The Return of the Primitive The Anti-Industrial Revolution

by Rand, Ayn

• ISBN13: 9780452011847
• ISBN10: 0452011841
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Plume

Summary

In the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, a social movement known as the "New Left" emerged as a major cultural influence, especially on the youth of America. It was a movement that embraced "flower-power" and psychedelic "consciousness-expansion," that lionized Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and launched the Black Panthers and the Theater of the Absurd. In Return Of The Primitive (originally published in 1971 as The New Left), Ayn Rand, bestselling novelist and originator of the theory of Objectivism, identified the intellectual roots of this movement. She urged people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to uphold, instead, a philosophy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and technological progress. Editor Peter Schwartz, in this new, expanded version of The New Left, has reorganized Rand's essays and added some of his own in order to underscore the continuing relevance of her analysis of that period. He examines such current ideologies as feminism, environmentalism and multiculturalism and argues that the same primitive, tribalist, "anti-industrial" mentality which animated the New Left a generation ago is shaping society today.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Peter Schwartz
Foreword to the First Edition	1	(4)
The Schools
The Cashing-In: The Student ``Rebellion''	5	(36)
The Chickens' Homecoming	41	(10)
The Comprachicos	51	(48)
The Culture
Apollo and Dionysus	99	(20)
The ``Inexplicable Personal Alchemy''	119	(11)
The Age of Envy	130	(31)
The Politics
The Left: Old and New	161	(12)
From a Symposium	173	(3)
``Political'' Crimes	176	(3)
Racism	179	(10)
Global Balkanization	189	(16)
Gender Tribalism	205	(14)
Peter Schwartz
The Anti-Industrial Revolution
The Philosophy of Privation	219	(26)
Peter Schwartz
Multicultural Nihilism	245	(25)
Peter Schwartz
The Anti-Industrial Revolution	270