In Chapter 5, I address self-interest as a foundation for capitalism by discussing the development of the Chicago School and the life and writings of Ayn Rand. Neoclassical economists after Alfred Marshall continued the narrowing of their discipline begun by classical economists. Whereas Polanyi and Keynes emphasized responsibility and duty in their moral foundation based on humanism, neoclassical economists associated with the Chicago School eschewed all social and moral responsibility and made narrow self-interest their reigning behavioral assumption. I begin by discussing the continued narrowing of neoclassical economics in the twentieth century and the rise of self-interest as the defining principle in economics. I discuss how the assumption of self-interest gained momentum and eventually conquered the Chicago School of Economics. I then discuss Ayn Rand’s glorification of self-interest in her novels and her interaction with the political right in America. I show how Rand’s moral foundation for capitalism based on narrow self-interest (rational egoism) represented a natural extension of the straightjacket of self-interest out of Chicago. This sets up a discussion of self-interest as a moral foundation for capitalism based on the seminal writings of the Chicago School and Ayn Rand.

This chapter argues that looking at how Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler approached the state of nature brings to the fore where the two political leaders converge and where they diverge. Sharing a belief in the existence of a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature, they disagree how to respond politically to that state of nature. Whereas Hitler thought that domestically the state of nature could be overcome through a strong state and through strong communitarian bonds holding people together, and whereas internationally he believed peoples simply had to live with the continued existence of an unregulated state of nature, Trump’s conclusions are different. He puts little faith in the existence of the state. Yet he believes that both domestically and internationally the state of nature can be tamed through an intricate web of power relationships within groups as well as between groups that creates a relatively stable system. Trump is part of two quintessential American traditions rather than of fascism: the Mafia subculture of New York City and the extreme individualism of Ayn Rand. The concept of fascism thus ultimately distorts our understanding of today’s America.

This chapter examines how the traditionalist wing of the conservative movement identified Flannery O’Connor as an important young writer who epitomized traditionalist conservatism’s faith in the sophisticated fiction of high culture. However, the chapter also shows how shifting conservative literary tastes could be discerned in movement conservatism’s contemporaneous reception of Ayn Rand. Unlike O’Connor and traditionalist conservatives who valued aesthetic form over abstract ideas, Rand and the libertarian conservatives at National Review who championed her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) were concerned above all with advancing a firm set of ideological principles through the medium of fiction. While Buckley eventually ousted Rand from the conservative movement, her immense popularity with conservatives of the era foreshadowed the movement’s growing distrust of literary fiction and its eventual embrace of ideological purity and cultural populism. By close reading selected works by O’Connor and Rand, two fundamentally different fiction writers with material and symbolic linkages to the conservative movement, this chapter reveals not only the importance of fiction as a crucial nodal point in these debates, but also how racially fraught literary representations of totalitarian collectivism proved to be foundational for conceptualizing modern American conservatism.