Tag Archives: The Fountainhead

Would Friedrich Nietzsche have admired Ayn Rand?

Nietzsche scholar Brian Leiter has a rather strong opinion about this: This typically idiotic remark in a recent NY Times book review caught my attention: “Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers … Continue reading

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Doubting the doctrine of hell: India disorients a Christian

One of Andrew Sullivan’s blog readers wrote this today: I’m a Christian . . . I think. I say, “I think” because a recent trip to India left me stumbling on the foundation of faith laid since my youth. I … Continue reading

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Oxford University Press Publishes a Biography on Atheist Capitalist, Ayn Rand

But the author of the book does not call Rand a “conservative” because Rand was an atheist! Hmm. Jennifer Burns is a University of Virginia historian, and her book on Ayn Rand is titled Goddess of the Market. Here is part 1 … Continue reading

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Ayn Rand and “Going Galt”: Under Bush, the Left Talked of Going to Canada to Live. Under Obama, Some on the Right are Reading ATLAS SHRUGGED and Imagining Themselves Escaping to “Galt’s Gulch”—a Utopian Capitalist Enclave in Rand’s Novel, Free of Collectivists

So reports the Washington Independent here. Money quote: The plot of Rand’s novel [Atlas Shrugged] is simple, despite its length — 1,088 pages in the current paperback edition. The United States is governed by bureaucrats, “looters” and “moochers,” who penalize and … Continue reading

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Form Follows Whose Function?: Reflections on Brasilia and the Career of Architect Oscar Niemeyer

The career of Oscar Niemeyer (the architect who almost singlehandedly designed all of Brasilia) is discussed in a fascinating Atlantic article titled, A Vision in Concrete (July/August 2008). It opens thus: It was a heroic and inhuman scheme. From 1956 to … Continue reading

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Howard Roark Laughed—and So Did Gilgamesh: Nietzschean Creators v. Advice from the Herd

In William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” on plate 9, there is this aphorism: The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey. In other … Continue reading

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