it.

But I think the people who compile these lists really dislike her work, and they think it's shallow because they find her fiction overdrawn.

They find her work in the mythic register simple, and she's also a grand systematic thinker in an age that's over systems.

You know, she's almost, she's creating an inverse Marxism, right? Marx was writing in 1848, you know? He's not a thinker of the mid-20th century.

So, um, I think that's part of it, the lack of a legacy and the dislike of what she had to say and the feeling that she's too detached.

Her insights are not insights because they're too idealized rather than being rooted in a theory of human nature that people find plausible.

[sighs] You study and write about history of ideas in the United States over the past hundred years, hundred plus years.

Well, how do you think ideas evolve and gain power over the populace, over our government, over culture? Just looking at evolution of ideas as they dance and challenge each other and play in public discourse, um, w- what do you think is the mechanism by which they take hold and have influence?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple different ways I think it happens.

I really am interested in the relationship between the thinker and then the reader and the interpreter of the ideas, and then the conditions on the ground that make that idea resonate or not resonate.

Um, and so I think, I think a lot...