Objectivist Round up September 2023

1. Someone asked Yaron Brook when an authorized biography of Rand (presumably the long-awaited one by Shoshana Milgram Knapp) will be published.  He said it was completed two years ago and will be coming out eventually but didn’t give a date other than it won’t take ten years.   Milgram was on the New Ideal podcast September 1 with Harry Binswanger to discuss Romantic Art.  The host introduced her and said she has written about Rand but no mention of a biography, authorized or otherwise.  (I listened to most of the podcast and it didn’t come up.)  One can only speculate on the reason for the delay.  Peikoff is up there in years and it’s hard to imagine him getting too interested in a biography at this stage in his life.  On the other hand, Ayn Rand Institute members such as Yaron Brook, Harry Binswanger and Robert “Rewrite” Mayhew have said the Branden accounts and the 2009 biographies by Anne Heller and Jennifer Burns are dishonest.  Any competent biographer will have to admit that the Branden accounts and the 2009 biographies pretty much got things right.

2. Yaron Brook will be debating Bryan Caplan on whether anarcho-capitalism would be a disaster.  The debate should be interesting.  Not too long ago the official ARI view of anarcho-capitalism was that it is nihilistic.  One wonders if those who ridiculed the idea of debating Open Objectivism will be similarly outraged.

[Bear in mind: back in the nineties, after the David Kelley split, ARI Objectivists would routinely refuse to debate or have any relations whatsoever with "liberatarians" (which would of course include anarcho-capitalists), because, as Peikoff once put it, "libertarians are worse than communists." Then in 2012 John Allison, one of ARI's leading donors, became CEO of the CATO Institute, a position he held until 2015. That seems to have created a thaw of sorts in the relations between ARI Objectivists and libertarians. So in the last few years, Yaron Brook has been a guest on Micheal Malice's "Your Welcome" podcast and a co-guest with Malice on Lex Friedman's podcast. So there's nothing really all that new or shocking in this most recent debate with Bryan Caplan. --GN]