Word: ayn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...core, Moral Perfectionism, inspired him to study philosophy. This was already a nascent interest: During his first year at Harvard, Ben-Shachar founded the campus Objectivist Club, but by his sophomore year he no longer ran it. Now he doesn't considers himself an Objectivist, noting the irony that Ayn Rand's highly individualist philosophy spawns "blind commitment" from her ideological "followers...
...Library of Congress and the "Book of the Month Club" conducted a survey in which they asked people to name the book that most influenced their lives. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ranked second only to the Bible. The Fountainhead, by the same author, placed 14th on the list. Yet Harvard is ignoring Rand, clearly one of the most influential American thinkers of this century...
...What may not be obvious, though, is how the lack of moral integrity today stems from an intellectual failure, the epistemological humility that refuses to hold anything as certain. Greene's noted ambiguity and his writing of plays like Yes and No are just two examples. The thinker Ayn Rand held that philosophy is an integrated total. If one finds a person negating what is good in morality, one will always find him at a deeper level negating knowledge and reason. Greene makes this view concrete...
Such adroitness comes naturally to a Fed chairman who has been in political training all his life and has managed to serve an extraordinary number of masters. A former student of the Juilliard school of music and a disciple of libertarian thinker Ayn Rand, Greenspan first entered politics as a domestic adviser to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign and rose to hold key economic posts under five Presidents. He suffered his greatest embarrassment in 1985 when, as a private economist, Greenspan wrote letters to regulators and Congress endorsing Charles Keating and his Lincoln savings and loan. Lincoln subsequently collapsed...
Kevin Phillips, author and former Republican political theorist, sees Greenspan as "sort of the financial equivalent of an operative instead of a statesman. He may know all the players, but he has a strain of intertwined parochialisms -- Republican strategist; Ayn Rand devotee; Wall Street forecaster; writer of letters for special pleaders like Keating. It isn't the background of a great economic statesman. It's the profile of an Austro- Hungarian court figure...