ARI’s online version of “The Objectivist Ethics,” about whose incompleteness I previously plained, now finally appears to be complete – except that most of the footnotes are missing, including an important one on teleology.
So why is it that ARI still can’t manage to post Rand’s most important article without screwing it up? I mean, they’ve got a decent-sized budget and staff, plus this stuff is holy writ to them – so you’d think they’d have both the means and the motivation to get it right.
In 1869, several years before Nietzsche published his famous analysis of ressentiment in such works as Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s “Flies of the Marketplace” or The Genealogy of Morals’ “Good and Evil, Good and Bad,” Victor Hugo published his novel The Man Who Laughs. In the following chapters Hugo offers a striking anticipation of Nietzsche:
Barkilphedro Gnaws His Way
Inferi
Hate Is As Strong As Love
The Flame Which Would Be Seen If Man Were Transparent
It would be interesting to know whether Nietzsche read The Man Who Laughs. (Nietzsche’s passing references to Hugo are dismissive.) Also, inasmuch as both Hugo and Nietzsche were early favourites of Rand’s, I wonder how much of the portrayal of ressentiment in her novels came from Hugo and not, as is usually assumed, from Nietzsche?
Or maybe its inner Sin City:
FWIW: In the first issue of Kevin Smith’s Batman: Cacophony, on stands this week, Deadshot finds the Joker reading a copy of The Fountainhead. Joker finds it boring, while Deadshot says it’s one of his favourites.
Moral: contract killers like Ayn Rand more than psychopathic clowns do. I guess that makes sense, actually. Still, you’d think the Joker would at least appreciate the first line.
Here at last (in PDF format – HTML versions to follow in futuro) are two broadly left-libertarian articles I wrote in the 90s that I’ve been promising for some time to post here. (The second one is broken into two parts because I can’t upload files greater than 5 MB.)
1. Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent
2. Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class, Parts One and Two
[Originally published in Social Philosophy & Policy 12.2 (Summer 1995) and 15.1 (Summer 1998), respectively; © 1995 and 1998, Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation; posted by permission of the Foundation.]
The first article critiques mainstream liberalism for privileging indirect and hypothetical forms of consent over direct, actual consent; the second explores the relation between big government and big business and argues that the malign power of the latter depends mostly though not entirely on that of the former. Both articles attempt to overcome the dichotomy between “capitalist” and “socialist” versions of antistatist radicalism.
(Not that anybody asked me.)
The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice – then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair – then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. He was Hank Rearden.