The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

It's been a while since I read a Rand book. This is a collection of essays she wrote, most in the last 60's and early 70's in response to hippie movements and Progressive education. Her comment on the sit-in's at Berkley: "Rule by pressure groups is merely the prelude, the social conditioning for

mob rule. Once a country has accepted the obliteration of moral principles, of individual rights, of objectivity, of justice, of reason, and has submitted to the rule of legalized brute force, - the elimination of the concept "legalizes" does not take long to follow. Who is to resist it - and in the name of what?" In "The Comprachicos" she compares the effect and motives of Progressive education to the physical processes employed by comprachicos and in other cultures. Children are reared to follow the group and not to experience any connection between independent thought and success. Eventually they stop trying to see this connection and live a life without purpose, unable even to see the paradigm into which they've been molded.

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LibraryThing member RonManners

"REASON AND MORALITY ARE THE ONLY WEAPONS THAT DETERMINE THE
COURSE OF HISTORY. THE COLLECTIVISTS DROPPED THEM BECAUSE
THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO CARRY THEM. PICK THEM UP: YOU HAVE."
This book is Ayn Rand's call to American youth to reject the tribal,
conventional irrationality of the New Left and to grasp

the need of a
philosophicalrevolution founded on the supremacy of reason, with
individualism, self-interest, science, technology, and progress as its
consequences. There is nothing new about the New Left; it is the last gasp
of an outworn philosophy. This is the view presented by Ayn Rand in a
critical analysis of such superior perceptiveness and originality that
it ranks as a landmark in the history of contemporary ideas. THE NEW LEFT:
THE ANTI-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION is a brilliant addition to the works
of one of America's most influential thinkers."
Taken from the Back Cover.

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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C

I am by and large an admirer of Rand's writing and philosophy--it was literally life-changing. The relatively low rating simply represents the fairly low place of this book among the works by her I've read--by the time I got to this collection of essays, little in it represented anything new. That

said, I can see its influence in my thinking--and there are a couple of gems in here I still remember vividly decades after first reading them--in particular, "Apollo and Dionysus" and "The Comprachicos." Anyone who reads the last and doesn't believe Rand felt compassion for her fellow human beings is willfully misunderstanding her. Mind you, she could be obstreperous--and often what comes across is the outrage towards those she feels do harm, then that compassion for the harmed--but it's there.

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