So who is this new entrant on the A-level syllabus, the woman hailed by one biographer as the goddess of the market? Born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, she saw her father impoverished and her family driven to the brink of starvation by the Soviet revolution, an experience that forged her contempt for all notions of the collective good and, especially, for the state as a mechanism for ensuring equality.Īn obsessive cinemagoer, she fled to the US in 1926, swiftly making her way to Hollywood. What is more, there is a new legion of devotees, one whose influence over our daily lives dwarfs that of most politicians. But Rand’s philosophy of rugged, uncompromising individualism – of contempt for both the state and the lazy, conformist world of the corporate boardroom - now has a follower in the White House. So the devotion of Toryboys, in both their UK and US incarnations, is not new. Sajid Javid: the communities secretary boasts of reading Rand’s novel The Fountainhead twice a year throughout his adult life. The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron’s adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with “mine”) turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called “ the virtue of selfishness” – Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. It is a timely decision because Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

A s they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend.

The fountain head book