1. It’s been reported that Allan Blumenthal and his wife Joan Mitchel Blumenthal passed away recently. Allan Blumenthal (Nathaniel Branden’s cousin) was a psychiatrist and a member of the Collective (he signed the statement denouncing Nathaniel after Rand booted Nathaniel and Barbara out of the movement). Allan (who was joint heir to Rand’s estate with Leonard Peikoff) broke with Rand around 1974, finding it impossible to maintain a civil, non-argumentative relationship with her. Barbara Branden, in her biography of Rand quoted Allan: "She was relentless in her pursuit of so-called psychological errors [concerning judgments on art]. If an issue were once raised, she would never drop it; after an evening's conversation, she'd telephone the next day to ask what we had concluded about it overnight . . . It was becoming a nightmare." She quotes Joan: "but, often, she would seem deliberately to insult and antagonize us."
2. Ayn Rand Institute thinkers Don Watkins and Onkar Ghate have a new book, Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up For Business. I discussed it here.
3. The Ayn Rand Fan Club has an excellent discussion of grudges within and outside of the Objectivist movement. Highlights: Yaron Brook says (shockingly) that “I’m a big believer in holding grudges” and Leonard Peikoff saying in 1989 that he won’t live long enough to forgive David Kelley even if Kelley became repentant. They make they point that many Objectivist schisms are in part personal grudges disguised as philosophical disputes.
—Neil Parille
2 comments:
So both of the Blumenthals passed on around the same time? Sorry to hear this. I wonder who of the 1960s inner circle is left. Peikoff, of course. Greenspan, though he was more marginal. Anyone else?
Allan was a concert pianist. He and Joan wrote books on art and music, if I recall correctly. If you look at Allan's account of Rand, he seemed to grow more critical from the Branden biography to the Ayn Rand Cult (Walker) to the Heller bio.
Greenspan is an interesting character, nothing in his life strikes me that he would have been a true believer in Objectivism or any other movement.
NP
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