Lisa Duggan - Mean Girl

Ayn Rand is the original Mean Girl, an advocate of the kind of ruthless hierarchy at the center of the movie and Broadway musical Mean Girls. Her sense of life, though developed in the early twentieth century, meshes with the age of neoliberal capitalism.

Neoliberal Capitalism Structure of Feeling Cruel Optimism Optimistic Cruelty

Ayn Rands novels featured ruthless heroes (initially based on an actual serial killer) and relentlessly advocated capitalism and inequality. But they have also been read in excerpts in the manner of cult novels for their feminist and queer elements.

Moral Economy of Inequality Umberto Eco and Cult Novels Mary Gaitskills Two Girls Fat and Thin Ivo van Hoves The Fountainhead

The 1917 Russian revolution led by the Bolsheviks shaped Ayn Rands antisocialist views for the rest of her life. Her exposure to European and American movies in Petrograd provided a stock of racialized and gendered imperial images that predominated in her fiction. Her novel We the Living, set just after the revolution, is her most autobiographical writing.

European Civilization Imperial Russia The Mysterious Valley The Indian Tomb We the Living European Fascism

Ayn Rands experience as a scriptwriter in Hollywood in the 1920s shaped her first blockbuster novel, The Fountainhead. The procapitalist perspective she developed and expressed in her fiction was based on serious misunderstandings of the workings of commerce, industry, and finance. By the 1940s and 1950s she affiliated with vehement anticommunism as well as with libertarian capitalism.

Hollywood Cecil B. DeMille Marriage to Frank OConnor Night of January 16th The Individualist Manifesto Anthem The Fountainhead Isabel Paterson Wendell Wilkie House Un-American Activities Committee Militant Liberalism

The publication of Atlas Shrugged and the launching of Objectivism as a movement via the Nathaniel Branden Institute made Ayn Rand a well-known public figure during the 1960s. The novel celebrated the superiority of capitalists and invoked the racialized hierarchies of empire in a sex-saturated romance plot. She was admired by followers but also reviled as a cult leader, and her reputation suffered during the 1970s. Her Objectivist philosophy became one strand in a rising, fractious American right wing.

Atlas Shrugged Foundation for Economic Education Volker Fund Ludwig von Mises Friedrich Hayek William F. Buckley and the National Review Murray Rothbard Whittaker Chambers Barry Goldwater

Ayn Rand was a significant figure in the rise of libertarianism and neoliberalism during the 1970s. Libertarianism remained a fringe movement, but neoliberalism came to dominate states and global institutions by the 1980s. Rand was too purist to be a neoliberal, but she helped create the cultural context for everyday neoliberalismthe promotion of selfishness, greed, and inequality. After the 2008 crash, her star rose especially among tech magnates in Silicon Valley. She is admired by many members of the Trump cabinet and many politicians despite significant political differences.