Chris Matthew Sciabarra (born February 17, 1960) is an American political theorist born and based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three scholarly books—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia; Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical; and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism—as well as several shorter works. He is also the co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand and co-editor with Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins of The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. His work has focused on topics including Objectivism, libertarianism (particularly the work of Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard), and dialectics.

Life

Sciabarra was a graduate of John Dewey High School before moving onto New York University. He earned his BA in History (with honors), Politics, and Economics in 1981; his MA in Politics in 1983; and his PhD in Political Philosophy, Theory, and Methodology in 1988, under the supervision of Bertell Ollman. "The Rand Transcript Revealed", co-authored by Sciabarra and Pavel Solovyev, was published in December 2021 in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and constitutes the author's most extensive exploration of Rand's education.

Sciabarra is openly gay. He is of Sicilian and Greek ancestry. He has also talked openly about living with disability.

Reviews of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

David M. Brown writes: "Much to my surprise the author of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, a comprehensive new study of Rand's thought and its genesis in Russian culture, has persuaded me that something called 'dialectics' is integral to Ayn Rand's philosophic approach and crucial to its success. Russian Radical is a different kind of look at Ayn Rand, a full-fledged 'hermeneutic' on the contours, development, and interpretation of her thought."

According to Lester H. Hunt: "It is indicative of the interest of this book that I have so far engaged in an argument with it instead of saying how good I think it is on the whole. Among other things, it is an excellent synthesis of the Objectivist literature, both the works of Rand and those of her immediate successors. Sciabarra's mastery of enormous amounts of material is almost literally incredible. He also manages to break entirely new ground on several different issues."

While James G. Lennox thoroughly rejects the author's historical conclusions, and he recommends against construing Rand's method of challenging dichotomies or "false alternatives" as "dialectical," he also writes, "[i]ts author has an encyclopedic familiarity with the writings of Ayn Rand and with virtually everyone who has advocated, commented on, or written critically about Objectivism. [...]. He is the first of her commentators to explore the intellectual milieu of Rand's early, formative years, providing a deeper appreciation for her occasional scathing remarks about Russian culture as she had experienced it. All of this material is discussed, and exhaustively referenced, in the interests of providing a comprehensive analysis of Objectivism, not merely as a philosophical system, but as a philosophical and cultural movement."

John Ridpath, a director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has argued that The Russian Radical is postmodern and deconstructionist in its overall orientation, that it is a "worthless product" of contemporary academia, and that on the whole it was "preposterous in its thesis, destructive in its purpose, and tortuously numbing in its content."

Bibliography

Dialectics and Liberty trilogy

Edited works

  • With Mimi Reisel Gladstein.
  • With Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins.

Monographs

Dissertation

  • Toward a Radical Critique of Utopianism (1988)

References

  • Dialectics & Liberty Home Page
  • Notablog Online Journal
  • The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies