Mean Girl · Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

"Astute."—New York Times

Ayn Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump.  Mean Girl follows Rand’s trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand’s philosophy of selfishness,  Mean Girl illuminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present. 

“Lisa Duggan gets it exactly right . . . when she writes

that Rand's ‘particular gift was not for philosophical elaboration, but

for stark condensation and aphorism. She deployed this gift to create a

moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance

fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass

readership." —Times Higher Education"Provides

an explanation for our current cultural and political moment. . . .

Duggan’s book sums up Rand’s life and philosophy in under ninety pages." —Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

“Lisa Duggan does a deep dive into Ayn Rand so that we don’t

have to. Instead, we can read Duggan’s impassioned, insightful,

sometimes terrifying, sometimes humorous account of Rand’s philosophy

and influence. Calls to understand and reject the allure of cruelty

rarely feel as lucid and timely.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts  

“The self-described ‘man worshipper’ Ayn Rand titillated generations of

strivers with her gospel of free-reign capitalism as the apex of human

achievement. As that fiction yields ever more wreckage and despair, Mean Girl provides

urgent insight into how Rand converted readers to her credo of

self-flattery, pious greed, contempt for those in need, and

obliviousness to history. Exalted are the profit-driven for they will

inherit the earth? How could anyone come to embrace smug indifference to

the suffering of others as worthy of admiration? Read this luminous

account to find out.” —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America   “Lisa Duggan’s wry and wise Mean Girl is

the Ayn Rand primer we’ve been waiting for, an inquiry into how a

narcissistic cult became a national creed. Duggan’s short history neatly

reveals the deep affinities between Randianism and Trumpism, and will,

if we are lucky, serve as a requiem for both.” —Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America   “Mean Girl offers

an eye-opening panoramic view of the rise of the ‘open-air theater of

cruelty’ that takes Ayn Rand as its muse. The whole package of

power-love associated with Rand throughout the twentieth and

twenty-first centuries—biography, economics, cultural politics, white

masculinity, authoritarianism, sexual violence—comes vividly to life

here in Lisa Duggan’s beautiful, stunning rendering.”—Lauren Berlant,

coauthor of Sex, or the Unbearable   “Sometimes, in the

right hands, a single figure can help make sense of an era. The right

hands are Lisa Duggan’s, and the single, rather unlikely, figure is Ayn

Rand, who is ready for her close-up. An individualist who built a cult, a

critic of the masses whose career depended on their media, an

Objectivist who marketed her philosophy via novels soaked in sex and

sentimentality, Rand aggrandized greed as a virtue and was the

unapologetic purveyor of what Duggan brilliantly calls ‘optimistic

cruelty.’ This short, accessible, and powerful book charts the rise of

affective neoliberalism through the lens of a life. Buy it for anyone

who has ever been lured by The Fountainhead or who needs help shrugging off Atlas Shrugged.” —Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair   “With Mean Girl,

Lisa Duggan offers readers a history of how greed and capitalist

accumulation were made cool and sexy. In a historical moment in which

billionaires have been refashioned into super-beings, Duggan’s history

of this libertarian matriarch provides a necessary and eye-opening

intervention.” —Roderick Ferguson, author of One-Dimensional Queer   “Reading Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl is

an exercise in emotional upheaval. One minute I was laughing out loud,

the next crying into my tea, and then finally feeling confident that

human beings cannot allow the suffocation of Ayn Rand’s thinking to get

to us. It is a terrific book only partly about Rand, because it is

really an intellectual history of neoliberalism—and its toxic

outcomes.” —Vijay Prashad, Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social

Research

Lisa Duggan is a historian, journalist, activist, and

Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She

is the author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy.