Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [183]
The beginning of the end of Rothbard’s relationship with Rand came when Branden accused him of plagiarizing John Galt’s speech, as well as key parts of Barbara Branden’s NYU master’s thesis on free will, in a paper he had prepared for the summer 1958 Sea Island symposium. Rothbard gave Branden a copy out of “misplaced good will,” he later wrote, and was, or pretended to be, stunned when Rand’s deputy responded with a six-page list of purloined words, phrases, and concepts. Branden threatened to send a letter to Helmut Schoeck, a well-known scholar and head of the symposium, as well as to initiate legal action, if Rothbard didn’t either retract the paper or credit Rand and Barbara. After an agitated exchange of letters, including one from Rand’s attorney Pincus Berner to Helmut Schoeck, Rothbard was summoned to a full court trial in Rand’s apartment. He refused to appear and was banished in absentia.
Though overwrought, perhaps, Rand and Branden had a legitimate complaint. The paper, titled “The Mantle of Science,” was infused with concepts and terms peculiar to Rand and Atlas Shrugged and reflected Barbara’s argument, based on Rand’s fallacy of the stolen concept, that a defense of philosophical determinism involves self-contradiction. Either Rothbard was unconscious of the echo (which is unlikely) or was reluctant to own up to the influence of a novelist—a woman novelist, no less, and one who was either ridiculed by or unknown to most university professors. On the other hand, Branden’s allegations were hasty and cold and, when imparted to Schoeck, might easily have ended Rothbard’s academic career. As time went on, real or potential theft of her intellectual property became an increasingly troublesome issue for Rand. In the mid-1960s she retained two attorneys who were also followers, Hank and Erika Holzer, to handle most possible infractions; eventually, Branden himself would become an object of their accusations. In his own defense, Rothbard pointed out that none of the disputed ideas had originated with Rand. Rather than admit guilt, he usefully if spuriously listed external sources from Aristotle to Adam Smith and Nietzsche for each one. In the end, he couldn’t attend the symposium anyway, because Branden’s attempted cure hadn’t helped his travel phobia or his intermittent depression.
The Rothbard story has many of the earmarks of the emerging Ayn Rand cult. That someone who had seen danger in her habits of thought so early and so clearly should be drawn into her orbit merely proves the strength of her charisma, the countercultural freshness of her ideas, and the power of her literary formula. As she had pointed out to her Republican acquaintances in the 1940s, great novels first stir the passions and then engage the mind; Atlas Shrugged did both superlatively. Whether she knew it or not, she was retailing her philosophy of strict rationality through a primal emotional appeal by characters in a fable. For certain kinds of readers who were romantics or especially methodical, bookish logicians or lonely rebels, organized Objectivism provided at least an illusion of freedom, individuality, integrity, and courage and fostered a pleasurable contempt for bureaucratized parental culture—all based on an imagined world that had yielded a resplendent philosophy for living.
For twenty-five years after the incident, Rothbard ridiculed and satirized Rand and what he called “the Ayn Rand cult” in private and in print. He once compared the group’s hierarchical structure and institutionalized veneration of the founder and leader to the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Trotsky, and Mao. Naturally, Rand also wholly renounced him. “Prior to our break with him,” Branden wrote in 1989, “both Ayn and I regarded Murray as highly intelligent…. [Afterward] it seemed to me each time she spoke of him she thought him less intelligent than before.” This was her old pattern. She did not, however, disparage or even mention him in public or in print.
In fact, unlike some later defectors, Rothbard wasn’t seriously injured by his break