In response to: Rand wrote four novels including ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE FOUNTAINHEAD plus a number of philosophical essays such as THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.
All of her work was an argument promoting "rational self-intrest"
She was a political paranoiac and a militant capitalist.
Her work goes through cycles of popularity and is under constant review in the cult community she created notably the "Objectivist Society"
Any opinions? Any Devotees?
It is interesting to see the connections between the utopies represented by the communist society (following the definition given by Marx) and the free-market society at the style of Rand. Based either on collective or individual action, both models see the productive activity of humans liberated from the state (in the first case, its disollution while in the scond its mere conservation as a regulator of non-economic aspects of life)
It is also interesting to see the parallelism of many holders of both types of utopias, forging their praxis and practical ideology either to the extreme left or to the extreme right (as it was the case of Rand). Thsi last fact can be seen as an attempt of these dreamers to keep an alliance with the gang that would likely eliminate the other one and open the path to their utopy, the paradise on earth.
It is finally interesting, and in connection to what I have said above, that Rand never dealt or tried to deal with the utopian concept of communism as an adversary (that one that can be traced back to Moro and Carlyle) but with the statism version introduced by the Soviets. This omission has been very convenient as it has kept its "ideal" as the struggle for irrestricted freedom against oppression from the state leaving aside the same problems of consistency with history and economics, its twin brother (the utopian communism) faced in the theoretical and practical fields.