Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s column reflects on Ayn Rand’s legacy and bemoans its godless superficiality.
Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch — it was, in fact, stillborn. The great public crises in Ayn Rand’s career came, in my judgment, when Whittaker Chambers took her on — in December of 1957, when her book Atlas Shrugged was dominating the bestseller list, lecturers were beginning to teach something called “Randism,” and students started using such terms as “mysticism of the mind” (religion) and “mysticism of the muscle” (statism). Whittaker Chambers, whose authority with American conservatives was as high as that of any man then living, wrote in National Review, after a lengthy analysis of the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy:
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