How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781501313110)

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.

Author: Adam Weiner
ISBN-10: 1501313118
ISBN-13: 9781501313110
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Language: English
Published: 10/06/2016
Pages: 264
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/08/2016