New book of essays on Atlas Shrugged

[Robert Campbell]

I'm pleased to announce that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion has been published by Ashgate.

The editor of this book of essays is the indefatigable Ed Younkins.

Contributors include (besides Ed himself) Stephen Cox, Doug Den Uyl, Doug Rasmussen, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Roderick Long, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Susan Love Brown, Spencer Heath Maccallum, Larry Sechrest, Jeff Riggenbach, Kirsti Minsaas, Petter Boettke, Peter Saint-Andre, and many others.

Among the participants on this board, Roger Bissell, Fred Seddon, Tibor Machan, and yours truly have all contributed chapters.

Robert Campbell

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I'm pleased to announce that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion has been published by Ashgate.

The editor of this book of essays is the indefatigable Ed Younkins.

Contributors include (besides Ed himself) Stephen Cox, Doug Den Uyl, Doug Rasmussen, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Roderick Long, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Susan Love Brown, Spencer Heath Maccallum, Larry Sechrest, Jeff Riggenbach, Kirsti Minsaas, Petter Boettke, Peter Saint-Andre, and many others.

Among the participants on this board, Roger Bissell, Fred Seddon, Tibor Machan, and yours truly have all contributed chapters.

Robert Campbell

Robert,

Thanks for the heads up! Who are Susan Love Brown, Peter boettke and Spencer Heath Maccallum? I believe I know or know of all the others. For anybody out there, this book would be worth getting for the Kirsti Minsaas essays alone not to mention all of the other extremely worthy people.

Jim

[Chris Grieb]

Robert,

You got it published before the ARI book was published.

Sounds like very good work. Thank you

[Greybird]

The book's listing at Amazon.com for the paperback edition ($29.95) says that it hasn't yet been released. Is it, in fact, available? If so, at what other site?

Although the contributor list makes this truly intriguing, I have to register my surprise at two elements. Even though there's no such thing as a philosophically obscene price {rueful smile} ... $124.95 for the hardcover edition does come close.

And did they have to choose a chemical plant for the cover illustration? I know Rand's point very well about the importance of industrial civilization, and one element of the photo evokes Wyatt's Torch, but couldn't they afford some kind of art? Especially at these prices?

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I know Rand's point very well about the importance of industrial civilization, and one element of the photo evokes Wyatt's Torch, but couldn't they afford some kind of art? Especially at these prices?

Greybird, I love the petroleum refinery on the cover!! What better for a book on Atlas Shrugged !!!

Jim

Edited May 10, 2007 by James Heaps-Nelson

[Greybird]

It plays into the hands of those who make cheap caricatures about Rand's points. Especially in regard to pollution. If they're intending to have academic types buy this, especially the hardcover edition (for use in libraries), well, it's not the best marketing ploy, to say the least.

It's not an unattractive photo, and as I said, it does allude to the book's theme. Yet Atlas has also had striking cover art, in both hardcover and paperback. I see missed esthetic and marketing opportunities here.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

It plays into the hands of those who make cheap caricatures about Rand's points. Especially in regard to pollution. If they're intending to have academic types buy this, especially the hardcover edition (for use in libraries), well, it's not the best marketing ploy, to say the least.

It's not an unattractive photo, and as I said, it does allude to the book's theme. Yet Atlas has also had striking cover art, in both hardcover and paperback. I see missed esthetic and marketing opportunities here.

Yes, a missed opportunity! They should've put an open pit iron mine on the front :-).

Jim

[Jonathan]

I think I would have gone with something like this:

Anyway, I look forward to reading the book. Many good writers there.

Thanks for the announcement, Robert.

J

[Dragonfly]

Does it also contain really critical articles?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Thank you for posting this, Robert.

I have admired Ed Younkins from a distance ever since I joined the Objectivst online community. He deserves all the credit he receives. He earns it the hard way.

I have read essays by almost every one of the writers you mentioned and all I can say is that this is quite an all-star cast.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Does it also contain really critical articles?

Dragonfly,

Some of these writers are prominent anarcho-capitalists, so without reading their essays yet, I can say it is a good prediction that this will be a far more balanced work in weighing pros and cons than something produced by ARI writers. (I don't mean quality of research or writing with this comment, merely the pro/con balance from a friendly perspective.)

Michael

[Judith]

And did they have to choose a chemical plant for the cover illustration? I know Rand's point very well about the importance of industrial civilization, and one element of the photo evokes Wyatt's Torch, but couldn't they afford some kind of art? Especially at these prices?

I love it. I've always believed in better living through chemistry (yay preservatives!), and I find the cover completely appropriate.

Judith

Edited May 11, 2007 by Judith

[Robert Campbell]

Jim,

Peter Boettke is an expert on Hayek and one of the leading Austrian economists in the younger generation.

Spencer Heath MacCallum is a social anthropologist and proponent of voluntary communities; he is best known for his early book The Art of Community.

Susan Love Brown is an anthropologist. She was a fairly prominent libertarian activist in the 1970s and contributed to Sciabarra and Gladstein's volume of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.

Steve,

According to the back of the book, the plant shown in the cover photo is a coke works once owned by the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Company. Hank Rearden and Ken Danagger would be able to relate to it. (I'm assuming the identification is correct, 'cause from a photo I wouldn't know coke ovens from a bunch of other industrial installations....) Ashgate is an academic publisher that budgets very little for cover art. Under those constraints, I think Ed made a good choice.

Since I've received one copy of the paperback and one of the hardcover in the mail, commercial availability for the paperback is obviously imminent. The hardback price is so crazy because the publisher assumes that only libraries will want the hardback--which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy once the pricing decision has been made. The paperback is high quality and the price is quite reasonable by academic publishing standards. (As a point of comparison, Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics isn't out in paperback yet.)

Dragonfly,

I saw just one other chapter in manuscript, so I can't tell you how many are critical of Rand until I've read them. However, some of the contributors are anarchists (e.g., Sechrest, Riggenbach, MacCallum, and Walter Block) and I would expect them to criticize Rand's politics, at least in passing. Some of the more literary contributors (including Minsaas, Cox, and Karen Michalson) I would expect to be at least mildly critical of Rand. My own chapter, on Eddie Willers, notes that in Atlas Shrugged Rand was more inclined than would be healthy to divide the human world into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes of Prime Movers and boat anchors (as Rich Engle would say). I expect the overall tone of the book to be respectful of Rand but not reverential.

Michael and Chris,

Although none of the Ayn Rand Institute intellectuals (Mayhew, Milgram, et al.) contributed to this volume, there are chapters by Michelle Fram Cohen (who joined the Orthodoxy around the time that chapter manuscripts were due) and Jennifer Iannolo. Diana Hsieh was on the initial contributor list, but dropped out before names were paired with tentative titles. I doubt in any event that she would have stayed with the project after her conversion to ARIanism.

Ed is an extremely efficient editor. He gets good people to contribute to his projects and he gets them to contribute in a timely fashion. If you've ever edited the work of multiple authors, you'll know how hard this is to bring off.

Robert

[James Heaps-Nelson]

According to the back of the book, the plant shown in the cover photo is a coke works once owned by the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Company. Hank Rearden and Ken Danagger would be able to relate to it. (I'm assuming the identification is correct, 'cause from a photo I wouldn't know coke ovens from a bunch of other industrial installations....) Ashgate is an academic publisher that budgets very little for cover art. Under those constraints, I think Ed made a good choice.

Cool!! I was wrong. Interesting. the photo is closer than I thought then and the two units with flames are firing coal and not FCC units you would see in a refinery.

Jim

[Roger Bissell]

Hi, folks! I can give a bit of detail that will be helpful to those curious about availability dates, critical contributors, etc....

I ordered an additional copy as a gift for a friend (got my hardback and soft cover copies from the publisher just yesterday, and they are gems!), and Amazon.com tells me the projected shipping date is June 4. So, order now, and you'll probably have it the same day I do -- about June 8 or so.

As for critical essays, I'd say that one of the first several in the book is significantly critical of Rand. Douglas B. Rasmussen, one of my fellow Iowans and college friends, now a professor at St. Johns University in NYC, wrote "The Aristotelian Significance of the Section Titles of Atlas Shrugged: A Brief Consideration of Rand's View of Logic and Reality." He says that Rand fails to "fully appreciate the difference between logic and reality and as a result becomes entangled in some serious conceptual knots." In particular, because she does not clearly enough define the good, she leaves herself open to criticism that her view is "dangerously close to a Kantian approach to moral epistemology." He and I have discussed this and other points made in his paper, and I am not fully in agreement with him, but I think his perspective is well worth considering.

My own piece is not so much critical as it is subversive. <g> I have in effect "channeled" Richard Halley, presenting a "transcript" of a taped "Hugh Akston Memorial Lecture" he gave in 2000 to Patrick Henry University on the topic of Romanticism in music. I am basically presenting my own Neo-Randian views on emotion and meaning in music as though they were developed by Halley after discussions with Hugh Akston, and I present Akston as the originator of a Grand Unified Theory of the Arts, and as the author of a number of essays sounding peculiarly similar to the first several in Rand's The Romantic Manifesto. These are views I have already discussed in essays in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, as well as in posts here on Objectivist Living and elsewhere, so it is nothing new. Another way of looking at it is, it is my view of Randian music aesthetics "as it can and ought to be." :-)

Some may find the level and quality of writing to be fairly uneven, but overall I think it's a very worthy volume -- certainly worth spending $20 or so for the soft cover version with the gorgeous photo on the cover. (The hardback copy I got did not have a dust jacket with the photo.) Go ahead, treat yourself!

REB

[Philip Coates]

I -love- that cover. With the play of light and twilight and steam, it's very beautiful.

[Chris Grieb]

Robert,

The book sounds very good. The fact that it is a good academic publisher is a good sign. I hope the compiler approaches Cato about a Book Forum.

I like the oil refinery on the cover.

Edited May 11, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[BaalChatzaf]

I love it. I've always believed in better living through chemistry (yay preservatives!), and I find the cover completely appropriate.

Judith

Take a deep breath and rethink the matter. I knew some people in Woburn Massachusetts whose asthmatic child nearly died because the effluence from the local chemical plant fouled the air. They knew they could not do anything about the plant so they moved to save their child's life.

Woburn is a town featured in the book and movie -A Civil Action-. Woburn has had an unfortunate history of being the dumping ground for some rather foul and dangerous stuff.

Better living for some, but not for others.

I have nothing against chemical plants as long as they are 100 miles away from the nearest residential area and water supply or tightly control their effluent. Freedom to produce is not a license to poison.

Bob Kolker

[Philip Coates]

> My own chapter, on Eddie Willers, notes that in Atlas Shrugged Rand was more inclined than would be healthy to divide the human world into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes of Prime Movers and boat anchors (as Rich Engle would say).

Robert, I'll wait to read your essay but my first reaction is the obvious one that for literary reasons (especially if the novel is already too long, very sprawling) one often may wish to essentialize, strip things down, and create archetypes in a novel and that Atlas shouldn't be read to imply that the author intended to say only Prime Movers and boat anchors exist in the real world. (For example, having him stranded would be heartless in the real world but makes literary and philosophical sense.)

[Judith]

My own chapter, on Eddie Willers, notes that in Atlas Shrugged Rand was more inclined than would be healthy to divide the human world into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes of Prime Movers and boat anchors (as Rich Engle would say).

I ordered the book yesterday, and I look forward to reading that chapter. I always found Eddie to be a very attractive character; far more than a boat anchor. I found it surprising that Dagny wasn't more attracted to him than she was, considering the dearth of attractive men in her world.

Judith

[Robert Campbell]

Phil and Judith,

There's nothing wrong with essentializing, or even with dealing in archetypes.

The problem that Eddie Willers posed for Ayn Rand is the status of an ordinary human being whose ethics are impeccable but who is not Prime Mover material. The challenge was heightened because Eddie is not a bit player, like Mike Donnigan in The Fountainhead; he is on the scene for much of the action in Atlas Shrugged.

Superimposed on the division between Prime Movers and everyone else is a principle of hierarchy.

I suspect that Rand considered Dagny being attracted to Eddie a "metaphysical" impossibility.

For the same reason that it was "metaphysically" impossible for Dagny to return to Francisco after she'd met John Galt.

Robert Campbell

[Chris Grieb]

Robert;

I think you're correct. I think the phase Ayn rand would use would be "metaphysically impossible".

I think when Dagny acknowledges that she has always known Eddie was in love with her is one of the most poignant moments in the novel.

Edited May 14, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I suspect that Rand considered Dagny being attracted to Eddie a "metaphysical" impossibility.

Robert,

I am biting, biting, biting my tongue but it ain't working. I have to ask.

You mean like considering it a "metaphysical impossibility" of her being attracted to any disciple other than NB?

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

Michael and Chris,

I put "metaphysical" in quotes to remind everyone that this is the way the word is used in Ayn Rand's aesthetic theory. Rand wouldn't have liked the language, but her aesthetic "metaphysics" largely operates in the realm of archetypes. All of which is quite different from good old fashioned metaphysics that deals with objects and relations and causality and the remaining affairs of "being qua being."

In her journal entries, Ayn Rand insists, by implication, on the "metaphysical" rightness of NB's being attracted to her, and the "metaphysical" wrongness of his being attracted to Patrecia Scott. Rightness and wrongness didn't line up with inevitability and impossibility, in this case. But then real human beings aren't mere instantiations of archetypes.

As for the "metaphysical" impossibility of being attracted to any other disciple besides NB... ahem, you must realize, Michael, your implication that, in matters of love, Ayn Rand didn't always successfully differentiate between reality and fiction. Doesn't that automatically make you an "apostle of the arbitrary"?

Robert Campbell

[Judith]

The problem that Eddie Willers posed for Ayn Rand is the status of an ordinary human being whose ethics are impeccable but who is not Prime Mover material. The challenge was heightened because Eddie is not a bit player, like Mike Donnigan in The Fountainhead; he is on the scene for much of the action in Atlas Shrugged.

Superimposed on the division between Prime Movers and everyone else is a principle of hierarchy.

I suspect that Rand considered Dagny being attracted to Eddie a "metaphysical" impossibility.

For the same reason that it was "metaphysically" impossible for Dagny to return to Francisco after she'd met John Galt.

Fascinating answer, Robert; thank you.

It confirms what I've always known; I consider ethics to be much more important in a person than intelligence or accomplishment.

Judith