It is not my intention in this article to criticize Gray’s general points; I will comment on them in my next essay. Here I will focus on Gray’s egregious discussion of Ayn Rand. This discussion is not only bad, it is inexcusably bad. Before proceeding, I should note that I knew John decades ago, when we both lectured at summer seminars for the Institute for Human Studies. We spent quite a bit of time together, and I later served as John’s informal guide when he visited Hollywood.

John was a friendly and thoughtful companion. His efforts to earn a PhD from Oxford were partly financed by IHS scholarships, and he was viewed as a bright light with the potential to bring intellectual respectability to libertarian theory in Britain. This did not pan out, however. Shortly after earning an advanced degree, he began publishing critiques of libertarianism. I had lost contact with John by then, so I never had a chance to discuss the reasons for his changes of position. (It is possible that John held the same hostile views previously but had disguised them during his years with IHS.) Nor did I track his subsequent intellectual developments, other than reading his books on J.S. Mill and Voltaire. Gray has become known as a defender of environmentalism and for his critique of global free trade.

John is a retired academic, having taught at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. Now, I have been around long enough not to expect a sympathetic treatment of Rand from academics, and I am familiar enough with Internet gossip not to be surprised by what I read about Rand. Recently, for example, one poster said that Ayn Rand was so poverty stricken in later life that she had little choice but to depend on Social Security to live. No one bothered to question this statement, even though it seems implausible on its face, given the substantial royalties Rand earned from Atlas Shrugged and other books.

John Gray’s main purpose is to portray Rand as the leader of a “cult.” It is true that Objectivism had certain cultish features, but it is also true that unlike most cults, there was a solid core of philosophy at its center. I discussed this problem with Nathaniel Branden during the early 1970s. He insisted that the cultish features were largely his responsibility, not Rand’s. He said that he was overly protective of Rand, and that he went overboard in attempting to shield her from public hostility.

But what about Rand’s philosophy? Gray has no desire to discuss this. He asserts that to examine or explain her philosophic views “would be tedious, since they are thoroughly silly.” He prefers instead to present various tidbits that support his thesis that Objectivism was a cult. A major problem here is that some of his examples are pure fiction. Consider this claim: