Topographies of Liberal Thought: Rand and Arendt and Race

Abstract

Rand and Arendt: the assonance is tempting. Yet these are two names rarely if ever voiced in the same breath. There are also some teasing circumstantial resemblances in their trajectories. Disembarking in the United States as bourgeois European Jews in flight from the totalitarian persecutions of early-twentieth century Europe-the one from Bolshevik Russia in 1926, the other Nazi Germany in 1941-both go on to enjoy sorts of philosophical prominence unusual for women in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these parallels count for so little that the same biographer may write a life of each without mentioning the other. (Heller, 2009;Heller, 2015) Only, it seems, the contrarian genius of Spiked magazine has felt moved to unite them in print, under the deliciously paradoxical banner of an anti-feminist feminism. (Holdsworth, 2016) Otherwise, they might as well inhabit parallel, non-communicating universes. Or at least, since they did inhabit the same public sphere, it seems they occupy distant, maybe even radically dissymmetrical, areas of it. For while Rand addresses only the narrow, shady margin of the libertarian/neo-con right, Arendt has the run of the sunlit agora, commanding the respect of thinkers of widely diverging interests. It is not just a matter of appealing to distinct constituencies or sides. Rather their audiences are constituted in ways that are incommensurable, by an address that is either homogenizing or capable of diversity.If Arendt remains good to think with, even indispensable, in spite of whatever differences we may have with her, it is because she invites us to think in a way that is nuanced, capacious, and multifaceted. But Rand has only one side, offering a single point of entry, and a uniform issue; wearing ever deeper, with relentless trenchancy and driving tendentiousness, the same narrow furrow. This, then, would be why, in the city of political philosophy, one meets Arendt at every turn, and Rand hardly at all.In the last analysis, I cannot honestly say I demur from the broad outline of this account. I would be only too happy never to have to meet a Rand; and, although I have been aware of her since she was namechecked by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, I have hitherto managed to avoid the assignation with the greatest of ease. For this, I suppose, I am indebted to the topography outlined above. There are, nevertheless, some problems arising out of its common-sense appeal to the public sphere as a coherent urban space. For one thing, as some recent swellings seem to confirm, a Rand's narrowness may not preclude a certain power of amplification. There are pronouncements that proliferate in an algorithmic continuum whose most respectable (which is to say normalising) instances would be Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray, that must remain all but incomprehensible without reference to Randian reason. And it does not matter if this 'reason' seems scarcely reasonable. This only means that the task of understanding how it functions as reason has yet to begin.Can the agora, which likes to think of itself...