For example, one thing that's always touted is the perennial popularity of "Atlas Shrugged", which is currently going through a renewed surge due to the economic crisis. But even before the GFC, we can see it was widely read:
A Freestar Media/Zogby poll found that 8.1 percent of American adults have read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. The poll of 1,239 adults was conducted by Zogby International between October 10 and October 14, 2007 at the request of Freestar Media, LLC. Among the poll's 80 questions was "Have you ever read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand?". The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.OK, if they're over 18 years, that's around 225,000,000 people. 8.1% of that means about 18,225,000 have read the book. Atlas Shrugged's sales in the 50-odd years since it was published seem to be about 6,500,000, so (assuming these are mostly in the US) each copy should have about 3 readers. Seems possible enough, at least in a back-of-an-envelope way, so let's grant this research could be reliable.
But the key question is: of the 18,000,000 or so Americans that have read the book, how many have become Objectivists as a result? Certainly this is unprecedented publicity for a philosophy, but how effective has Rand's magnum opus actually been in persuading people that her philosophy is the one to follow?
Of course, trying to figure this out is difficult as there are no firm numbers on the volume of self-described Objectivists out there. Furthermore, Objectivism is so schismatic that no one can agree on what being an Objectivist really entails in the first place. For example, at the furthest cultic extreme, Leonard Peikoff contends that Ayn Rand herself was the only true Objectivist, and everyone else is just a "student" of Objectivism. So it's obviously a problematic proposition.
However, we can make some reasonable assumptions. For example, we'd presume Libertarians outnumber Objectivists, mainly on the basis that unlike Objectivists, the Libertarians have enough weight to have managed to form a consistent political presence in the US. There are around 225,000 registered Libertarians in the US, so Objectivists would have to be significantly less than that. So that could give us a reasonable upper bound. And of course, whilst Libertarians are often inspired by Rand's writing, they are certainly not considered to be Objectivists.
What's the minimum then? Well, let's take the free site The Atlasphere as possible minimum. This networking site for Ayn Rand fans, which has been around for many years now, claims about 18, 774 member profiles. So if we generously assume they're all US citizens that would give us a possible bottom figure. So that would make the number of Objectivists roughly somewhere between 225,000 and 19,000. So let's put a guesstimate on it and assume that figure in the US is 100,000. That's a pretty generous assumption, I think. It's more than five times the number of self-described Objectivists on the largest, longest running free Objectivist networking site. And certainly after spending some years around Objectivist websites, one can anecdotally say that seems generous. While there are plenty of sites, they're not heavily populated in general, and when they are there's a lot of the same old, same old names cropping up. And certainly there's nothing in the attendance at Ayn Rand Institute or Atlas Society conferences or events to suggest a following much larger - if any thing, the opposite.
So that means from around 18,000,000 readers of Objectivism's definitive bestselling expression, we get 100,000 Objectivist conversions, or a conversion rate of 1:180, or roughly just over 0.5%. That is, even with very generous assumptions, 99.4% of people who have read "Atlas Shrugged" have not become Objectivists as a result.
That's the state of play after 50 years. At this rate even using what is supposed to be Objectivism's most powerful conversion tool it will take literally millennia before Objectivism becomes the "political" force Kelley seems to think is possible.
The failure of the Objectivist movement's leaders to offer a realistic route to political advancement is surely yet another thing that turns off would-be Objectivists. If the philosophy of Objectivism were as vitally important to the future of man as it suggests, then advancing Objectivism politically and culturally would seem to be a pressing need. Yet for some reason, we are told that political advancement must wait. Would-be followers, flush with enthusiasm, looking for the political branch of the ARI are given "the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all". Who would want to follow a philosophic (and hence political) movement whose leaders aren't even seriously trying to succeed?
ReplyDeleteThere are a number of issues that could be added to Daniel's fine commentary:
ReplyDelete1. Demographics of Objectivism. No statistics here, but I don't think I would be going out on a limb to suggest that Objectivists, in the main, are not terribly prolific bearers of children.
2. Peikoff's successor. Peikoff was Rand's heir, but who will be Peikoff's heir? As the succession gets further from Rand, odds of further schisms greatly increase. Orthodox Objectivism is more of a personality cult than an ideological movement, so the further removed it becomes from Rand (as it will inevitably over time) the more it must will weaken. Peikoff can impress the faithful with his declaration of being Rand's "intellectual heir," but whose going to be impressed with the declaration that so-and-so is Peikoff's "intellectual heir"?
3. Dilution of Rand through revisionism. Neo-Objectivism, which seeks to give Objectivism a varnish of respectability by making it more scholarly, will be forced to make more and more compromises with Rand's original material to keep it in line with contemporary advances in psychology and cognitive science. There is a built-in self destructor in all of this. The more successful neo-Objectivism finds itself in the academic community, the greater will be the scrutiny from non-Objectivists; and the greater scrutiny, the more likely the errors of Rand's original system will be exposed and held up to withering criticism, forcing the neo-Objectivists to give ground and revise. So the more successful neo-Objectivism is, the more it will have to change and become something else.
"A Freestar Media/Zogby poll found that 8.1 percent of American adults have read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand."
ReplyDeleteI find it unlikely that 8.1% of American adults have ever read any thousand-page novel.
As for conversion statistics, my guess is that there are a fair number of temporary conversions - people who read the book, get excited about Rand for a while, then lose interest and move on to something else. The typical case is a high school or college student who becomes an Objectist for a semester or two and then thinks better of it.
Permanent conversions seem to be rare. People who stick with Objectivism into adulthood are relatively hard to find.
Anon69:
ReplyDelete>Who would want to follow a philosophic (and hence political) movement whose leaders aren't even seriously trying to succeed?
Turning to what this folly of the "cultural change" project accomplishes, it seems to work on several possible levels: a) Allows a permanent ineffectualism to be recast as a Sisyphisean us-against-the-masses tale; a excuse conveniently consonant with Objectivism's internal mythology.b) Prevents actual-unworkablity of Rand's political programme being discovered in practice, as the first two prior steps are again conveniently insurmountable. c) In the unlikely event Rand's political program should ever be practised, and fail (which it would almost certainly do), there is the built-in excuse that steps 1 and 2 were not sufficiently thoroughgoing to successfully achieve 3. (This is reminiscent of Communist revisionism where the failure of actually existing Communist regimes in Russia or China could be blamed on the fact they skipped vital steps when they took over from largely feudal societies, not post-capitalist ones as Marx prophesied)
This is one individual who has "stuck" with being an Objectivist for over 40 years. What's sorely missing from this conversation is the panning of Rand and her works from academia...so-called "liberal" arts courses, etc. It's as if they are too scared of its truth to discuss it other than to try to marginalize the works and the author. If it were allowed to be discussed fairly, I think you would see a breakthrough of interest comparable to Darwin's evolutionary theory's supplanting creationism.
ReplyDeleteMicheal Prescott, I think I fit your sterotypical temporary objectivist quite well. I read the book Atlas Shrugged on a recomendation when I was 18, spent about several months as Randroid, then about 2 or 3 years as a schismatic trying to reconcile objectivism with reality - until reality won hands down. Today I find objectivism laughable.
ReplyDeletertaylortitle:
ReplyDelete>What's sorely missing from this conversation is the panning of Rand and her works from academia...so-called "liberal" arts courses, etc. It's as if they are too scared of its truth to discuss it other than to try to marginalize the works and the author.
Hi rtaylortitle
It's certainly true that Rand was ignored in academia. And there is a grain of truth in that she can be a "scary" proposition for liberal arts courses etc. in that she is a direct challenge to a lot of their assumptions, and I'm not sure they really know how to deal with her. Objectivism is quite a complicated web of mistakes, and these mistakes are concealed (even from herself) by Rand's verbal skill and her alternately inspirational and intimidating rhetoric. Further complicating things is that Rand didn't understand the philosophical problems she claimed to solve, so her "solutions" are on examination are answers to the wrong questions. As Greg Nyquist says, the chief difficulty in criticising Objectivism is the complexity of its confusions. So the average teacher's probably just going to dismiss it with some superficial one-liners, which the budding Objectivist enthusiast is hardly going to find convincing - if anything, it will only confirm their belief in "the truth" of Objectivism, because this my-genius-against-the-masses-ignorance experience is part of Objectivism's internal mythology.
It actually takes a fair amount of effort to see the real problems with Objectivism, effort that few people have really expended because it is a marginal philosophy in the first place. Hence Rand is the subject of a lot of inaccurate criticism, which ironically in turn reinforces Objectivism's internal myth that critics have no real answer to her.
Finally, a central problem is that Rand's confident and sweeping writing style gives the impression she is writing clearly and precisely; in fact, in a hide-in-plain-sight way, she goes on and on about how important it is to be "precise", and how clear and precise she is compared to "other philosophers" even when she is churning out reams of vague, contradictory waffle laden with obscure jargon (the specialist Objectivist jargon serves to conceal many of her contradictions) - in other words, just like most other philosophers...;-)
However, despite all that, Rand can be coherently, accurately and even decisively criticised. As I assume you are new to this site I will summarise how:
1) Her theories, while probably containing some truth in a broad, very general sense (and most theories contain some truth of this kind), do not stand up to scientific, empirical testing. In fact while Rand makes noises about the importance of "reality", actual science rarely if ever makes an appearance in her work. Further, even finding empirically testable propositions in her work is very difficult, as it consists largely of rationalisations, albeit stated with considerable passions. Like Marxism, or Freudianism, Objectivism's apparent irrefutability is not a sign of its truthfulness but a function of my next point...
2) Rand's theories are primarily verbalist. That is, they reduce to literally word-games. As Greg says in ARCHN, some of Rand's most important doctrines turn out to be mere plays on words! This problem can be hard to see, as it stems from very ancient and quite basic logical errors in Aristotle's methodology, which Rand imported wholesale into her system. These errors - primarily the simple fallacy that there are "true" and "false" definitions of words - are ones Rand shares with most philosophy, including with no small irony many schools she and her followers ostensibly despise!
Anyway, if you are new to the site take a look around, I am sure you will find plenty to chew on...;-)
After a person read Atlas Shrugged, if he were interested in Rand's philosophy he would probably turn to The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. The Amazon rankings for these book are, respectively, 2101 and 5706.
ReplyDeleteNot bad for books that are over 40 years old, but it doesn't indicate that Objectivism is on the verge of breaking out into the mainstream.
As a comparison, Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology - a 1300 page book that came out 15 years ago and has become a standard ultraconservative Evangelical work -- has an Amazon ranking of 1424.
" If [Objectivism] were allowed to be discussed fairly, I think you would see a breakthrough of interest comparable to Darwin's evolutionary theory's supplanting creationism."
ReplyDeleteAlthough a "fair" discussion of Objectivism in academia might lead to slight increase in interest in Rand's work, I think it very implausible that one would see a "breakthrough of interest" comparable to evolution. Darwin's theories do not have any specific political or moral content. Socialists like Marx and individualists like Sumner and Mencken could equally be inspired by Darwin's ideas. Not so with Rand. If you don't agree with her particular brand of individualistic ethics and politics, you're not going to like her philosophy, regardless of how fairly she is discussed. Anyone on the left is going to despise Rand, for obvious reasons; and all those on the right who are religious or who, following in the footsteps of Burke and Hayek, have little sympathy for rationalistic critiques of tradition, are not going to find Rand to their taste. So even if we ignore the scientific problems of some of Rand's chief claims (problems we have raised repeatedly on this blog), a breakthrough of interest in Rand's ideas hardly seems likely.
'In fact while Rand makes noises about the importance of "reality", actual science rarely if ever makes an appearance in her work.'
ReplyDeleteOne of the more amusing and explicit instances of this is found at the beginning of her work on "epistemology" - "The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."
At the time ITOE was published, there was no such scientific discovery.
Peikoff can impress the faithful with his declaration of being Rand's "intellectual heir," but whose going to be impressed with the declaration that so-and-so is Peikoff's "intellectual heir"?
ReplyDeleteI've seen the term "intellectual heir" dozens of times in connection to Rand/Peikoff, but apart from that, I've never seen it anywhere else.
So what does it mean that Peikoff is Rand's "intellectual heir?" Did she write an intellectual will? Is there something legal or official in this? Or is it just some weird cult leader's appointing-of-the-successor thing?
- Chris
Chris,
ReplyDeleteRand said Branden was her "intellectual heir." It has been reported that Rand said after the split that she would never have another such heir.
Leonard Peikoff is the heir to Rand's estate, but the designation of him as her intellectual heir was not in her will.
It's not clear why LP believes he is Rand's IH. It's been reported that he claimed Rand once told him that.