From The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin. He has a whole chapter on her that’s well worth the read:

We possess an entire literature, from Melville to Mamet, devoted to the con man and the hustler, and it’s tempting to see Rand as one of the many fakes and frauds that periodically light up the American landscape. But that temptation should be resisted. Rand represents something different, more unsettling. The con man is a liar who can ascertain the truth of things, often better than the rest of us. He has to: if he is going to fleece his mark, he has to know who the mark is and who the mark would like to be. Working in that netherworld between fact and fantasy, the con man can gild the lily only if he sees the lily for what it is. But Rand had no desire to gild anything. The gilded lily was reality. What was there to add? She even sported a lapel pin to make the point: made of gold and fashioned in the shape of a dollar sign, it was bling of the most literal sort.

Since the nineteenth century, it has been the task of the left to hold up to liberal civilization a mirror of its highest values and to say, “You do not look like this.” You claim to believe in the rights of man, but it is only the rights of property you uphold. You claim to stand for freedom, but it is only the freedom of the strong to dominate the weak. If you wish to live up to your principles, you must give way to their demiurge. Allow the dispossessed to assume power, and the ideal will be made real, the metaphor will be made material.

Rand believed that this meeting of heaven and earth could be arranged by other means. Rather than remake the world in the image of paradise, she looked for paradise in an image of the world. Political transformation wasn’t necessary. Transubstantiation was enough. Say a few words, wave your hands and the ideal is real, the metaphor material. An idealist of the most primitive sort, Rand took a century of socialist dichotomies and flattened them. Small wonder so many have accused her of intolerance: When heaven and earth are pressed so closely together, where is there room for dissent?

Far from needing explanation, her success explains itself. Rand worked in that quintessential American proving ground [of Hollywood]—alongside the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck—where garbage achieves gravitas and bullshit gets blessed. There she learned that dreams don’t come true. They are true.

I mean, she is.

Her way of thinking is very shitty and she was a pretty terrible person, but her profession was philosophy. Not like she’d have any other career.

Can anyone explain why Ayn Rand’s ideas aren’t considered philosophical? I know there’s a lot of bashing her, but I don’t actually know what about her ideas disqualifies it as being a philosophy.

I read Atlas Shrugged and aside from it being a capitalistic wet dream, my understanding is her big idea is that people should work hard pretty much for the sake of the work itself. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but I was wondering if anyone had a better explanation.

Is she really any worse than Friedrich Nietzsche or Immanuel Kant? Hardly the first philosopher with a shit reputation as a human being.

Say what you will about Objectivism, but it was undeniably influential. And it was far more approachable than Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy of Language or Hegel’s Dialectic. If you end up a Thelemite by the end of it… well, at least its an ethos.