How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis

by Adam Weiner

Overview

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author.

A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies-his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand's Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan's ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking “the virtues of selfishness,” even in fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501313110
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/06/2016
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Adam Weiner is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College, USA. He is the author of By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (1998).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Dubious Virtue of Selfishness
Chapter One: Radicalizing Dostoevsky
Chapter Two: “The Most Atrocious Work of Russian Literature”
Chapter Three: Dostoevsky Reborn
Chapter Four: Rigor “Mortus” or Waiting for Rakhmetov
Chapter Five: Fire in the Minds of Men
Chapter Six: Rakhmetov Lives!
Chapter Seven: The Vengeance of the Muse
Chapter Eight: In the Graveyard of Bad Ideas
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2016
Weiner (By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia) promises a book about Russian writers, Ayn Rand, and the U.S. financial crisis. His delivery is impressive on the first, more than acceptable on the second, and lacking on the third. The Russians include Nikolay Chernyshevsky, author of the largely forgotten 1863 novel What Is to Be Done, which Weiner describes as a “jarring cacophony of disparate elements” and a “great source of inspiration for the Russian revolutionary movement”; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who, Weiner says, thought Chernyshevsky was “at the center of a secret terrorist organization”; and Sergey Nechayev, a murderous revolutionary who refashioned himself after Chernyshevsky’s antihero, Rakhmetov. Weiner’s literary criticism, focusing on political and philosophical themes, is solid up to and including his explication of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, written by a woman who, Weiner reminds us, grew up in St. Petersburg at a time when Chernyshevsky’s influence there was “ubiquitous and unassailable.” Weiner’s conclusion that “unfettered capitalism is no more a utopia than the chained collective” effectively damns both Chernyshevsky and Rand in one sentence. Readers who expected more about the U.S. financial crisis than a few brief mentions of Alan Greenspan, who called Rand’s deeply flawed novel “a magnificent masterpiece,” won’t find that in this otherwise fine book. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Weiner’s is an intellectual history told as a horror story. The history is a deliberately ironic one: how "rational egoism," the doctrine of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel/manifesto "What Is to Be Done?," which was the inspiration for Russian revolutionaries from Bakunin to Lenin, migrated to the United States in the guise of Ayn Rand’s far-right objectivism. … Weiner rises to the challenge of paraphrasing Chernyshevsky and Rand and illustrating the clumsiness and incoherence of their books." - New York Times Book Review

“Weiner’s key insight is connecting Rand’s ideas — and the Russian literary intellectual lineage she emerged from — with the 2008 financial collapse ... Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. But Weiner, a scholar of Russian literature, appears to be far more interested in one of Rand’s antecedents than Rand herself. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist best known for his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, written while its author was imprisoned in a St. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject ... Weiner deftly handle[s] the contradiction here: a bad novel could not only become ideologically potent, but it could also inspire people who would not recognize each other as fellow travelers.” - Los Angeles Review of Books

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