Subscribers to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies can now access the new July 2021 issue of the journal on both Project Muse and JSTOR. Hard copies will be in your mailboxes soon enough!
I previously disclosed the contents of the issue here. We remain the only double-blind peer-reviewed biannual university-press published interdisciplinary scholarly periodical devoted to the critical discussion of Ayn Rand and her times.
Pardon me for this commercial break!
This being Pride Month, I am happy to announce that my 60+ page-monograph, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation (2003) is finally available again for sale—though supplies are limited—through the C4SS Store (link to sale page). I donated virtually my entire personal inventory of the work to the store. The book may be out-of-print, but the copies are pristine and being sold for only $5 each!
The “Homonograph” (as I’ve often called it) is a combination philosophical exegesis, sociological study, and political tract, which examines Rand’s impact on the sexual attitudes of self-identified Objectivists in the movement to which she gave birth and the gay subculture that she would have disowned.
I should also mention that our special discount sale of the anthology, The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (coedited by Roger Bissell, Ed Younkins, and me), is now over, because the book is sold out! It is still available at a higher price (in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle) through Amazon (as well as Google Books and Lexington Books), but why would you pay a minimum of $40 when you can get the book for $18 directly from the C4SS Store (link to sale page)! I’ve autographed all the copies that C4SS is selling. It is also available as part of the C4SS Store’s special collection: “The Intros Bundle” (link to sale page).
I want to thank James Tuttle for making all of this possible. Check it out!
It is with deep appreciation to the readers and supporters of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies that I announce today the imminent e-publication on JSTOR and Project Muse and in print of our forty-first issue, the beginning of our third decade as the only double-blind peer-reviewed interdisciplinary, scholarly journal devoted to the study of Ayn Rand and her times.
As I previously pointed out, since the beginning of our collaboration with Pennsylvania State University Press in 2013, JARS has become a truly worldwide publication. Our authors come from every corner of the globe, as does our readership. Indeed, while a strong 48% of our article requests still come from the United States, the majority of requests now stretch from North and South America to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, encompassing nearly 130 countries.
With Volume 21, Number 1, we have now published 392 articles by 181 authors. In this issue alone, we introduce four contributors new to our pages—Mikhail Kizilov, Abhijeet Melkani, Stephen Marvin and Syed Haroon Ahmed Shah—each of whom embodies our mission, which welcomes papers from every discipline and from a variety of interpretive and critical perspectives, fostering scholarly dialogue through a respectful exchange of ideas.
Here is our line-up for the new July 2021 issue:
Introduction – Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Articles
Beyond “The Money-Making Personality”: Notes Towards a Theory of Capitalist Orthopraxy – Roger Donway
Hegemonic Change and The Role of the Intellectual in Atlas Shrugged: A Gramscian Study – Syed Haroon Ahmed Shah
Rand on the Atonement: A Critique – Amos Wollen
Selfish versus Selfish – Merlin Jetton
Mental Integrations as Functional Wholes – Abhijeet Melkani
Existence, We – Stephen Boydstun
Book Reviews
Re-reading Rand through a Russian Lens (review of Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo Ayn Rand v russkom kontekste [Ayn Rand’s Fiction
in a Russian Context], by Anastasiya Grigorovskaya) – Mikhail Kizilov
A Multilayered Work (Review of Layers, by Nathaniel Branden) – Mimi Reisel Gladstein
A Journey to Fulfillment (Review of The Tao of Roark: Variations on a Theme from Ayn Rand, by Peter Saint-Andre) – Stephen Marvin
Discussion
Reply to Roger E. Bissell: A More Scientific Compatibilism – George Lyons
Rejoinder to George Lyons: Ontological, Ethical, and Methodological Compatibilism and the Free Will Controversy in Objectivism – Roger E. Bissell
Readers can check out the article abstracts here and the contributor biographies here. Those interested in submitting articles to be considered for publication in JARS, should use the Editorial Manager platform. And those interested in subscribing to the journal, should consult the various links here.
Larry McShane, in yesterday’s New York Daily News reminds us that May 3, 2021 was the 100th anniversary of the first time the term “Big Apple” was used to refer to New York City (by New York Morning Telegraph cub reporter and horse-racing writer, John J. Fitz Gerald). In his article, “Apple of Our Eyes: 100th ann’y of Nickname that’s Synonymous with City,” McShane relies on the work of Gerald Cohen and Barry Popik, who traced the lineage of the term:
Back in 1921, when Babe Ruth was in right field for the Yankees and Mayor John Hylan in City Hall, a horse-racing writer for the New York Morning Telegraph overheard a Louisiana chat between two Black stablehands. The pair mentioned an upcoming trip from New Orleans to New York — the Big Apple, as they called it. …
“Back then, if you wanted to refer to New York by its nickname, it was ‘Gotham’ or ‘Li’l Old New York.’ But not the Big Apple.”
The nickname was resurrected in the 1970s, during the days of rising crime and declining fiscal policy. Of course, folks at that time were talking about how the Big Apple was “rotten to the core.” But jazz aficionado Charles Gillett (and president of the NY Convention and Visitors Bureau) seized on the term, regularly used “among Harlem musicians of the ’30s, who hailed a New York gig as playing the ‘Big Apple’.”
Alas, there is no recognition anywhere in the city of Fitz Gerald (who is buried in an unmarked grave 160 miles north of Belmont Park). Nor has there been any attempt to track down those New Orleans stablehands who used the term that Fitz Gerald brought into print. Just “one more instance of the African-American influence on the language” and on New York City lore.
Last Friday, I announced that The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies celebrated its twentieth anniversary with an astounding 22,209 global article requests from JSTOR and Project Muse (not counting print subscriptions). As it happens, though Project Muse will continue offering current issues as part of its program, JSTOR will be ending its policy of offering current journal issues by December 31, 2021. What does this mean for the JARS e-subscriber?
Well, all electronic subscribers to the journal will continue to have access to what will be 21 years of JARS back issues through the JSTOR platform. According to JSTOR, back issues will continue to be accessible as the “moving wall advances each year.” So where will new issues of JARS be published starting in 2022?
The Scholarly Publishing Collective, that’s where! From a February 9, 2021 press release comes this news:
Duke University Press is pleased to partner with nonprofit scholarly journal publishers and societies to provide journal services including subscription management, fulfillment, hosting, and institutional marketing and sales in a collaboration called the Scholarly Publishing Collective (SPC).
Beginning in 2021, the SPC will provide subscription management and fulfillment services, in partnership with Longleaf Services, to Cornell University Press, Texas Tech University Press, and the University of North Carolina Press. The SPC online content platform will launch in 2022, hosting journals and fulfilling digital access on behalf of Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the University of Illinois Press.“Finding a powerful hosting platform for our eighty scholarly journals, as well as securing the expert sales and marketing services of the SPC, will transport our journals to new levels of impact,” said Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State University Press. “We’re thrilled about offering enhanced services to our societies, journal editors, and libraries, and we are eager to work with colleagues at Duke University Press, one of the most talented teams in university press publishing.”
Through the SPC, publishers will have access to resources that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive, such as a best-in-class web platform, proven customer relations and library relations teams, and a network of global sales agents with insight into university press content.“We are honored to be working with this prestigious group of publishers,” said Duke University Press director Dean Smith. “The SPC gives us an opportunity to support a healthy ecosystem for nonprofit, mission-driven publishing and to help ensure that these publications and organizations remain vital to the communities they serve.”
More information will be forthcoming to JARS subscribers, but the expansion of the journal’s global visibility, accessibility, and scholarly impact can only be enhanced by this new endeavor.
Reviews for The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (Lexington Books, 2019) are slowly appearing throughout the scholarly literature, with more to come.
Today, I’m posting excerpts from a review by Gregory J. Robson (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Iowa State University) that appears in The Philosophical Quarterly (29 December 2020, Oxford Academic).
The contributors to this anthology insightfully explore ‘the context of human freedom’. This exploration is ‘dialectical’ because it engages in logical analysis and synthesis of economic, political, and other principles and ideas that often just appear in tension with one another . . . The book’s three parts include contributions from distinguished scholars in economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and related fields. The topics range widely and discussion is sometimes uneven, but this is no surprise in a book whose authors are multidisciplinary and cover considerable ground ably. . . . The three parts fit together well due to the often complementary arguments of influential scholars such as Gary Chartier, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Steven Horwitz, Roderick T. Long, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, and Douglas B. Rasmussen. Themes emerge such as the value of human relationships unmediated by force and fraud, the disvalue of political coercion, and the potential immorality of taxing some to hand to others.
The reviewer then focuses more extensively on the “complementary” contributions of Billy Christmas (“Social Equality and Liberty”) and Robert Higgs (“Exploring the Interconnections of Politics, Economics, and Culture”). He concludes:
[A] deep virtue of ‘Dialectics of Liberty‘ is its insistence that a free society takes seriously the need to persistently ask and answer—and *re-ask* and *re-answer*—why the state has authority to constrain liberty and the scope of any such authority. A society that does not take such questions seriously fails adequately to respect the personhood of would-be coercees. In principle, adherents of diverse political views do have the resources to take this claim onboard. Yet the essays in this book make a notable cumulative case for why classical liberals . . . and, relatedly, right and left libertarians . . . may be better equipped than supporters of more statist positions to explicate and defend the value of the personal and political liberties. This book has much to recommend it. It will be a valuable resource for teachers and researchers interested in the broad tradition of classical liberalism. And, in the spirit of dialectical exchange, hopefully it will spark responses by proponents and opponents alike.
Nice review! Terrific book! 😉
Clichés, by definition, are trite and lacking in originality. But you’ll find more than a few in the following post. This year didn’t lack for originality, but it helped to illustrate more than a few clichés.
This week, I’ll be featuring a few hilarious tidbits from my favorite comic strip, “Pearls Before Swine” (created by Stephan Pastis), all centered on a single theme: What a Miserable Year 2020 Was! Today, it’s best captured by yesterday’s featured strip in the New York Daily News:
So, before we start counting our blessings, let’s review our journey through the utter misery of 2020. I wrote 29 Notablog installments on the Coronavirus pandemic, not to mention umpteen entries on everything from racism and social injustice to civil unrest and a crazier-than-usual election year. (In-between, there were nearly 100 new songs added to my “Song of the Day” series—because music helped to ease the pain of a year like no other.)
Our social fabric has been drowned in so much sadness—in grief, in fear, in pain, in anger—but somehow, we seem to have made it through to the end of 2020. Then again, there are still a few days left to this miserable year, and if 2020 has taught us anything, it is the truth of that other cliché: “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!” Or as that old poster for “Jaws 2” once declared: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water …” SLAM! The Great White Shark Shows Up Again!
For me, personally, I experienced more sorrow crunched into twelve months than I ever thought possible. I saw mass death and destruction in my hometown on a scale that, after living through 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy, I never could have imagined. I lost neighbors, friends, beloved local proprietors, colleagues, and even a cousin to a virus that hit New York City like a nuclear blast, with the fallout going on for months on end. I saw the ugliness of racial injustice give way to the agony of civil unrest. I saw political actors and political pundits incapable of dissecting, analyzing or helping to resolve complex social problems with intellectual scalpels, as they approached every issue with a sledgehammer, giving expression to yet another old cliché: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
But there was another side to this tale that reveals how many blessings I truly have.
Professionally, I count my blessings to have been here to celebrate the twentieth anniversary volume of a scholarly periodical that I cofounded way back in 1999: The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. I also helped to organize and moderate an illuminating four-month Facebook symposium with over 100 members, including nearly all of the contributors to The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (coedited with Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins; Lexington Books, 2019).
Personally, I count my blessings that I saw compassion manifest itself throughout 2020 as people came to each other’s assistance.
I count my blessings that I have family and even neighbors, who have become like an extended family, offering their love and support through it all.
I count my blessings that I have great doctors who were able to coordinate the squeezing of nearly six months of “elective” surgical procedures into a two-month period, completing (and recovering from) four surgeries by the first week of November.
I count my blessings that I was then able to summon the strength to face a dire medical crisis on November 13th, when I almost lost my sister (to a non-COVID-related illness). In the middle of this, we had to give up our cat Cali for adoption, but I count my blessings that she was adopted by a loving mommy—who had first given her to us!
I count my blessings that I have seen, for months on end, the heroism of first responders, saving the lives of countless people, including my own sister’s life, as EMS workers rushed her to the emergency room on that harrowing morning. After a month in the hospital, my sister returned home on December 12th, brought up the stairs in a wheelchair by a couple of other EMS workers who showed the same depth of care as those who first brought her down.
Through it all, we’ve never lost our sense of gallows humor. When my sister wondered how on earth she would get down the stairs to go for follow-up medical appointments, I told her: “If all else fails, there’s always the Richard Widmark Way!” (For those who haven’t seen the 1947 film, “Kiss of Death,” check it out [YouTube link]!) We have a tough road ahead, but we are here to talk—and to laugh—about it.
I count my blessings that when I wrote about my sister’s ordeal, I saw an outpouring of love and support on Facebook, on email, and elsewhere, attesting to how deeply she has affected the lives of so many people: her colleagues, her friends, and, most of all, those who were her former students.
I count my blessings that at the end of this challenging year, I am here, my sister is here, my brother and sister-in-law are here, my family and dear friends are still here. We are here to lift a glass to the promise of 2021, knowing full well that when we did so at the end of 2019, in the hopes that 2020 would bring greater health and happiness to all, we had no clue what we were getting ourselves into.
We don’t know what lies ahead, but we do know that this too shall pass. Or as my urologist’s office reminded me: “It may pass like a kidney stone. But it will pass.”
Count your blessings, folks. For there is no truer cliché than this one: Where there is life, there is hope. And where there is love, all things are possible.
As I mentioned yesterday, the concluding issue of the twentieth anniversary volume of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was officially published on JSTOR—as hard copies are on their way to print subscribers.
In this December 2020 issue of the journal, another publication close to heart was reviewed: The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, coedited by Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and Edward W. Younkins. The review essay, written by Allen Mendenhall, can be found on JSTOR here.
It’s always a bit awkward inviting a colleague to review a book you’ve co-edited for a journal of which you are a founding co-editor! But when I approached Allen, I simply told him, in essence: Just because I’m a founding coeditor of the journal and a coeditor of DOL doesn’t mean you have to give us Two Thumbs Up. I asked of him only that he mention those authors in the anthology who were members of the JARS editorial board (Robert L. Campbell, Roderick T. Long, and me) or advisory board (Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen), or contributors to past issues of the journal (Roger Bissell, Ed Younkins, Steve Horwitz, Gary Chartier, and Troy Camplin), which would at least provide us with some context as to why the review is appearing in the journal. Yes, context-keeping applies even to reviews of books about the art of context-keeping!
Then, I told him: “Take no prisoners, and have fun!”
And that he did. Allen gave us a really wonderful review. An excerpt can be found on the book’s home page here. But here’s a key comment:
The … chapters … are broad in scope, treating such expansive and seminal concepts as freedom, reality, and human flourishing and such elemental philosophical fields as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology. They send a message, namely that the editors are “thinking big,” calling into question whole schools of thought and promoting approaches to inquiry that are primary, essential, and comprehensive. They’re hitting the reset button. …
DOL is a wide-ranging volume colored with the unique voices and personalities of its various contributors. Yet it is united in purpose and models the dialectical method that it celebrates. [Contributor John F.] Welsh registers a memorable line that supplies fitting closure to this review. “A volume dedicated to the ‘dialectics of liberty,'” he states, “provides a wonderful opportunity to explore not only the interstices at which dialectical and libertarian theory overlap, but how the two might enhance each other for the benefit of advocacy for individual freedom, free markets, and minimal government.”
I concur. And The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom is that volume.
Folks looking to pick up a copy of the anthology can still do so at the heavily discounted rate of $5 per softcover book (with a $5 shipping charge no matter how many copies you order). There are only a dozen or so books left at this special rate. Please visit the DOL Discount Page and let Paypal do the rest!
Back on October 11, 2020, I announced the publication of the December 2020 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. As noted in my previous announcement, this completes the twentieth anniversary volume of the journal. Two decades of critical, independent, interdisciplinary Rand scholarship to celebrate! (Abstracts of the essays from the current issue are available here; contributor biographies are available here.)
Today, I have some follow-up news: JSTOR has just published the new issue. Subscribers can find the contents here. Print subscribers should be receiving their hard copies in the coming weeks.
But I have additional news to share! As readers no doubt know, we are abstracted and indexed by nearly two dozen services. Today, we have been added by the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS). With a significant expansion in our subscriber and reader base and in our accessibility through libraries worldwide, our global reach expands as well. This important reference index will further enhance that reach.
Happy Twentieth Anniversary to JARS! To many more milestones to come!
I am delighted and deeply honored to announce the publication of the second of two issues celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The December 2020 issue will be making its debut shortly on JSTOR; print subscribers should expect the second of these two historic issues in the weeks thereafter.
As I mentioned back on June 5, 2020, we decided to devote two issues to reviewing those works in the general area of Rand studies, which have never been critically appraised in our pages. The list of works reviewed in this second issue of volume 20 are:
The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism, by Nathaniel Branden
Think as If Your Life Depends on It: Principles of Efficient Thinking and Other Lectures, by Barbara Branden
The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, edited by Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and Edward W. Younkins
Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins
Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy, edited by Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew
Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, by Isabel Paterson (edited by Stephen Cox)
Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson, by Marc Champagne
Ayn Rand: An Introduction, by Eamonn Butler
Atlas Rising: Ayn Rand and Silicon Valley by The Atlas Rising Institute
Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan
Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory, by Michelle Marder Kamhi
The Soul of Atlas: Ayn Rand, Christianity, a Quest for Common Ground, by Mark David Henderson
The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics, by Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen
***
As is the case with every issue, we have introduced at least one new contributor to the JARS family. This issue brings debut pieces from four new contributors: Onar Am, Alec Mouhibian, Molly Sechrest, and Amos Wollen.
Here is our Table of Contents for Volume 20, Number 2 (the abstracts can be found here; contributor biographies can be found here):
The Man Who Would Be Galt – Dennis C. Hardin
Something That Used to Be Objectivism: Barbara Branden’s Psycho-Epistemology – Robert L. Campbell
The Dialectics of Liberty – Allen Mendenhall
Free Market Revolution: Partial or Complete? – Chris Matthew Sciabarra
From Defiant Egoist to Submissive Citizen: Is There a Bridge? Why the Hell Is There a Bridge? – Roderick T. Long
Goddess of the Republic – Alec Mouhibian
Peterson, Rand, and Antifragile Individualism – Onar Am
Introducing Ayn Rand – Edward W. Younkins
Silicon Rand – Troy Camplin
Ayn Rand: Mean Girl? – Mimi Reisel Gladstein
Bucking the Artworld Tide – Molly Sechrest
Ayn Rand and Christianity: The Virtuous Parallels – Amos Wollen
The Perfectionist Turn – David Gordon
Eudaimon in the Rough: Perfecting Rand’s Egoism – Roger E. Bissell
Index to Volume 20
Those seeking to subscribe to the journal should visit the sites linked here. And—as we march into the third decade of this remarkable journal—those wishing to submit manuscripts for consideration should follow the instructions here.
Once again, I wish to express my deepest appreciation to my co-editors, our board of advisors, our contributors, and most of all, our readers, without whom we would never have been able to publish this grand finale—the longest single issue in the history of our journal—to our twentieth anniversary volume.
As I said in the Introduction to Volume 20, Number 1: “Here’s to another two decades and beyond of JARS triumphs . . . two decades, or until such time as Rand studies have so penetrated the literary and philosophic canon that specialized journals of this nature are no longer required.”
Chris Sciabarra, April 2022 Coney Island Parachute Jump, Brooklyn, New York