This short volume dissects Ayn Rand's life and work as a novelist and political philosopher. Duggan engages with how Rand and her writings have shaped, and were shaped by, American politics – including how they are connected to contemporary neoliberalism. Duggan's work is part of the University of California Press's American Studies Now series and is designed to offer a primer to students and activists hunting for an accessible introduction to Ayn Rand and neoliberalism. This is an aim that is largely achieved through an acerbic and humorous approach that spares little sympathy for Rand and her ideas, portraying her as a curmudgeonly and rigid figure whose approach to the world was prone to naivety and a disconnection from reality.

Duggan characterizes Rand as a writer who used her fiction and nonfiction work to express a profound hostility towards collective action, and to argue that collectivism enables popular forms of control that lead to societal decline as superior individuals are prevented from creating and ruling. Duggan persuasively finds that this approach synergizes with neoliberal logic and evokes a combination of Raymond Williams's concept of “structure of feeling” and Lauren Berlant's “cruel optimism” outline to propose that meanness and greed are the central affective components within Rand's objectivist philosophy which draw together the competing forces that drove America to the right in the last third of the twentieth century. Duggan pithily summarizes this framework by inverting Berlant's cruel optimism, which suggests that the values that we aspire to under neoliberalism are frequently to our own detriment, and that Rand alternatively advanced an approach to life that can be termed “optimistic cruelty,” in which selfishness and disdain for others are encouraged.

The value of Duggan's book derives from the way that she positions Rand both as a synecdoche for the shifts occurring within the US political and cultural spheres, and as one who had a direct impact on their development via the influence her writings have wielded over business, technological, and political leaders. Rand's works are portrayed as texts that actively convert individuals to conservative politics by playing on their ambition and arrogance. The crux of Duggan's work is that Rand upholds elements of the emotional undercurrent to right-wing thought. Whilst Duggan successfully substantiates this argument, she ultimately portrays Rand as sui generis. Despite Duggan drawing connections between Rand and the broader undercurrents of right-wing thought, her approach underexplores how Rand was impacted upon by internal debate and granular shifts within mid-twentieth-century right-wing thought.

The four main chapters work to historicize Rand by demonstrating her influences and impact. Duggan's first chapter begins with Rand's upbringing in Russia and the effect of the Bolshevik Revolution. The second tracks her experiences in Hollywood and how this impacted upon The Fountainhead (1943) and her association with anticommunist groups. The third frames Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), a novel that took thirteen years to produce, as being influenced by the early attempts to unpick the New Deal order and whose reception on publication enabled Rand to launch the objectivist movement that saw her become a prominent public figure during the 1960s and eventually achieve a cult-like status amongst her followers. The fourth works towards the present and engages with how Rand was a touchstone for burgeoning movements of neoliberals and libertarians during the 1980s and how her acolytes, such as economist Alan Greenspan, carried forward her work. During the first three chapters Duggan manages to strike an impressive balance between analysing Rand, her work, and her wider environment, paying particular attention to how Rand's attitudes to empire, race, religion, gender, and sexual identity shaped her work and who it attracted. Nevertheless, the fourth chapter is somewhat disappointing, partly due to its comparative brevity but also due to Duggan losing some of her previous finesse and getting bogged down in the existing scholarship on neoliberalism that somewhat comes at the expense of a focus on Rand. Duggan does explore the connection between the entrepreneurial self that neoliberalism encourages and Rand's own work, but more could have been done to highlight how Rand connected with and was used by, and even unified, right-wing forces, before and after her death in 1982.

Matters of emphasis aside, whilst Duggan's work breaks little new ground, its real value stems from both its concision and its thorough embeddedness in the tradition of American studies, which allows the author to blend literary, historical, and political analysis together to map out the history of Rand and her relevance to the contemporary moment.