COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Too many advocates of capitalism have been prone to charges of "atomism" in their defense of markets. Rand embraces a dialectical sensibility that refuses to disconnect politics and economics from culture, psychology, ethics, and epistemology. That so many libertarians have been guilty of this disconnect is one of the reasons that Rand opposed being lumped together with them. In any event, dialectics is NOT anti-dualism; it is an emphasis on context. And context-dropping is, in Rand's view, a major offense against reality and logical thinking.

Insofar as thinkers such as Hegel and Marx concentrate on analyzing factors within a specifiable context, they have some similarity to Rand. That Rand offers a "diametrically opposite prescription" is her contribution to a dialectical enterprise: she is revolutionary because she adopts a dialectical method, where other market advocates come perilously close to atomism, even though she eschews the entire "left-wing" substance to which that method has been wedded in modern times.

On the history of dialectic, I am not being "disingenuous" when I "package-deal the dialectics of Hegel and Aristotle." There are fundamental differences between Aristotle and Hegel. Hegel (or at least the "Hegel of tradition") is an historicist. He adopts a Platonic view of dialectic, in the end, which undercuts his own contributions to our understanding of the method. But even Hegel understood that Aristotle was the "fountainhead" of dialectics -- and he uses this term -- and that the whole enterprise of understanding an object of study in its many aspects and through its many dynamic relations is a key characteristic of dialectical inquiry. I fear that Tym Parsons and others are misunderstanding dialectics because they seem unable to grasp its "form" -- context-sensitive method -- as distinguished from the particular content (Hegelian, Marxian, etc.) to which it has been linked. My own work is moving toward an articulation of this form -- in my attempt to reclaim the method in the name of reality, reason, and genuine radicalism, a type of radicalism inspired partially by the works of Ayn Rand.

Tym Parsons' criticisms are typical of many of my critics. Such criticisms do not look at the subtlety of my argument, which, of course, is not captured even in The Chronicle article. I never expected that it would be. An article is not the place for a dissertation on Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Those who are interested in the book should read it.

As for my "try[ing] to make Rand academically 'respectable' ..." -- it is my belief that my work is accomplishing this, and not because it has distorted Rand's legacy. It is because my work approaches Rand as an historical figure who cannot be disconnected from her own context in our attempts to understand her contributions. In this sense, I have taken seriously Rand's own emphasis on the importance of context to understanding.

-- Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics (posted 4/20, 12:43 p.m., E.D.T.)

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