IF ONLY THEY'D STAY IN VEGAS:

A city that works by extremes is an appropriate place to celebrate Ayn Rand--or, more specifically, Objectivism, the philosophy she conceived and the occasion for the conference I was in Las Vegas to attend. Rand made a name for herself writing novels in the 40s and 50s before trying to articulate the worldview they implied. The Romantic Manifesto, The Virtue of Selfishness, and Capitalism:  The Unknown Ideal have never enjoyed the popular appeal of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but then again, they weren't meant to. If art, for Rand, was "the integrator of metaphysics," the precepts themselves warranted description.

Ayn Rand's intellectual legacy is mixed at best. Anecdotal evidence suggests that elements of her philosophy have made their way into "lit crit" seminars and (a supreme irony) gender studies, and for many years I have assigned her essay "What Is Capitalism?" to my business-ethics classes. Yet, when it comes to "real" philosophers--a designation that, for better or worse, indicates a perch in a Philosophy Department--Objectivism mostly goes unmentioned.

In this respect, Rand's academic reputation resembles Karl Marx's. The unfinished saga that is Das Kapital is now essentially ignored by its intended adversaries, the superintendents of an "economic science," whereas faculties across the humanities still plumb works like On the Jewish Question, The Holy Family, or Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, an effort Marx thought so highly of he abandoned it in a desk.

Atlas Shrugged ranked second behind the Bible in a 1991 survey asking about the single work that had "made a difference" in the lives of respondents.

But the trajectory of their intellectual legacies isn't the only resemblance. Much like Marx, Rand's relevance to scholars is largely underwritten by her ideological influence. Even if academics remain unconvinced by her arguments about aesthetics, ethics, and political economy, they have good reason to read Rand for her abiding significance to the conservative movement.

That relationship can hardly be described as cozy. Set aside the College Republicans and Chamber of Commerce types who occasionally look in the mirror and hope to find a glimpse of John Galt. An unapologetic Objectivist is about as welcome in conservative circles as a Trotskyite in liberal ones. The ambivalence is not so much a matter of policy disputes--though, in both cases, they are so great as to constitute a difference of kind, not degree--but of the patience required to accommodate the nervous tic of the political radical, the inevitable tendency to make the good the enemy of the perfect.

When I told a cousin who works for a libertarian think tank about attending an Objectivist conference, he rolled his eyes and muttered, "The Bible." He was referring, of course, to Atlas Shrugged, the nearly 1,100-page tome that William F. Buckley, Jr. once copped to having "flogged" himself to get through. In the late 50s, the reactionary editor of the National Review dispatched Whittaker Chambers--the former Soviet spy whose conversion story, Witness, Ronald Reagan credited with flipping him from a New Dealer to a right-wing warrior--to write a scorched-earth review that would serve as a forcible parting of ways between the Objectivists and the upstart conservative movement. Chambers famously obliged. "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained," he wrote of Atlas Shrugged. "Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal."

For Chambers, the problem with the novel was not so much the views it espoused--"a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does"--but the manner in which they were prosecuted. "It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation," he said of the book's ideological call to arms. "Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible."

If Buckley, by way of Chambers, aimed to make it acceptable for conservatives to shun Rand and her acolytes, she did little to dispel the stereotype of the implacable ideologue. Just as Marx strained to distance himself from the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon and Proudhon, Rand didn't hesitate to stiff-arm groups that, to the untrained eye at least, seemed like natural allies. "Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to 'do something,'" she warned her followers in the Objectivist newsletter. Such groups included conservatives and libertarians, both of whom perverted capitalism, the first by substituting "theocracy for capitalism," the second "anarchism for capitalism." For Rand, the free market was neither a shortcut to the common good nor the commercial incarnation of "all is permitted." Instead, the system best embodied the only principle of distributive justice she recognized: To each according to his ability--period. [...]

All vacations promise some kind of escape, but escapism is the allure of Las Vegas. The city--with its shows, its clubs, even its casinos--is ultimately incidental. You come to leave your self behind.

Escapism of a different sort is also the allure of a radical philosophy. It seduces not by promising a temporary solution to the contest between the grosser passions and personal integrity--the very conflict that can sometimes make escaping the "real world" so enticing--but by providing an alternative vision of what the "real world" constitutes. Base and Superstructure. Unconscious and Conscious. The City of God and the City of Man. These dichotomies assume that the world we see is not the one that must be reckoned with, that there is another world, with its own shadowy forces, its own systemizing logic, its own uncanny story. Here is the world that matters, says the radical philosophy. Not only does it precede the apparent world, it predominates.

Being invited to glimpse such a world can be beguiling, especially for the lost and lonely, for nothing affirms a sense of significance, even superiority, like believing yourself a keeper of the ultimate secret. And yet, if the evangelists of a radical philosophy have the forehand advantage of flattery, they still have to contend with the hazard of false consciousness. They must convince the uninitiated that many of the problems they see in the world--indeed, often the very ones that make them liable to conversion in the first place--are irrelevant, moot, or even mistaken.

The afterward of Brook's talk provided an illustration. A catechumen made his way to the microphone to ask the kind of question one might expect to be addressed by a session titled "The Inequality Debate." Having spent a few days in Las Vegas, the young man was distressed by the evidence of poverty he had seen on the Strip, which can be considerable, given that Nevada's tourism and housing industries were devastated by the financial crisis and the state still has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country. So much of the presentation seemed to revolve around a dispute between elites over the philosophical implications of inequality, he said, but what about "the street junkies? They are so miserable and they sleep on the street." His question was simple: "Why isn't the free market hiring those people?"

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