Category: Access

The extreme case of false individualism is the libertarian sect, rooted in the teachings of Ayn Rand,  known as Objectivism.  Only in America, I sometimes think, could a political movement be based on a writer of pop fiction.  The thinness of Rand’s erudition is matched only by the banality of her imagination, which ran to most of the clichés of soft pornography.  I never got farther than a few chapters into Atlas Shrugged, but I did once manage to finish The Fountainhead, and even though I skimmed it rather quickly, my gag reflex was hard to suppress.  In her defense,...

This mysterious work, when it was discovered in the late 20th century, was attributed to Plato, but in view of the philosopher’s appearance in the dialogue, that identification is as suspect as everything about the work.  The scholar and translator, who says he discovered the text in the ruins of a Calabrian monastery, claims the Greek original was destroyed in a fire.  Even if the tale is true, it is hard to know what to make of the translation, which makes anachronistic literary references and uses late 20th century expressions for which it is hard to imagine Greek equivalents.  Nonetheless,...