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Ayn Rand Among The Austrians: Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Larry J. Sechrest
Ayn Rand Among The Austrians: Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Larry J. Sechrest
Introduction
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
and Larry J. Sechrest
In our Fall 2004 issue, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies featured a
symposium entitled “Ayn Rand: Literary and Cultural Impact.” It
was the first of two in honor of the Ayn Rand Centenary.
This Spring 2005 issue completes our Centenary celebration.
Entitled “Ayn Rand Among the Austrians,”1 the present symposium
is centered on Rand’s relationship to the Austrian school of econom-
ics. A rather heterodox approach to economics, the Austrian school
was founded by Carl Menger in the nineteenth century and was
exemplified in the twentieth century by such theorists as Ludwig von
Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Murray N. Rothbard.
Even though Rand had personal relationships of varying lengths
with both Mises and Rothbard, there has been relatively little formal
engagement between the Randian and Austrian approaches. This
symposium hopes to fill a major gap in the contemporary scholarly
literature by exploring both the similarities and the differences
between Objectivism and Austrianism.
rather admired Atlas Shrugged.” Childs “once asked him about it, and
he said that he thought it was a very good, even profound, book, but
apparently [he] skipped Galt’s speech. He couldn’t make heads nor
tails out of it, he said, and indeed he could not understand any of her
philosophical writings.” Alas, the New Individualist Review, on which
Hayek served as an editorial board advisor, dismissed Rand’s book
For the New Intellectual as “madness” (Goldberg 1961).
Despite her harsh criticisms of the ethics and politics of particular
Austrians, Rand and her early followers derived much “intellectual
ammunition” from the economic insights of the Austrian school.2
Perhaps the most important contemporary theorist at the intersection
of these traditions is George Reisman, who is represented in the
current volume. Reisman is the author of the monumental work,
Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996), which draws from both
Mises and Rand.
This is the inane and tragic state of affairs that has come to
surround the crucial economic history of the 1920s and
1930s. Whether one turns to accounts given by Marxists,
Austrians, Monetarists, or Keynesians, one will not obtain an
accurate, consistent account of these distinctive decades. . . .
In his notes (24 n. 14), Salsman rejects not only the “Austrian”
business cycle writings of Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Hans Sennholz,
and Benjamin Anderson, but the theses of two “Objectivist” articles,
which draw from Austrian business cycle theory: Greenspan’s “Gold
and Economic Freedom” and Branden’s essay on “Depressions,”
both of which appear in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Interestingly,
he does not mention Rand’s own 1974 essay, “Egalitarianism and
Inflation” (republished in Rand 1982, 145–65), which is also inspired
by the Misesian theory of money and credit.
Salsman even argues that Herbert Hoover himself later resorted
to “regurgitat[ing] the usual screed of Marxists (and of Austrian
economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek): that
economic depression is the ‘inevitable’ result of a previously ‘false’
prosperity.” And he states further that “there’s not a single econo-
mist or historian of the 1930s who does not ridicule and condemn
Hoover’s presidency—and simultaneously endorse the rationalization
he used to exonerate himself, the Marxian-Austrian theory of ‘boom
and bust’” (Salsman 2004b, 19–20). This is clearly an attempt to
further discredit a theory that Rand and her early associates used
approvingly and with regularity in their writings on economics.
Sciabarra and Sechrest — Introduction 247
***
Notes
1. Thanks to Roderick T. Long for suggesting this apt title. And thanks also to
Robert L. Campbell for the editorial work that he did with the present authors in
preparation of the current volume.
2. Ironically, the Austrian insight into the non-neutral effects of taxes has been
used to argue against Rand’s defense of limited government (Sechrest 1999).
3. See Sechrest 1993, 59–76; 1997, for comparisons of the Austrian and
monetarist approaches to business cycles. Lumping them together, as Salsman does,
is a questionable procedure.
4. Sciabarra (1995a, 76–79) argues that there are genuine parallels between
Austrian and Marxian theories of the business cycle. Each school focuses on the
“political character of the business cycle,” even though each proposes diametrically
opposed solutions to the problem. See also Vorhies 1989; Sciabarra 1995a, 336–38;
2000, 287–300. Salsman (1995c, lecture 5) is aware of Sciabarra’s work—he quotes
approvingly, and without attribution, from Sciabarra 1988 (subsequently adapted for
Sciabarra 1995)—on the parallels between the Marxian and Hayekian critiques of
utopianism but views these parallels as weaknesses.
5. Salsman seems to have badly distorted the well-developed Austrian theory
of business cycles. To discover what some modern Austrians have actually said about
“unsustainable expansions,” see Garrison 2001, 57–83; Cochran and Glahe 1999,
65–149; Sechrest 1993, 45–58; Carilli and Dempster 2001; and Callahan and Garrison
2003.
References
Branden, Barbara. 1986. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday.
Branden, Nathaniel. 1963. Books: Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. The
Objectivist Newsletter 2, no. 9 (September): 34.
Buechner, M. Northrup. 1995. Objective Value vs. Modern Economics. 6 audio lectures.
New Milford, Connecticut: Second Renaissance Books.
Callahan, Gene, and Roger W. Garrison. 2003. Does Austrian business cycle theory
help explain the dot-com boom and bust? Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
6, no. 2 (Summer): 67–98.
Carilli, Anthony M., and Gregory M. Dempster. 2001. Expectations in Austrian
business cycle theory: An application of the prisoner’s dilemma. Review of
Austrian Economics 14, no. 4: 319–30.
Childs, Roy A. 1994. Liberty against Power: Essays by Roy A. Childs, Jr. Edited by Joan
Kennedy Taylor; foreword by Thomas Szasz. San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes.
Cochran, John P., and Fred R. Glahe. 1999. The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for
250 The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol. 6, No. 2