---
With his working-class ties and his radical plans.
He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl,
And he's always at home with his back to wall.
And he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost,
And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross
And he likes to be known as the Angry Young Man.
--Billy Joel, "Angry Young Man"
Every so often, I pepper my blog with the term "hyper-anarcho-libertarian," usually pejoratively. Which invited a question from one of my first loyal readers:
So, Kip, are you an Objectivist or not?
Um, well, um, gee, um...
For background, my exposure to Ayn Rand was fairly typical of many "Objectivists." I stumbled across "For The New Intellectual" in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years (i.e., 1984). I had no idea whatsoever who the author was or what the book was about -- I just liked the snazzy title.
Within about a year, maybe 18 months, I had voraciously consumed the entire canon, both fiction and nonfiction. Armed and dangerous -- and largely ignored by my undergraduate colleagues -- I was "an Objectivist."
But that was twenty years ago.
So am I an Objectivist today? A card-carrying member, to be oxymoronic? Heck, I don't know. Maybe, sorta kinda. I suppose I could be called an "Objectivist" in one sense, similar to the sense that I'm still a "member" (i.e., an alumnus) of my fraternity, my undergraduate Alma Mater, my graduate school or my law school. I sometimes still call myself a research analyst even though I don't do research anymore (I review and approve the research of others). I have no problem calling myself an "attorney" even though I don't practice and don't plan to.
I do know that I'm a small-l libertarian, and for the most part I leave it at that. I try to avoid debates that involve terms like "anarchist," "minarchist," "natural-rightists," "Hayekian," "Austrian" or "Straussian" (I had never even heard that one before reading Tim's blog). Alternatively, consider the excellent group-blog Samizdata's self-description:
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, libertarians, extropians, futurists, "Porcupines," Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
Am I really required to pigeonhole myself into one of those categories? I wouldn't know how to. If anyone else wants to try, knock yourselves out.
Is there such a thing as a "Objectivist Alumni Club?" More importantly, why should there have there be? We don't talk about "liberal alumni" or "conservative alumni" or "Catholic alumni" or "capitalist alumni." (I mean "alumnus" not in the sense of a "recovering Objectivist" comparable to a "recovering alcoholic," though I've known a few "ex-Objectivists" over the years who would probably apply that term to themselves.)
Rather, by "Objectivist alumnus" I mean someone who still agrees with all or most of what Ayn Rand wrote, but who does not depend exclusively, or even primarily, on Rand's writings for evaluating policy issues. Someone like this guy.
I think there are far more such "Objectivist alumni" than there are practicing "Objectivists." Why that might be the case will be the subject of Part Two in this series.
(Guest-posted earlier today at Freespace.)
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