Correct. Larry_Borgia was stating two distinct facts.
When I majored in philosophy, Ayn Rand and ‘Objectivism’ were not regarded as academically robust philosophy. It was grouped with such things as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and other pop literature. It may come up in discussion but was not considered to be sufficiently rigorous.
This was at a Canadian school which followed a more British tradition of analytical philosophy than American schools.
At least Robert Pirsig read Plato and Aristotle and took them seriously. His book was basically a chronicle of his own mental collapse, but I still respect him more than Rand.
Blasts from the past
We debated Ayn Rand’s importance in the History of Philosophy earlier this century.
2007:
And back in 2002, a poster asked What contribution, if any, did Ayn Rand make to philosophy? The poster AynRandLover and the poster Libertarian seemed to think it was substantial. (The first would later change his handle to erislover; the second changed his username to Liberal. I was going by the name flowbark at the time, a name picked at random.)
I’m much too lazy right now to dredge through posts so ancient that they involved Liberal/Libertarian, but I’m about 90% sure he had no idea Ayn Rand despised libertarians. Like I said, I couldn’t tell you how many libertarians I’ve interacted with over my life who were completely clueless that their idol despised them and everything they stood for. If anything is cult-like, it’s how much libertarianism has managed to bury that fact from itself and hold her up as their champion for four decades after her death.
Oh, and I’m also much too overjoyed at the moment by guilty on all 34 counts for TFG.
Not that it matters, but Libertarian seemed aware of Rand’s hostility.
Binswanger’s sectarian anger reminds me of the LaRouchites I occasionally encountered.
Sam Stone (who has denied being a Libertarian and expressed skepticism of the Lib. Party upthread) also caught the distinction:
Heh, I’ve also heard libertarians described as “hippies with guns”. Which is actually rather appealing to me.
It’s still so weird to me that people take Ayn Rand seriously as a philosopher. Not just her cult followers, that’s to be expected, but other people, including people who don’t like her. She’s never produced a serious work of philosophy, never engaged with any other philosopher. She is a polemicist and a pop fiction writer.
Again, her disagreement with libertarians had nothing to do with ideas. Libertarians failed to feed her ravenous ego, so she hated them. Rand was incapable of reason herself. All her ideology was based on venom and slogans.
Rand’s stock has been falling over the past 20 years. As I noted in 2002, thick encyclopedias of philosophy don’t mention her: her defenders argued that this was anti-conservative bias in academia, which I refuted by showing examples of highly respected academics who happened to be conservative. As I depict it, the conversation pivoted to should Rand be taken seriously.
Quibble: You can be a thinker that shoots from the hip like Nietzsche or Camus and inspire volumes of philosophical commentary. Some of Rand’s fans have attempted to do the same: they got funding of course, but they didn’t get much traction. I lack the philosophic chops to properly distinguish between sloppy thinkers deserving of philosophic scrutiny and the other kind. Except to the extent that Rand was all huff and puff, like Lyndon LaRouche.
FWIW, and because I think the author deserves the shares, here’s a link to the start of Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)'s articles on how non-state peoples in Roman times organized for war. Devereaux uses a specific definition of non-state: that there is little or no idea of government or rulership as impersonal institutions, as opposed to systems of loyalty to various leaders. As Bret makes clear, this does NOT mean an absence of laws or enforceable customs, rulers, or organized coercion.
I started out writing that I was unimpressed by Devereqaux’s post, because he didn’t discuss how any local Big Man will have soldiers, sometimes full time, under his command. But then he goes into exactly that in Part II.
The author is making some anthropological claims: I’ll hypothesize that there are probably more modern eras of history with better records where the divide between states and Big Man enclaves can be better explored. Interesting work though.
Devereaux is using this period because this is his area of expertise, and one of the goals is to explain the differences of the Celtic and other cultures from how Rome and Greece functioned.