‘So how do you like It here in Hampshire, Miss Rand?’

The neoliberals’ Jane Austen.

In the United States, where she made her home and found her primary audience, Ayn Rand’s books inspired the first wave of neoliberal economists and neoconservative activists, whose interventions so changed the American social and political landscapes of the late 20th century. Alan Greenspan, one of her more prominent disciples, attended many a philosophical soirée at her Manhattan apartment. Rand’s ‘philosophy’ underpins most of the unpicking of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies that has been both the stern task and the dark joy of the post-Reagan neoconservative consensus: the loathing of large-scale government intervention and regulation, the baiting of welfare bludgers, the maenad frenzy to cut corporate taxes and to free ‘capitalist man’ from all constraint. The more susceptible of my contemporaries took their infatuation with Rand’s fables into many an American university, thinktank, and young- Republican hoedown and hootenanny. Some eventually found themselves running the show, in the administrations of presidents both Republican and Democrat. From their conduct of such office as they achieved, a number of fine ironies have ensued.