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University of California Press

About the Book

 
"Astute."—New York Times 

Ayn Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girl follows Rand’s trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, Mean Girl illuminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present.

About the Author

Lisa Duggan is a historian, journalist, activist, and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy.

Table of Contents

Overview
Preface

Introduction. “What Is Good for Me Is Right”
1. “Proud Woman Conqueror”
2. “Individualists of the World Unite!”
3. “Would You Cut the Bible?”
4. “I Found a Flaw”

Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Key Figures
Selected Bibliography

Reviews

“Lisa Duggan gets it exactly right . . . when she writes that Rand's ‘particular gift was not for philosophical elaboration, but for stark condensation and aphorism. She deployed this gift to create a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.’"
Times Higher Education
?"?The therapeutic value of Duggan’s book goes well beyond freeing me from shame for my teen-age lack of literary taste and political discernment; it also provides an explanation for our current cultural and political moment. . . . Duggan’s book sums up Rand’s life and philosophy in under ninety pages?."
The New Yorker
“‘A history of the influence of Ayn Rand and her particular brand of narcissistic amorality, and an argument that her novels function now as ‘conversion machines for our contemporary culture of greed.’ Exhibit A: Paul Ryan.”
LitHub
"Duggan’s skills as a cultural historian and her sharp-witted socio-political commentary fuse seamlessly together in this short yet fascinating book that is a necessary read for students of culture and politics, but also activists and organisers who feel the deep disillusionment of what seems like a never-ending neoliberal era."
LSE Review of Books
"Provides an explanation for our current cultural and political moment. . . . Duggan’s book sums up Rand’s life and philosophy in under ninety pages."
The New Yorker
“Lisa Duggan gets it exactly right in Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed when she writes that Rand's ‘particular gift was not for philosophical elaboration, but for stark condensation and aphorism. She deployed this gift to create a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.’" 
Inside Higher Education
“Duggan goes beyond the more standard biographical accounts of Rand and gets to the bottom of her novels and how they set a disturbing tone for global capitalism. Further, Duggan explains the mischaracterizations of Rand in modern memory, and provides expert analysis of current affairs in helping readers to contextualize the actual historical Rand and her likely political endorsements as well as her most reactionary views.”
Truthout
“Cultural historian Lisa Duggan has written a small, perfect book which accomplishes so much in only a few pages, with irony and wit, humor and insight. . . . The book is fun, funny and in only 116 pages explains so much about not only its subject but of our neoliberal or reactionary culture of greed and its obstinate commitment to economic fantasy.”
KPFK/Bibliocracy
“Lisa Duggan wrote a book that explains everything you need to know about Ayn Rand and why she became so enormously consequential so that you don’t have to read Rand’s work yourself.”
 
The Dig

"[Duggan] is sharp, engaging, and funny when writing about Rand, whose magnetism, determination, grandiosity, desperation, and galloping narcissism Duggan captures beautifully."

New York Review of Books
"The power of Duggan’s book seems that maybe in unmasking Rand’s philosophical legitimacy and hold on the right removes a central prop and leaves the right ever more naked.”
The Baffler
“Lisa Duggan does a deep dive into Ayn Rand so that we don’t have to. Instead, we can read Duggan’s impassioned, insightful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes humorous account of Rand’s philosophy and influence. Calls to understand and reject the allure of cruelty rarely feel as lucid and timely.”—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
 
“The self-described ‘man worshipper’ Ayn Rand titillated generations of strivers with her gospel of free-reign capitalism as the apex of human achievement. As that fiction yields ever more wreckage and despair, Mean Girl provides urgent insight into how Rand converted readers to her credo of self-flattery, pious greed, contempt for those in need, and obliviousness to history. Exalted are the profit-driven for they will inherit the earth? How could anyone come to embrace smug indifference to the suffering of others as worthy of admiration? Read this luminous account to find out.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
 
“Lisa Duggan’s wry and wise Mean Girl is the Ayn Rand primer we’ve been waiting for, an inquiry into how a narcissistic cult became a national creed. Duggan’s short history neatly reveals the deep affinities between Randianism and Trumpism, and will, if we are lucky, serve as a requiem for both.”—Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
 
Mean Girl offers an eye-opening panoramic view of the rise of the ‘open-air theater of cruelty’ that takes Ayn Rand as its muse. The whole package of power-love associated with Rand throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—biography, economics, cultural politics, white masculinity, authoritarianism, sexual violence—comes vividly to life here in Lisa Duggan’s beautiful, stunning rendering.”—Lauren Berlant, coauthor of Sex, or the Unbearable
 
“Sometimes, in the right hands, a single figure can help make sense of an era. The right hands are Lisa Duggan’s, and the single, rather unlikely, figure is Ayn Rand, who is ready for her close-up. An individualist who built a cult, a critic of the masses whose career depended on their media, an Objectivist who marketed her philosophy via novels soaked in sex and sentimentality, Rand aggrandized greed as a virtue and was the unapologetic purveyor of what Duggan brilliantly calls ‘optimistic cruelty.’ This short, accessible, and powerful book charts the rise of affective neoliberalism through the lens of a life. Buy it for anyone who has ever been lured by The Fountainhead or who needs help shrugging off Atlas Shrugged.”—Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair
 
“With Mean Girl, Lisa Duggan offers readers a history of how greed and capitalist accumulation were made cool and sexy. In a historical moment in which billionaires have been refashioned into super-beings, Duggan’s history of this libertarian matriarch provides a necessary and eye-opening intervention.”—Roderick Ferguson, author of One-Dimensional Queer
 
“Reading Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl is an exercise in emotional upheaval. One minute I was laughing out loud, the next crying into my tea, and then finally feeling confident that human beings cannot allow the suffocation of Ayn Rand’s thinking to get to us. It is a terrific book only partly about Rand, because it is really an intellectual history of neoliberalism—and its toxic outcomes.”—Vijay Prashad, Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research