The Society for Politics, Economics, and the Law hosted a Duke English professor Tuesday night who spoke critically about Ayn Rand and the tensions her writings have created. 

Michael Moses, an associate professor of English at Duke University and editor of the literary journal , Modernist Cultures, focused on Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism which Rand claimed to be the founder of.  Rand’s Objectivism was a philosophy that reality exists independently of consciousness.

Moses spoke at length about Rand’s relationship with Hollywood where she tried for much of her early life to become a screenwriter. Moses argued that Rand’s frustration with having to work in a system that was interested in appealing to the masses, whose taste in art Rand did not approve of, was a result of her belief in an objective standard of quality. 

Moses said did not read Rand’s work until late in his life after he had been an English professor for a long time, which changed his impressions of her work.

 “It probably would have been very different if I had read her when I was 15 or 16, that’s when all of my friends were reading her,” Moses said. “I actually find her much more interesting as a literary figure.” 

“The standard view is that she’s not high brow and she’s not low brow she’s kind of a ‘middle-brow’ novelist,” Moses said. “I actually think she’s much more interesting stylistically than formally. One of the most interesting things about Atlas Shrugged is the strange set of different genres it combines; science fiction and utopia, socialist realism and American nationalism—there are passages that sound like the could have been written by the Italian futurists.” 

Ayn Rand is a cult hero with many supporters in the political sphere. Many Republican representatives have publicly expressed Rand’s influence on them including Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Rand Paul, as well as former Texas Congressman and Libertarian Presidential Candidate Ron Paul.

Bryon Burke, a senior studying biomedical engineering and member of SPEL since his freshman year, said that he was influenced by Rand’s philosophy on the power of the individual when he read The Fountainhead for a class in high school which led him to read Atlas Shrugged on his own.

“I read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in high school and I was interested in hearing the perspective on her philosophy and beliefs from an academic professor,” Burke said. 

For Burke, the lecture allowed him to revisit his experience of Rand’s work. 

“I didn’t have much of a political point of view when I read [Rand’s] books in high school,” Burke said.

“I knew she was a believer in individual freedom and capitalism and that she was not real popular in academic and literature circles, and I knew she was not as popular as her books were commercially successful.”