Out of a Gray Fog: Ayn Rand’s Europe
Out of a Gray Fog: Ayn Rand’s Europe. Claudia Franziska Brühwiler. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.
Claudia Franziska Brühwiler attempts, largely successfully, to dispel some of the “Gray Fog” that hangs over the question of Ayn Rand’s roots and reception in Western Europe. A book on such a topic is a task for a scholar with a formidable command of relevant languages. By my count (and apologies to the author if I’ve missed a language) Ayn Rand’s Europe cites sources in English, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian. With some understatement, we may conclude that the book’s breadth is not hampered by any significant language barrier.
Ayn Rand’s Europe goes into much useful detail on what Rand did or did not get from canonical figures in the Western tradition such as Aristotle, Auguste Comte, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche. That Rand’s reading of philosophy tended to superficiality is news to nobody, and so to some extent, arguing about whether Rand was (say) a “Nietzschean” or not, is to bark up the wrong tree. But, the author’s discussion of the function these four thinkers served in Rand’s thought is new, excellent, and deserves wide recognition.
I owe Brühwiler a note of thanks for introducing me to the scholar Dominik Bartmanski, on whose work she builds the argument that Rand turned herself into an “iconic” thinker by associating and then disassociating herself with Nietzsche, by formulating her own theory of altruism as opposed to Comte’s views of the same, by setting up her radical anti-Kantianism as her “brand”—“semiotic condensation” in Bartmanski’s term—and by aesthetically associating herself with Aristotle, rather than Plato. If academic philosophers had been Rand’s intended audience, this would have required careful engagement with the works of the four thinkers in question. However, it wasn’t, so she didn’t. Rand’s use of these thinkers, depended less on careful engagement with (say) Kant’s ethics than it did with a symbolic opposition to “Kantianism.” Put bluntly, Rand’s rejection of Kant, Nietzsche, and so on, tells us that she is the chief of a new tribe with whom she wants us to identify. None of this requires careful knowledge of On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History For Life or Thus Spake Zarathustra. I’m reminded of a humorous incident in my graduate school days, when an undergraduate walked into my office carrying an unabridged copy of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He didn’t mention the book, which I thought was odd, so I inquired as to his thoughts on it. Embarrassingly, it turned out that he hadn’t read it, and so the book had served, rather, as a “semiotic condensation” of his tribal allegiance. (Full Disclosure: I’d never read the whole thing either, but hadn’t pretended to have done so). Rand’s engagement with Kant, Nietzsche, Comte, and Aristotle, therefore, can be summed up as a key part of the process by which she gained charisma, in which state one constructs one’s “social authority” such that we see a reordering of the “sacred and the profane.” (102)
Brühwiler’s discussion of Rand as a charismatic figure could stand further analysis. Here, the author has usefully employed Bartmanski’s work on becoming an iconic thinker, and so in that spirit, I will advance Philip Rieff as another theorist of use. Rieff argued that Western culture since the late 19th century is the first culture in history to try to solve the problem of transgression by eliminating the concept of sin altogether. This is what led Rieff to dub our era an “anti-culture,” whose fundamental commitment is to eliminating the idea of the sacred. In the absence of any sacred order that could contextualize our good (or bad) behavior, Rieff argued that actual prophets would be replaced by guru-like figures who would bring no divine interdicts but would instead offer us a merely therapeutic comfort. So Brühwiler’s argument is that Rand gained charisma and reordered the sacred and the profane, in an overall context that Rieff argued denies any reality to either concept. No wonder then, that Nathaniel Branden (Rand’s disciple and sometime paramour) and his eponymous institute were very much involved in the self-esteem movement. Rieff’s prophecy that therapy would fill the gap left by divine interdicts seems very much fulfilled in Rand’s work and legacy. Brühwiler’s first chapter is titled “Categorizing Rand,” in which she (I think rightly) calls her a “public intellectual.” Complementing her analysis of Rand’s iconicity with a look at Rieff suggests how we might think about the specific type Rand was. Rand’s mode of engagement with key figures in the Western canon suggests that her way of being a public intellectual has more in common with (say) Ibram X. Kendi than with Eric Voegelin.
Having discussed Rand’s use (and abuse) of important Western thinkers, how should we describe the character of Rand’s Western European reception? At one level, Brühwiler demonstrates that Rand’s European influence is rather more circumscribed than in the United States, where innumerable individual fans coexist with organized Objectivism in institutions such as the Ayn Rand Institute and The Atlas Society. By comparison, European Objectivism is an archipelago of mostly isolated individual cases. A few scattered politicians, playwrights, and artists comprise the extent of Western European Objectivism, though the recent launch of an Ayn Rand Institute in Europe could perhaps change this, in future.
How to explain this seeming lack of interest? While there is some evidence for the thesis that Europeans are just too “sophisticated” (for whatever an innately tautological definition is worth) for American pop-philosophical potboilers, context, as always, matters quite a bit. One of Brühwiler’s more interesting discoveries is that such a simple matter as WWII-era paper shortages, in combination with Rand’s own reluctance to abridge her novels, made translation into major Western European languages more difficult. Having once billed herself as the third of the three most important philosophers in history (Aristotle and Aquinas being the other two), Rand’s reluctance to cut The Fountainhead (1943) down by a few hundred pages is understandable. One is reminded of Clemenceau’s irritated remark that Wilson came to the Paris Peace Conference with fourteen points, where God had contented himself with only ten.
Where Rand’s European reception has been important, however, is in its effect on European perceptions of the United States. Rand is predominantly viewed as an American philosopher, and so Rand’s ideas are evocative of the kind of place America is supposed to be. Here, I want to propose complementary thesis to Brühwiler’s. Ayn Rand’s Europe shows how European analysts often misunderstand what Rand actually said. For instance, no one even marginally familiar with Rand’s oeuvre could possibly mistake Donald Trump for some kind of Randian hero, a mistake at least one of Brühwiler’s sources makes. However, this is exactly the same category error made by American commentators: witness fears that Paul Ryan was some sort of dyed-in-the-wool Objectivist. This makes me suspect that something else is really going on here. European criticisms of Rand seem more similar than different to American ones, based as they tend to be on one’s demographic or economic position, or allegiance to some rival therapeutic prophet. Ironically, perhaps at least some of this similarity is a result of the “global village” character of a world created by the kind of capitalist entrepreneurship that Rand envisioned, and for which many elites pretend disdain as they rail against its injustices while reaping its material benefits.
It is possible, then, that “Ayn Rand’s Europe” is pretty much like “Ayn Rand’s America,” in the sense that the same sorts of people on both sides of the Atlantic love and hate her books, and do so for largely similar reasons. Ayn Rand’s Europe does much to illuminate this dynamic. One hopes that future analyses will follow Brühwiler’s lead in looking at what Rand actually says and to whom that appeals, rather than trying to shoehorn Rand’s Objectivism into preexisting political categories, be those European or American.
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