Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

by Lisa Duggan

of the left.32 Rand’s writing fits this framework well. Her ideas and feelings emerged during the Bolshevik revolution, when her sense of outraged entitlement in the face of (to her) undeserved loss congealed into a moral economy and a structure of feeling that shaped her life’s work. Her impassioned defense of hierarchy, embedded in the history of racial capitalism and imperialism, combined with a eugenic sense of the greater