THE LIBERTARIAN TRADITION PODCAST | Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement
b'
\\nIn this January 12, 2010 episode of the Libertarian Tradition\\xa0podcast series, part of\\xa0the Mises Institute’s online media library,\\xa0Jeff Riggenbach\\xa0discusses the important role played by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand in the early libertarian movement.
\\nEditor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article most of the others.
\\nHere is a brief summary, however:
\\nIn light of then recently released books on Ayn Rand\\xa0\\u2014 Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made \\u2014 Riggenbach discusses Rand’s role in the early libertarian movement. Along the way he highlights Heller’s defense of the quality of Rand’s writing against mainstream literary critics. He goes on to argue that Heller’s book is the better of the two and explains what mars Burns’s book. He plays a couple of clips of Rand herself explaining why she and her philosophy of Objectivism are not conservative, and challenges the coherence of Burns’s conception of the American Right.
\\nIf you’re unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and her importance in the libertarian tradition, this episode offers a good primer on the subject as well as on what differentiates libertarianism and conservatism.
'