How bad writing destroyed the world
Subtitle: Ayn Rand and the literary origins of the financial crisis
By: Adam Weiner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9781501313110
Subjects: Moral and ethical aspects; Russian literature; Russian fiction; Egoism in literature; History and criticism; Influence; Economics and literature; Rationalism in literature; Economic aspects
Description: Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and potentially destructive power of terrible literature. --Publisher.

"Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author. A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies-his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand's Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan's ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking "the virtues of selfishness," even in fiction."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 220-244) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: on the dubious virtue of selfishness; title: Radicalizing Dostoevsky; title: "The most atrocious work of Russian literature"; title: Dostoevsky reborn; title: Rigor "mortus" or waiting for Rakhmetov; title: Fire in the minds of men; title: Rakhmetov lives!; title: The vengeance of the muse; title: In the graveyard of bad ideas.