I am delighted to announce the publication of a special blockbuster 2023 double issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies that constitutes the final volume in our twenty-three-year history. As I write in the introduction to this very special issue:
In 2020, when JARS celebrated its twentieth anniversary, I provided an in-depth tribute to all those who had contributed to this project. Here, I will only repeat that this journal was the brainchild of the late Bill Bradford and that it is to him that we owe our creation. And it is to the hard work of all our editors, advisory board members, peer readers, and contributors that we have owed our continued success. Since 2013, we have been grateful for the remarkable support of the Pennsylvania State University Press family, which has led to our greater visibility as the only globally accessible academic journal devoted to Ayn Rand and her times.
In these more than two decades of our existence, JARS has been a trailblazing periodical that has both reflected the growth in and furthered the dissemination of scholarly discussions of Rand’s work. There is barely a topic that this journal’s contributors haven’t touched upon over these many years; we have featured articles examining significant issues in ontology, epistemology, methodology, ethics, aesthetics, politics, economics, social theory, culture, literature and literary criticism, psychology, sexuality, history, anthropology, and the natural sciences, truly exemplifying the interdisciplinary nature of our project.
From the beginning, we have been committed to introducing at least one new JARS contributor with every issue that we’ve published; in this issue, we add three new contributors to our ranks, for a final tally of 191 authors, who have written 422 articles in the span of 23 years.
Among those articles, there have been 129 formal book reviews. But when one counts the many scholarly surveys that we have featured, which have traced Rand’s impact on everything from literary fiction and popular culture to progressive rock, our contributors have examined well over 200 works relevant to Rand studies. There are still dozens of books that we never got around to discussing here. But this only underscores our conviction that Rand studies has grown so extraordinarily that not even we can keep up with the demand for reviews of that expanding literature. It is more apparent than ever that Rand has truly become a part of the scholarly canon.
We are proud of the role we have played in creating the first forum for the critical scholarly discussion of Ayn Rand’s life, thought, and legacy. We leave this field in 2023 a far better place than it was in 1999, when our first issue was published.
Our deepest appreciation extends especially to our devoted readers, without whom none of this would have been possible.
Our Grand Finale features the following articles and contributors:
Introduction – Chris Matthew Sciabarra
ARTICLES
What She Left Behind – Pavel Solovyev
Ayn Rand’s Years in the Stoiunin Gymnasium – Anastasiya Vasilievna Grigorovskaya
Epistemology According to Rand and Hayek – Robert F. Mulligan
Check Your Presuppositions! A New Kind of Foundationalism in Objectivism – David Tyson
Life is not a Machine or a Ghost: The Naturalistic Origin of Life’s Organization and Goal-Directedness, Consciousness, Free Will, and Meaning – Marsha Familaro Enright
How We Live: A Dialectical Examination of Human Existence – Roger E. Bissell
Ayn Rand’s Novel Contribution: Aristotelian Liberalism – Cory Massimino
BOOK REVIEWS
On Grounding Ethical Values in the Human Life Form (Review of The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb and Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman) – Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl
Freedom’s Three Furies (Review of Freedom’s Furies by Timothy Sandefur) – David Beito
Retaking America’s Universities (Review of Retaking College Hill by Walter Donway) – Raymond Raad
Ayn Rand and Russian Nihilism Revisited (Review of Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia by Derek Offord) – Aaron Weinacht
Ayn Rand, Fascism, and Dystopia (Review of Ayn Rand e il fascismo eterno. Una narrazione distopica by Diana Thermes) – Luca Moratal Roméu
Postmodern Rand, Transatlantic Rand (Review of Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts, edited by Neil Cocks and Out of a Gray Fog: Ayn Rand’s Europe by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler) – Roderick T. Long
Index to Volume 23
Master Author Index (Vols. 13–23)
Check out links to the abstracts and contributor biographies of this truly grand finale. Subscription information can be found here. The issue will be available in approximately two weeks on the Scholarly Publishing Collective and will be mailed to print subscribers thereafter. Follow-up announcements will be posted.
Also see the Facebook announcement.
