How bad writing destroyed the world : Ayn Rand and the literary origins of the financial crisis
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
How bad writing destroyed the world : Ayn Rand and the literary origins of the financial crisis
Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016
- : PB
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [240]-244) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
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
by "Nielsen BookData"
