PUBLISHED REVIEWS

DAVID MACGREGOR, CRITICAL REVIEW 11, no. 3 (SUMMER 1997): 373-91

"IT AYN'T RAND"

"Ayn Rand believed in a capitalist marketplace full of extraordinary people who have achieved 'the full integration of mind and body,' . . . as Chris Sciabarra writes in his remarkable exposition of Rand. . . . Sciabarra's thesis is difficult to prove conclusively with the available evidence. . . . But he demonstrates persuasively, I think, that Rand's thought cannot be properly understood apart from the consideration of German dialectics. . . . Drawing on the writings of Rand and her followers, Sciabarra traces the central elements of Objectivist philosophy, a school of thought that has grown beyond the boundaries initially set by its founder. . . . Sciabarra shows how Rand's analysis of power relations closely resembles Hegel's vision of the master-slave relationship. . . . [However,] Sciabarra fails in     . . . his major argument [that] Rand . . . provide[s] an alternative to the dialectical standpoint of Hegel and Marx. On the contrary, Rand's entire mode of thought is trapped within the duality of statism and capitalism. . . . Sciabarra's success in portraying Rand as a dialectical thinker partially stems from the amorphous definition of method he took from Ollman. . . . [Nevertheless, Sciabarra shows that] Rand has contributed something of importance to our understanding of individual freedom."

David MacGregor, King's College, University of Western Ontario