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Review of Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

Reviewed by Robert Mayhew (read by Sean Saulsbury)

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. . . . Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a great novelist and philosopher, who, in her lifetime, attracted what could be called “disciples,” and it was Judas who wrote the biography...

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About the Author

Robert Mayhew (PhD, Georgetown University, 1991) is professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Republic, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia, and, most recently, Plato: Laws 10 (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is the editor of Ayn Rand’s Marginalia, Ayn Rand’s The Art of Nonfiction, Ayn Rand Answers, and of four collections of essays—one on each of Ayn Rand’s novels. He recently finished a book on the Sophist Prodicus of Ceos, and is currently preparing a new edition of the Aristotelian Problemata for the Loeb Classical Library, to be published by Harvard University Press.