Ayn Rand 9781501301339, 9780826445131

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Series Editor’s Preface

The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was one of the most powerful and influential twentieth century advocates of free market capitalism: in all, Rand’s novels have sold more than 20 million copies and her works of nonfiction more than 25 million; the philosophical movement her work inspired, Objectivism, flourished during her lifetime and continues to attract followers to this day; a host of leading public figures, such as former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, cite Rand as a formative intellectual influence; her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, frequently appears high in lists of the American public’s favorite books. In this outstanding book, Professor Mimi Gladstein of the University of Texas at El Paso sets out the philosophy that Rand espoused in her work. At the heart of Rand’s outlook was a belief in the moral supremacy of individualism over collectivism. For Rand, human progress was dependent on the ingenuity and creativity of individuals prepared to challenge received wisdom and accepted ways of doing things. The collectivist mindset, by contrast, punished people for their achievements, taking money from the most productive and giving it to the least productive via redistributist taxation. Rand argued that the morality of the collectivist state was no different to that of a burglar: Both believed they were entitled to appropriate other people’s property because they needed it more.

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Rand celebrated selfishness and rejected altruism. For Rand, altruism was a mask for collectivism; it undermined individual self-esteem and the desire to achieve and put in its place a negative attitude toward oneself (which was deemed worthy of sacrifice) and others (who were deemed in constant need of help). Selfishness, on the other hand, inspired people to productive activity that creates goods for people’s wants and needs, and independence, the desire to take care of oneself, thereby not placing a burden on others. In Rand’s view, altruism was the philosophy of a society of serfs, whereas selfishness was the mindset of a society of free men and women. This valuable volume sets out Rand’s thought in a lucid and cogent manner. It places Rand’s ideas in the context of her life and times as an émigré from the Soviet Union to the United States and considers the initial reception and long-term influence of her work. Certainly no account of libertarian thought would be complete without a thorough treatment of the contribution made by Rand. This volume will prove indispensable to those unfamiliar with Rand’s work as well as the more advanced scholars. John Meadowcroft King’s College London

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The Life

Ayn Rand was a polarizing and controversial person in life, and her personality and ideas are of such dynamism and force that even a quarter century after her death, she still provokes strong emotions and controversy. Those who reject her ideas are strident and derisive in their condemnation. Her adherents are just as passionately committed to the power of their convictions. However, even among those who accept the validity of many of her views, there is division and denunciation. The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in California maintains the archives of her possessions and approves publication of works about her life and writing. On the other coast of the United States, The Atlas Society: Center for Objectivism promotes her ideas through summer study courses, publications, and the occasional anniversary celebration of her works. The most recent was a one day seminar in Washington DC, cosponsored by the Cato Institute, for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. The ARI conducted its celebration with a fiftieth anniversary exhibit and a series of discussion groups through the 2007 fall season at a regional library in Hollywood. Antipathy between these groups has been deep-seated, and even in a new era of leadership there are few signs of rapprochement.

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The source of these towering passions was born Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia.1 Raised in a largely secular household of Jewish descent, Rand rejected religion at a relatively young age, declaring herself an atheist in her early teens. Her youth was both privileged and precarious. Before World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution the Rosenbaums traveled abroad and took vacations at seaside resorts; after Zinovy Zacharovich Rosenbaum’s pharmacy was nationalized and their comfortable living quarters appropriated by the state, their standard of living deteriorated considerably. Rand’s intellectual powers and strong will were evident from an early age. Her recollections of self are of a girl who was the opposite of her mother, a graceful, social person, not very interested in ideas. “I was antisocial. I was insufficiently interested in other children” (quoted in Branden 1986, Passion, 5). One friend she does recall, a relationship based on the sharing of ideas, politics specifically, is the sister of Vladimir Nabakov. Chris Sciabarra, who made an extensive study of Rand’s Russian roots, theorizes that the girls must have attended the Stoiunin Gymnasium, an avant-garde school designed to prepare girls for the university (69).2 Evidence of Rand’s precocious intellect is her enrollment in the University at age 16 and graduation three years later. From her early years, Rand’s abiding interest was the world of the mind. She always insisted that to know her, the most important thing was to know her ideas, not her family history. In her earliest public autobiographical musings, she recalls that intelligence was the quality in others that she cared the most about. Rand’s interest in literature was also stimulated in her childhood. Her archetypal image of a hero was shaped

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when at age nine she fell in love with Cyrus Paltons, the heroic protagonist of a boy’s magazine serialization of The Mysterious Valley by Maurice Champagne. Both the hero’s exploits and the illustrations depicting him as tall, lean, and long-legged suggest a pattern Rand’s heroes would embody. The plots she was most drawn to were those that centralized the battle between good and evil. “I believe there is only one story in the world” wrote John Steinbeck in East of Eden. “We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil” (475, 477).3 For Ayn Rand the contest was not so much within the self as against the forces of evil in the world, although some of her most interesting characters must struggle first with the battle within. As the girl Alisa matured, the novels of Victor Hugo enthralled her and she came early to “the idea that writing would be the defining passion of her life and the career she would pursue as an adult” (Britting 2004, 8). Two other artistic media were, after reading, the main sources of Rand’s aesthetic pleasures. Rand credits the discovery of operettas with saving her life. Their presentation of what she called “a benevolent-universe shot in the arm” (quoted in B. Branden 1986, 46) brought much-needed respite in the throes of the dank and dismal Russian collectivist state. Among her favorites were Millocher’s The Beggar Student, Offenbach’s Grand Duchess, and Lehar’s The Song of the Lark. Her other great joy came from going to the movies—a pastime that would lead her far from the drab existence of a tour guide in the Peter and Paul fortress, across an ocean and a continent to Hollywood and the launching of her writing career. Rand’s high school years were spent in the Crimea where a pre-Soviet system of education still maintained. This was

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during the period of the Russian Revolution (1918–1921), and the Rosenbaums still had hopes that their situation might be restored to some normalcy. In high school, Rand studied Aristotle and the American political system of individual rights, two topics that left indelible impressions on her. When the Red army finally defeated the White in the Crimea, the Rosenbaum family returned to St. Petersburg, now Petrograd. The location of the Rosenbaum home afforded the young Alisa a ringside seat to the early machinations that led from a revolution for freedom to the establishment of a totalitarian state. Alexandr Fedorovich Kerenski, who headed a provisional government, became her first real life hero. However, his struggles to create a viable democratic state were undermined by the Bolsheviks who attacked Petrograd and took power. Kerenski escaped to the west, a direction his hero-worshiper would follow. When they met many years later in New York, her illusions about him had evaporated. The early years of the establishment of the Soviet Union were times of privation and purges. Food was scarce; the Rosenbaum family savings were quickly depleted. Although he tried to practice his profession, Zinovy Zacharovich, who had once owned a pharmacy, became a clerk in one far from his home. Anna Rosenbaum became a teacher of languages in high school. At one point, because of her family’s bourgeois status, Alisa and many of her friends were to be expelled from the university. A quirk of fate caused them to be reinstated when a visiting delegation of British scientists heard about the impending purge. Because of the desire of the new regime to impress them, some of the students, Rand among them, were allowed to complete their degrees.

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At the University, Alisa chose, over her father’s objections, to major in history. He wanted her to have a profession such as medicine or engineering. The one professor Rand would mention by name when she recalled her university education was N. O. Lossky, with whom she studied ancient philosophy. In her recollections for a series of interviews prior to the writing of the biographical essay, “Who Is Ayn Rand?” Rand remembers that Lossky was a Platonist who did not think highly of female students. Nonetheless, he gave her a “Perfect” on her final exam.4 Rand’s intellect developed as she sharpened her mental teeth, both rejecting and interpolating the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche. After the university, Alisa enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography: her purpose, to learn screenwriting. After only one year in the program, she received permission to visit relatives in America and thus never studied screenwriting, as it was part of the second year of the program. Many years after Rand’s death, the Ayn Rand Institute published translations and copies of her Russian writings on Hollywood.5 In effect, although she did not list these works on her vitae, they are interesting as her earliest publications. The person, who was to be known as Ayn Rand, celebrated her twenty-first birthday in transit to a new life and a new identity. Anna Borisovna, the mother with whom she shared so little sensibility, was perceptive and caring enough to arrange for an invitation from relatives in Chicago and to pay for the transit by selling her jewelry. Both Alisa and her mother were aware that a person of Rand’s beliefs would not fare well in Soviet Russia. Again, fortuitous timing worked in Rand’s favor. Travel restrictions on students had been temporarily eased in

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the transition from Lenin’s to a new economic policy. As Rand’s relatives owned a silent film theatre, it could be convincingly argued that Rand was going to the United States to study film. The actual birthday occurred in Berlin where she visited with her cousin Vera Guzarchik, a medical student. Alice Rosenbaum, the name on her liner ticket stub, arrived in New York harbor on February 19, 1926. She was never to return to her birthplace, a country she was to characterize as “the ugliest and incidentally, the most mystical country on earth.”6 As a student in Leningrad, she expressed strong anti-Soviet sentiments until such time as she feared that her remarks might endanger her family. Once she had left Russia, she was to devote much of her life to revealing the tyranny, drudgery, and soul-destroying evil of the Soviet state. In her first novel and in subsequent nonfiction writing, she argued effectively about the disastrous consequences of collectivism, inveighing against the rationalizations by socialists and their liberal sympathizers of Soviet atrocities and rule of terror. “Complete loathing” is the expression she chose to describe how she felt about Russia. Rand’s sojourn with her Chicago relatives was brief. Although she credits them with providing a lifeline for her, once she left Chicago she did not maintain strong family ties. Barbara Branden theorizes that because the Portnoy/Satrin/Goldberg families were deeply steeped in living within their religious traditions—attending synagogue, maintaining strong family ties—they were not people with whom Rand felt she had much in common. Their values were not her values (Passion, 72). However, even though her visitor’s visa had expired, her Chicago relatives provided a letter of introduction to someone in

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the Cecil B. DeMille Studio, bought her a train ticket, and gave Rand money for a new start in California. It was at this juncture in her life that Alisa Rosenbaum became Ayn Rand. According to most sources, the name Ayn was chosen even before she reached America. Its derivation is Finnish. A Chicago cousin, Fern Brown, a successful writer herself, remembers an old RemingtonRand typewriter as inspiring the choice for a last name. According to Brown, Rand wanted to maintain her initials AR and preferred Ayn Rand to Ayn Remington. Impact, the ARI newsletter, cites letters from family in Russia that refer to the name “Rand” even before they heard from her in America. They cite a New York Evening Post article that quotes Rand to that effect. In the Cyrillic spelling of her name are resemblances to both the names “Ayn” and “Rand.” After leaving Chicago and starting a new life in California, only a few of her closest friends in the early days knew her birth name. During the zenith of her career it was not referred to, even by her inner coterie. It was only in 1983, during research for her booklength biography, that Barbara Branden discovered it. It had not been included in the early “official” biographical essay. Rand was remarkably confident in herself for a young immigrant woman whose security in a new country was tenuous at best. One of her mother’s early letters recounts the departure scene and Alisa assuring her family that when she would return, she would be famous. Ann Borisovna writes that her father Zinovy concurred, remarking after the train departed that he was sure his daughter would show the world. By the time she left Chicago for Hollywood, Rand had written four screenplays in English, a language she had not quite mastered.

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Once settled in the Hollywood Studio Club for women, a residence that provided inexpensive living for the likes of Donna Reed, Rita Moreno, Kim Novak, and Norma Jean Baker before she was Marilyn Monroe, Rand again was the beneficiary of amazingly fortuitous timing. Just at the moment she was dejectedly exiting the DeMille lot when the letter of introduction proved no entry to a job, Cecil B. DeMille drove by and gave her a ride to the set of King of Kings, which was then in production. His purpose was to show her how a movie is made—a necessary preparation if she wanted to be a screenwriter. After a number of days of watching, DeMille offered Rand her first job in Hollywood as an extra in his film about the life of Jesus Christ, rich irony for a woman who was to be one of the country’s most adamant atheists. Another quirk of fate put in her path, during this first job in her adopted country, the man who was to be her husband till the end of his life, just three years before the end of hers. When asked about her lack of belief in an afterlife on the Phil Donahue show, she remarked that if she believed there was an afterlife, she would immediately kill herself so that she could be with her beloved husband. When they met, he was also an extra in the DeMille movie. For Rand it was love at first sight. Before she knew a thing about him, she had decided that he had her kind of face— aloof, aristocratic, strong, independent, cold, and graceful. It is a look that would be replicated in some measure in many of her heroic protagonists. Frank O’Connor was, by most accounts, a handsome, kind, gentle, and decent man. He was an actor who never achieved much success in the field, although he appeared in a few movies in the early 1930s. People who knew him describe him as a passive man, rarely the major breadwinner

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in the marriage. After DeMille’s studio closed, Ayn and Frank met again, by chance in a public library. Their relationship developed and on April 15 of 1929, shortly before her extended visa was about to expire, they were married by a judge in Los Angeles, going to Mexicali some months later so she could reenter the country as the wife of an American citizen. As soon as she could, she applied for citizenship.7 The early days for the O’Connors were difficult. Before the marriage, Rand had worked for DeMille as a junior screenwriter, doing treatments and synopses of others’ works. Her own scenarios were dismissed as improbable and unrealistic. When DeMille closed his studio, Rand was reduced to working whatever jobs she could find, such as waiting tables and stuffing envelopes. In 1929 she got a position in the wardrobe department of RKO Pictures as a filing clerk. Although it certainly wasn’t the kind of work she desired, the pay was steady and consistent with her ethics of the importance of fair value, she did a good enough job that she was promoted to head of the department within a year. All this time, she continued working on her own writing projects. The economy and the intellectual zeitgeist could not have been worse for a writer of Rand’s philosophical bent. It is testimony to her perseverance and integrity that she was able to prevail. Shortly after her marriage, the crash of 1929 sent the economy into a tailspin. Concurrently, in what is often referred to as the “Red Decade,” the preponderance of the artistic and intellectual classes promulgated leftist, collectivist, and communist themes. Rand, who had seen collectivism in action, was appalled. How could it be that in this country that she had come to in order to get away from the suffocating strictures of communism, the

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intelligentsia were advocating many of the same collectivist and statist measures as brought privation and stultification in Russia? Rand thought that Americans were obviously not adequately knowledgeable about the dangers and reality of communism. Thus, spurred on by Frank and his brothers, she set about to write a novel that would tell the American public what was really occurring in Russia. A story goes that before she left Russia, a man at her farewell party told her to tell the world what was actually happening behind what later came to be known as the “Iron Curtain.” Tell them Russia is a large cemetery and that we are slowly dying he told her. We the Living is her fulfillment of her promise to do so. Airtight is the original title for what eventually became We the Living, Rand’s first published novel. In some ways, that title is more expressive of the cemetery and coffin imagery evoked by the impetus of her promise. The Russia she depicts shuts its citizens into an airtight coffin from which there is no escape. Begun in 1930 and finally published in 1936, although it was finished some years earlier, Rand defined We the Living as the closest work to an autobiography that she would ever write. As originally published, the novel is remarkable for Rand’s ability to communicate analytically and creatively in a newly learned language. Few writers are able to accomplish this: Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabakov are the ones who come to mind. Once she had become famous, Rand made some revisions to the original text. She claims that they were “minimal.” However, a comparison of the 1936 and the 1959 editions suggest more “substantial and substantive changes.”8 To develop her writing skills during this early period of her professional life, Rand read extensively. Most contemporary writers did not appeal to her, but the works of

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O. Henry did. His trademark plot twists and lighthearted style as well as his novel and ingenious take on things appealed to Rand. She described his main characteristic as “pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inexhaustible imagination” (Manifesto 1969, 95). That influence can be seen in some of her works. Rand also discovered a favorite among the novels she read. It was Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster’s Calumet K. Its heroic protagonist, Charlie Bannon, prefigures, in his strength, integrity, and perseverance against overwhelming opposition, Howard Roark and John Galt. Although she appreciated the intellect and ability of create interesting characters of Sinclair Lewis, his tone and tenor did not jibe with Rand’s sense of life. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms she “hated” and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain she found “pretentious” (Passion, 101). In addition to her reading, Rand was writing persistently and productively. She wrote several scenarios set in Russia. One of them, Red Pawn, was good enough that Rand was able to sell it to Universal Studios in 1932 for the considerable sum of 1500 dollars. That sum included a contract for her to write the script. This story of a beautiful woman who becomes the mistress of a prison commander in order to be near her husband who is in the prison was never made into a film. The early thirties were a heady time for Rand. Her first professional sale allowed her to quit her job with RKO and devote herself to writing. In her letters to family, she writes enthusiastically of her husband and their happiness together. Frank was still working at his acting career, waiting for a break that never came. Although his jobs became fewer and fewer, Rand’s professional life was developing steadily. In addition to working on We the Living, Rand,

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inspired by viewing a courtroom drama and stories in the newspapers about the suicide of Ivar Kreuger, a Swedish business tycoon, decided to write a play. A noteworthy feature of the work is an O. Henry-like twist on the format of the trial play, the use of audience members to serve as the jury, thereby creating the possibility of a different ending every night. Originally titled Penthouse Legend, produced in Hollywood as Woman on Trial, the play that came to be known as Night of January 16th opened on Broadway in 1935. Rand’s determination and commitment to the integrity of her ideas were evident from this early period in her career. Never one to go along to get along, Rand bucked the system and would not sign a contract that would have allowed changes in her play. The Hollywood production came about because she would not sign under those conditions and although the California production was not as lucrative, the character of her play remained unchanged. After its Hollywood success, A.H. Woods renewed his bid to produce the play on Broadway. This time, although she had reservations, Rand signed a contract in the belief that any changes would be made with her consent. The production process was painful for Rand who had to fight Woods to maintain the integrity of her thematic content. Years later when she wrote an introduction to a published version, she regrets allowing the name change, calls the play’s history “hell,” and contends that although she was able to “preserve the best of the passages he [Woods] wanted to eliminate,” the play became “an incongruous mongrel slapdashed out of contradictory elements” (Night of January 16th 1936, 14). Broadway audiences were more kind; the play had a respectable 283-performance run.

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The year 1936 was a banner year for Rand’s career. Success sometimes breeds success, and as Rand’s play was being readied for Broadway, Macmillan made an offer to publish We the Living. Although it was not promoted and garnered only a few mostly negative reviews, after some time it finally reached the readers who were Rand’s target audience. However, that was too late as Macmillan, convinced that it would not need a second printing, destroyed the type. Revised and reissued, it was to sell millions of copies once its author became well known. The O’Connors had moved to New York for Ayn to work on the production of Night of January 16th. Box office royalties allowed them some financial comfort for the first time, although Rand had to sue Woods for withholding some of her monies to pay another writer for rewrites. She won her case.9 They moved into a nice apartment at 66 Park Avenue and Rand began trying to bring her family to the United States. As We the Living was not, at that time, contributing significantly to the family income, Rand’s agent tried to get her a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Rand was convinced that her inability to get a job was the result of being blacklisted because of her anticommunist views. By this time she had begun to make speeches on the subject, recounting her experiences and warning audiences of the Soviet threat. Anthem, Rand’s futuristic dystopian novelette, was also completed during this New York period, but she could not find an American publisher. Cassell, the British publishing house that had issued the English version of We the Living, bought the book. However, it too did not receive wide distribution till after Rand’s Fountainhead success. It became, because of its length and accessibility, one of her best sellers, particularly for school-age readers.

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Rand was actively writing in a number of genres during this period of her life. Besides the professional accomplishments of a Broadway play and a novel put out by a major publishing house, she also worked on adapting her novel for the stage. The Unconquered opened on Broadway in 1940 but did not replicate even the moderate success of its predecessor. It closed after a five-day run and was Rand’s swansong of writing for the stage. Two other scripts, Ideal and Think Twice, were never produced on Broadway. For her next major project Rand kept notes in three ring-bound notebooks. She begins with a quotation from Nietzsche, “The noble soul has reverence for itself” and then declares, “The first purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith. Therefore—a new definition of egoism and its living example” (Journals 1997, 77). The year before, she wrote in her journal that she had to study philosophy, higher mathematics, physics and psychology. Rand was a voracious researcher and did not limit herself to reading. Having decided that her protagonist would be an architect, she then worked, without pay for six months in the office of Eli Jacques Kahn, a famous New York architect of the time, to gain some practical knowledge. Second Hand Lives is an apt original title for a novel whose major theme has to do with people who sell out, moochers and looters without individuality or creativity. Rand’s term was secondhanders. The title change to The Fountainhead represents more of an emphasis on the heroic protagonist rather than the major and minor second-handers, the antagonists who work against standards and competence. Concerns about her depleting finances plagued Rand during the writing of The Fountainhead. Her husband’s lack of contribution to the family’s support was also a

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disappointment. When Macmillan’s offer to publish did not include a guarantee of adequate publicity and advertising, Rand ended her association with that publishing house. Knopf showed interest, but Rand did not meet the agreed deadline and subsequent submissions to other publishers brought eight rejections. Disagreement over the manuscript also led to a break with her agent, Ann Watkins, and for a period of time Rand acted as her own advocate. Richard Meland, a story editor at Paramount who was enthusiastic about the portions of the novel he had read, recommended Archibald Ogden, an editor with Bobbs-Merrill. Ogden championed the book and a contract with an advance of US$1200 was signed. Timing was again in Rand’s favor. Shortly after the signing, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and with paper rationing and the war effort, it was not likely that a public ready for diversion would have been receptive to a long and serious novel of ideas. Rand’s narrative, describing the trajectory of Howard Roark’s career in The Fountainhead, reads remarkably like a description of the publishing history of the novel itself. “It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places” (549). Although not an instant best-seller, the novel was positively reviewed in key venues such as The New York Times Book Review and The Saturday Review of Literature, and it slowly reached its kind of readers. A US$50,000 film rights sale set in motion another battle of the wills between the author and the filmmakers who wanted to make certain changes. Neither Gary Cooper as Roark nor Patricia Neal as Dominique found favor with reviewers who also declared that the script was heavy-handed, haranguing, and hectoring.

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As Rand’s contract for the book sale to the movies also called for her to write the screen adaptation, Ayn and Frank again moved cross-country from New York to California. The O’Connors bought a property in Tarzana with acreage and a house designed by Richard Neutra, a house that was very much in keeping with the architectural principles espoused in The Fountainhead. From all accounts, Frank O’Connor was content in this setting, growing flowers, raising peacocks, and developing the land. Rand, who did not drive, preferred urban living. Publication of The Fountainhead also brought Rand a group of adherents, many of whom were to become quite successful in their own right. The initial “fan” contact was made by Nathan Blumenthal, later Nathaniel Branden, then a psychology student at UCLA. As the relationship developed, Rand was to call him her “ideal reader” and “intellectual heir.” He introduced Rand to Barbara Weidman, later Branden, who would become Rand’s authorized and unauthorized biographer. A close relationship developed among Ayn Rand, Frank O’Connor, Barbara Branden, and Nathaniel Branden. When Barbara and Nathaniel moved to New York to continue their studies at New York University, Rand and her husband were not far behind. Rand had always preferred the city to country living, and as her personality was the dominant one in the marriage, Frank acceded to her wishes. When Nathaniel and Barbara were married in 1953, Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor stood up for them as their matron of honor and best man. Back in California when Barbara and Nathaniel would visit the O’Connors in Tarzana, Rand read them portions of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written. In New York, as the group of her admirers and friends broadened,

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she continued the practice. It was in these gatherings of Fountainhead fans and readers of Atlas Shrugged in manuscript that the nascent Objectivist movement was engendered. Atlas Shrugged was published in October 1957 and was to be the last work of fiction published in Rand’s lifetime. It is generally considered to be the “Bible” of Objectivism, the philosophy Rand would develop in her subsequent writing and lecturing.10 The next year, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Institute, initially designed to teach the principles of Objectivism, but it gradually developed into an intellectual movement. During the 1960s Rand was interviewed and feted as a major intellectual force. She lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Johns Hopkins University. She was presented with a Doctor of Human Letters degree at Lewis and Clark College, where the students spent a semester studying her works. Rand had a radio program, a newspaper column, and a newsletter through which to promulgate her philosophy. The newsletter grew into a journal and many of her articles were reprinted in books of nonfiction such as The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. A woman of towering intellect, Rand was so confident in her opinions and so articulate in their defense that she bested even the most erudite of New York intellectuals in debate. Bennet Cerf (1974) recalls, “You can’t argue with Ayn Rand. She’s so clever at it she makes a fool out of you” (251). Her editor at Random House, Hiram Haydn, whose political persuasion was contrary to the views expressed in Atlas Shrugged, the novel he edited, said in his autobiography that Rand always made him feel like a “soft-headed, ambivalent, tortured liberal,” not unlike

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the antagonists in her fiction. Alan Greenspan (2007) credits her with being “a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value” (51). Only a woman of Rand’s unwavering self-esteem would have had the confidence to proclaim without a sense of the outrageousness of her views that her favorite American author was Mickey Spillane and her favorite television show “Charley’s Angels.” Perhaps it was that she was so intellectually gifted that she could justify even the most controversial of opinions. The year 1968 was a cataclysmic year for the followers of Ayn Rand’s ideas. It was the year of her personal and professional break with Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden. Nathaniel Branden, who had been the primary force behind the movement to disseminate Rand’s basic philosophy through the medium of the Nathaniel Branden Lectures that then became incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute, was the epicenter of the explosion, reverberations of which are still felt today. In an article titled “To Whom It May Concern” that Rand published in The Objectivist, May 1968, issue, but dated September, Ayn Rand repudiates both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who were then in the process of a divorce. Leonard Peikoff, who replaced Nathaniel as Rand’s heir, Alan Greenspan, Allan Blumenthal, and Mary Ann (Rukavina) Sures added their names in a brief addendum to Rand’s renunciation. Rand accuses Nathaniel Branden of concealing from her “certain ugly actions and irrational behavior” (4), of “exploiting me intellectually and professionally” (5), and of “psychological conflict and contradictions” (8). Rand explains that her original case was not against Barbara Branden but that Barbara’s

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behavior subsequent to the break with Nathaniel convinced her to take action against both of the Brandens. The Brandens, in separate letters, responded to Rand’s accusations. Although Nathaniel’s “In Answer to Ayn Rand” hints at a source for the real problem, his rejection of her romantic advances, it was not until Barbara Branden’s publication of the book-length biography The Passion of Ayn Rand that certain facts about the Rand/ Branden relationship became public. This came in 1986, four years after Rand’s death. Nathaniel Branden’s recollections of his intimate relationship with Rand followed in Judgment Day, published in 1989, and again in a revised version of that same memoir, My Years with Ayn Rand, which came out a decade later in 1999. Each of the Brandens testify to the existence of an intimate sexual affair between Nathaniel and Ayn.11 In Michael Paxton’s companion book to his Academy Award-winning documentary on the life of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff acknowledges the affair, stating: “This she did, of course, with the knowledge and the consent of her husband” (1998, 142). After the rupture, Leonard Peikoff became an intellectual mainstay for Rand and her literary executor and heir. He was the first head of The Ayn Rand Institute, founded after her death to continue the promulgation of her philosophy. When he stepped down and became the chairman emeritus, Michael Berliner succeeded him; presently Yaron Brook holds that position. Although the Brandens were gone, Rand still had the friendship and allegiance of most of the people who had formed the core of the Objectivist movement and her adherents and admirers around the country were largely unaffected. Rand continued to publish The Objectivist with Leonard Peikoff as the associate editor. It ceased publication in 1971 and The Ayn

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Rand Letter followed. Publication ceased in 1976. In 1974 Rand was the graduation speaker at West Point; the seventies also included appearances on such popular television interview shows as “Donahue” and “The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder.” Her last public appearance was a November 1981 presentation to the National Committee for Monetary Reform. In the last years of her life, both her health and the state of culture and government depressed her to the point that she stopped writing. In the quarter century since her death, the validity of many of her ideas has gained credence. The statist and collectivist political systems she railed against, Fascism and Communism, have been consigned to the “dustbin of history.” The largest remaining “communist” country in the world, China, has adopted certain capitalist institutions. Ayn Rand died in her apartment in New York on March 6, 1982. Her husband of 50 years had preceded her by three years, dying in November of 1979. A big floral arrangement in the shape of a six-foot tall dollar sign graced her funeral, and the music that was played was what she had affectionately termed her “tiddlywink” music.

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An Exposition of Rand’s Ideas

Rand initially used the medium of fiction to explicate her many ideas on everything from art to politics. However, once she began to attract adherents to her philosophy, Rand started publishing works of nonfiction in which she amplified and augmented the particulars of specific areas of her thought. Of her seven works of nonfiction, six were published in Rand’s lifetime; one was published posthumously.1 The titles are strong indicators of their subject matter. The first is For the New Intellectual (1961), subtitled The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. After a preface and lengthy essay also titled “For the New Intellectual,” the book reprints major philosophical sections of the works of fiction. A speech by Kira, the protagonist of We the Living, about the value of the individual human life, is the first selection, followed by a section from Anthem about the rediscovery of the word “I.” The three selections from The Fountainhead are, “The Nature of the Second-Hander,” “The Soul of a Collectivist,” and “The Soul of an Individualist.” Finally, there are eight selections from Atlas Shrugged, including Francisco’s “the meaning of money” speech, a section on “the meaning of sex,” and John Galt’s summative speech that Rand identifies as “the philosophy of Objectivism.” Rand’s preface states that she thinks these main philosophical passages from her novels embody implicitly a

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full “outline for a new philosophical system” (For the New Intellectual 1961, 1). Concluding the preface, she names her philosophy Objectivism. Although she was to work on fleshing out various aspects of her philosophical system throughout her life, the heart of it is in the fiction, most especially the selections she chose to reprint in For the New Intellectual. These provide an appropriate starting place for an exposition of her philosophy.2 We the Living is the story of a young woman coming of age during the dire days of the establishment of the Soviet state, falling in love, and finally trying to escape the suffocating strictures of the oppressive collectivist system. The protagonist, Kira Argounova, wants to be an engineer and construct skyscrapers but is not allowed to leave. She loves Leo Kovalensky, a cynical and dissolute young aristocrat, but becomes the mistress of Andrei Taganov, a Communist hero, to save Leo and to get him the medical care he needs. Through her main characters, Rand makes it clear that the premises at the heart of Communism, that is, collectivism, are at fault for crushing individual potential and dreams. Rand spells out through both the narrative and dramatically that any system that values the collective above the individual is doomed to quash productivity and fulfillment as it glorifies the mediocre. The plot also demonstrates how in such an atmosphere those who can best work the system and speculators can thrive, whereas worthwhile individuals are sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment. In the brief reprinted excerpt, Kira, who has been Andrei’s lover so she can get Leo the help he needs to recuperate from tuberculosis, lectures Andrei on the significance of the individual human life as against the state, proclaiming “who can tell me why I should live for anything but for

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that which I want?” (72). She goes on to accuse him (as a representative of Communism) of locking all the people in an iron airtight cellar from which there is no escape.3 Rand’s statement is unambiguous. Her theme, she writes, is about “the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it” (69). Through her main and minor characters, Rand illustrates the various ways the collectivist state destroys the life and/or spirit of those living within it. Even its greatest proponents are not spared. Andrei, the hero of Melitopol, who is a dedicated communist, who believed passionately in the revolution’s promise, comes to understand that not only is the party corrupt, but also the ideals under girding it are not valid. In a way, Andrei is the most tragic figure in the novel, as his destruction is both spiritual and physical. Kira, whose desire is to be an engineer and build, remains spiritually unbowed but is killed to prevent her achieving her goal of freedom. Leo, who Rand describes as fine and able initially, becomes thoroughly disillusioned and cynical, and although he lives, is spiritually defunct. Early in her career, Rand’s work retained vestiges of her encounter with Nietzschean thought. However, as she honed and developed her own philosophy, she was to expunge much of that from her texts. This she was able to do in We the Living because the 1936 edition went out of print and a new edition was issued in 1959. In his 2004 analysis of the details of what he calls the “Nietzschean” flavor of the earlier texts, Robert Mayhew concludes that many accusations of a Nietzschean impulse result from over reading the implications of certain passages. His rationale is that these passages were rewritten not so much to edit out Nietzsche as because they were “dubious and confused” (2004, 210).4

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Anthem presents a future world in which the collectivist state has succeeded in implementing its philosophy so thoroughly that even individual names have been obliterated and people have numbers instead. In addition, the language reflects the loss of individuality to the extent that the word “I” has disappeared from usage and each person uses the collective pronoun “we” to refer to self and “they” to refer to someone else. Also, in what Rand sees as the inevitable results of collectivist mentality, humans have relapsed into a primitive state, technology having been lost. The bureaucratic mindset is such that advances are not allowed because they might interfere with an established bureau, therefore, when the protagonist, Equality 7-2521, discovers electricity, it is denounced because it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. Also, his discovery is condemned because it was not a collective effort but discovered by an individual. In the ensuing flight to avoid punishment for his accomplishment, the protagonist escapes and is joined in the Uncharted Forest by Liberty 5-3000. She is a woman that he thinks of as “the Golden One.” Since neither can commit the sin of preference, they have not been able to act on their attraction. They find a house, somehow left standing from the Unmentionable Times and move into it. In the library, Equality 7-2521 begins to unravel the mysteries of its manuscripts, and it is then that he finds the word “I.” This is the portion of the text Rand chose to highlight in For the New Intellectual. Of significance is the protagonist’s antialtruistic declaration: “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others” (74). Equality 7-2521 begins to understand the tyranny accomplished through the word “we” and rejects it as “a word by which the depraved

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steal the virtue of the good” (74-5). For him the word “we” comes to represent servitude, looting, wretchedness, falsehood, and ignominy. After much reading of the ancient texts Equality 7-2521 chooses the name Prometheus because he learns that just as he had suffered for attempting to bring electricity to his fellows, so Prometheus had been punished for his temerity in bringing fire to humanity. The Golden One takes the name of Gaea, who was the original mother earth goddess. Anthem ends hopefully with Prometheus planning to learn all he can and then sneak back into the city to try to free the like-minded and eventually build a fort from which to fight for the freedom, the rights, the honor, and the life of Man. The sacred word he plans to inscribe on the portals of his fort is “Ego.” Rand identifies the theme of The Fountainhead as “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul” (77). The novel chronicles the story of Howard Roark, a talented and independent architect of impeccable integrity, through his interactions with four other characters. It is through these stories that Rand illustrates the sources, psychological and societal, which go into the making of either a collectivist or an individualist. The context for the first excerpt, “The Nature of the Second-Hander,” is a conversation between Roark and Gail Wynand, a cynic with qualities of greatness, who has co-opted his honor. Roark recognizes Wynand’s core of inner integrity and they have become friends. Roark explains what he has come to understand about people who live secondhand, who have no self. In his analysis of Peter Keating, a consummate second-hander, Roark makes clear that when one’s driving force is the opinion of others and becoming great or important in their eyes is what dictates one’s choices in life, then one loses the self; such people are egoless. For

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such people, it is not what they accomplish but what others think they have accomplished that matters. Although such people realize their own mediocrity, as long as others think them great, they are satisfied. They do not act but want to give the appearance of action. They do not judge for themselves but repeat the opinions of others. But, Roark asserts, it is the doers, thinkers, workers, and producers upon whom the world depends. He calls those types the “egoists” and declares that they are hated by the second-handers who will easily excuse criminals but harbor a “malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence” (79). Roark blames the acceptance of altruism for those who live secondhand, who seek self-esteem through what others think of them, who have created a “world perishing from selflessness” (80). Because the terms selfishness and egoism have taken on negative connotations in contemporary society, Rand has Roark select the term “a self-sufficient ego” to define the quality he seeks in those he would choose for friends.5 The second excerpt from The Fountainhead is “The Soul of a Collectivist.” Although the selection above is the individualist, Roark, defining the quality he most admires in people, this second explication of methods and motives is by Ellsworth M. Toohey, the ultimate collectivist whose real purpose is to rule others. Having reduced Peter Keating to a selfless and willing pawn, Toohey has no fear in revealing the methodology of his plan to kill the individual and man’s soul. The soul cannot be ruled and therefore must be broken, according to Toohey, and the tools to do this are to make a person feel small, guilty, to kill his aspiration and his integrity. By setting selflessness and altruism as the ideal, an ideal that is unachievable, one fills people with guilt and a sense of unworthiness. Such people are more

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easily ruled. Other of Toohey’s methods include making people feel unclean, uncertain, and unable to trust themselves and killing a man’s sense of values. Killing a person’s capacity to recognize or achieve greatness while concurrently setting up standards achievable by all, kills incentive to improve, to excel, or to perfect. Setting low standards is another method used by collectivists. Yet another weapon against greatness and the sacred is laughter. By using laughter as a means to undermine reverence or respect, by reducing the seriousness of everything, the heroic and valued are undermined. The most important thing Toohey divulges as a weapon to beat people into obedience and submission is, “Don’t allow men to be happy. . . . Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living” (83). Toohey explains that all the great systems of ethics have preached the repudiation of personal joy, extolling sacrifice, renunciation, and self -denial and have thus gained world power and ruled millions; their methods have included using vague and obfuscating terminology to sell the concepts of such things as Nirvana, Racial Supremacy, Paradise, or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Toohey cautions that when one hears a prophet speak of sacrifice and service, one should remember that there is always someone collecting those sacrifices and being served and that is unlikely to be the person preached to. Nonetheless, he advises that there is a weapon against those who would kill happiness and freedom and that weapon is reason. To leave humans unarmed, reason must be undermined and Toohey describes the best way to challenge the power of reason as extolling feeling not thinking and belief or faith, not proof. A key part of Toohey’s modus operandi is that he has been very open about his plans. He tells the truth about

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himself, but people don’t want to believe him. Like Hitler who published his plans in Mein Kampf or current terrorist groups who declare their desire to install Islamic theocracies throughout the world, Toohey counts on his audience not to want to hear and therefore to ignore that which they don’t want to deal with. In the third and final selection from The Fountainhead reprinted in For the New Intellectual, Howard Roark defines “The Soul of an Individualist.” The context is a trial; Roark has dynamited an unfinished government housing project because his agreement with Peter Keating, the architect of record, called for his design to be built unchanged, and although Keating had tried to prevent it, the government made significant alterations. Because the government agency that broke the agreement can’t be sued, neither architect has recourse to law. Roark defends himself and begins by reminding the jury that throughout history creators have often been reviled, theorizing that the first man who discovered how to make fire was probably burned at the stake, although he brought light and warmth to his fellows, whereas the inventor of the wheel was doubtless broken on the rack using a weapon of his own devising after bringing the gift of travel and technology. Recalling the Promethean legend, Roark conjectures that it prefigures an archetypal situation where human benefactors are punished for their courage. Instead of being heralded in their times, great creators—be they thinkers, artists, scientists, or inventors—usually stand against the people of their era and find every great new thought opposed. These creators are self-sufficient, selfmotivated, and self-generated, but not selfless. Roark goes on to remind his audience that the mind is a human’s only weapon and survival tool because unlike

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animals, humans are not equipped by nature with fang, claw, wings, or weapons with which to get food and shelter. Implements of survival must be produced, and the mind is the tool with which they are created. This is done by the individual mind, as there is no such thing as a collective brain. Whereas the creator works to achieve by overcoming the laws of nature, the second-hander or parasite works to control not nature but other human beings. This he does by means of altruism, a philosophy that requires humans to live for others and place others above the self. Altruism produces a parasitic relationship in that if one’s main purpose or motive is serving others, then one become a slave, a slave not by conquest but a slave by choice. Altruism privileges giving as a virtue, but before there is something to give, it must be produced and therefore Roark questions the concept of admiring those who give what they have not produced while damning the creator/producer to servitude. Roark calls into question a long list of prevalent ideas such as that it is a virtue to agree with others, that the ego is evil and that selflessness is a virtue. He identifies the “greatest fraud ever perpetuated on mankind” (95) as the false dichotomy between egoism and altruism, the former implying sacrifice of others to self and the latter, sacrifice of self to others. The choice, he counters, is not that at all, but the choice between dependence and independence. Although emperors, dictators, and the like have been called egoists, they are anything but in that an egoist is one who exists for the self and asks no one else to exist for him, an impossibility for those who would rule others and must function by controlling them. Ironically, tyrants are the ultimate parasites, dependent on the exploitation of producers and second-handers alike. A real egoist is

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self-sufficient. For such an individual, all proper exchanges should be those of mutual advantage and the only type of relationship that between equals; the proper way to relate to other human beings and for them to relate to you is “hands off” (98). The United States of America derived from a Declaration of Independence, built on the principle of individualism, one based on a person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Roark reminds his audience that it is the pursuit of one’s own happiness and not the happiness of someone else. Although the principles of independence and individualism initially prevailed in building the country he calls the “noblest country in the history of man” (98), Roark fears the ancient and ugly monster of collectivism that at the time was dominating Europe and the thinking of many in the United States. Although he does not name Fascism and Communism specifically, the descriptions (one where the individual lives for the state and the other for the masses) and the time of publication (1943) make clear that for Rand these political systems are two sides of the same coin. Finally, Roark claims the right to destroy Cortlandt because he designed it and was not paid the price he contracted for—that it be built exactly as designed. He rejects the right of the government to demand the gift of his talent and refuses to exist for others; he states that he recognizes no obligation toward others except not to participate in a slave society and to respect their freedom. The jury acquits him. Over a decade and a World War divided the writing of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In the meantime, Rand had become a best-selling author and a thinker whose ideas attracted a number of fans. As she wrote Atlas

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Shrugged, she was able to sharpen and hone her thinking as she read excerpts to a select coterie of students of her philosophy. Atlas Shrugged was the apogee for the fictional explication of Rand’s philosophy through the medium of narrative and character. Rand herself commented on the fact that as all the major religions in the world have their own mythologies, that is stories and parables that embody their values, so she saw Atlas Shrugged as the foundational myth that concretized her own philosophy. The plot of Atlas Shrugged grew out of Rand’s response to the idea of what would happen if the producers, the people of the mind went on strike. She names the theme of the novel “the role of the mind in man’s existence” (103).6 The initial setting is New York City in an undefined future time. The protagonist is Dagny Taggart, who runs a railroad started by her father. Her problems in doing so are complicated by the fact that as she tries to negotiate the miasma of various bureaus, councils, and committees, the effective and capable people are disappearing. She must also work around her brother James, the titular head of Taggart Transcontinental. The world she inhabits has devolved into a collectivist nightmare made up of people’s states such as the People’s State of England and the People’s State of Germany. Among other people’s states named are Argentina, Chile, France, Guatemala, India, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, and Turkey. A “Head of State,” one Mr. Thompson, governs the United States. There is a National Legislature, but no House of Representatives or Senate. “Money is the root of all evil” is the opening line of the scene from which the first selection excerpted by Rand in For the New Intellectual takes place. The setting is the reception following the wedding of James Taggart and Cherryl

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Brooks. Most of the major and minor representatives of the looting and mooching second-handers are in attendance and as the party progresses, they articulate their collectivist and antirational opinions. Francisco d’Anconia makes his dramatic entrance by finishing James Taggart’s sentence that the world is about to move from material to spiritual aims and instead of an aristocracy of money install, concludes Francisco: an aristocracy of pull. The guests try to dismiss him by repeating the old bromide about money and evil, and concluding that, as Francisco is the product of money, one can expect nothing positive from him. This selection that Rand names “The Meaning of Money” is Francisco’s rejoinder. He delivers what is, in effect, a “money is the root of all good” rebuttal. Francisco tells the shocked onlookers that they should ask themselves about what the root of money is. He explains the importance of money as a tool of exchange made possible because there are goods produced and people able to produce them. Money makes possible exchange of value for value. Moochers use tears, and looters use guns to achieve their goals, but it is only the producers that make money possible. In her journal notes as she prepared Francisco’s speech, Rand noted that a proof of “the noble nature of money is that people are able to keep it only so long as they keep their virtues—and no longer” (596). For Rand there was a comprehensible connection between money and morality. Accordingly, when people become corrupt, careless, or lazy, there are always looters who will descend like locust to appropriate the money. Examples of heirs who have lost family fortunes because they have never learned the value of money are referenced by Francisco who says, “If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him”

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(107). What Francisco means by being equal to his money is that people must have respect for what the money represents in terms of creativity or work. The premise here is that for a man to have respect for money, he has to have earned it. Conversely, those who have not earned it or have obtained money dishonorably find it easy to disdain it. Furthermore, money is the product of virtue as it is the end product of one’s own efforts. Francisco declares, “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you. . . . The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it” (108). Francisco states that as long as humans live in societies and have need of a medium through which to deal with one another, there is no substitute for money. The only alternative would be force. However, there is much that money cannot do. It cannot buy happiness, intelligence, admiration, or respect, and the one who thinks it can, will probably attract cheats, frauds, and parasites. Although Francisco makes this generic defense of money early in the novel, later when the productive and creative people are revealed in their mini utopia, there is no paper money, only coins of silver and gold. This is because as Francisco explains, the people who would destroy and loot first destabilize the value of money. Initially, they seize the precious metals and leave the owners paper in their stead. By doing this, they undermine any objective standard and can thus practice arbitrary power to set value. Gold and silver have objective value. Paper money was originally a certificate for an equivalent value in silver or gold. Rand believed that the nation should reestablish the gold standard. Her final speech was before the National Committee for Monetary Reform, an organization that wanted to do

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just that and to educate the citizens of United States about the benefits of a free market economy. The dollar sign is a key icon in the novel and Rand reads it as a symbol for the United States as it is a combination of the letters U and S. For her, the United States is the country that originated the concept of “making” money and Francisco, as her spokesperson in this speech, calls the American Industrialist “the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being— the self-made man” (111). Later in the novel, another of the producers, Owen Kellogg calls the dollar sign a mark of pride and observes that the United States is exemplary because “wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of a man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself” (AS 630). “The Martyrdom of the Industrialists” is the title Rand gives to the next selection reprinted from Atlas Shrugged. Francisco is speaking again, this time specifically to Hank Rearden, one of those self-made American Industrialists he had lauded in his speech at the Taggart wedding. This speech is directly tied to the title imagery. The underlying concept is that industrialists and inventors such as Hank Rearden are, contemporary versions of the Titan Atlas, and like him, they are holding up the world. Francisco explains to Rearden that rather than giving thanks and being appreciative, the world only makes itself heavier and heavier, expecting more and more of the Atlases. He asks Rearden what he would tell a bleeding, buckling, overburdened Atlas. When Rearden does not give a suitable reply, Francisco proclaims that Atlas should be advised to shrug, to relieve himself of the unappreciative burden.

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In much of his presentation to Rearden, d’Anconia is analyzing the paradoxes inherent in a system which denounces people, not for their faults but for their virtues, a system that damns not those who make mistakes but those who achieve. D’Anconia calls into question being labeled selfish for having the courage to act on one’s own judgment, of being described as arrogant for being independentminded. Equally reprehensible to Francisco is a system that calls the self-disciplined and strong ruthless because of their purposefulness, which calls those who create wealth greedy and those who create abundance out of nothing, robbers. Most egregious, however, is Rearden’s willingness to accept the code of the moocher. In Francisco’s words, “The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt” (114). In other words, Rearden is providing the sanction of the victim to those who offer their impotence and need as justification for taking advantage of his many abilities. Although the reader does not know it at the time, Francisco is preparing to ask Hank Rearden to join the strike of the people of the mind. Francisco initiates a discussion of the moral meaning of capitalism, indicating that Rearden’s mills are “an abstract principle, such as a moral action, in material form” (AS 420). Leading Rearden through a series of questions to try to get him to understand that he has erroneously accepted the moocher’s moral code, Francisco points out that every girder, pipe, and valve in the mill had been chosen by Rearden, using his best judgment, to make his steel. More than that, Rearden has spent 10 years of his life developing Rearden metal. This he has done with the expectation of making money from exchanging his best effort for the best effort of others. Nonetheless, in spite of his best efforts, Rearden has encountered nothing but opposition.

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In addition, d’Anconia asks Rearden for whom he has made his metal. He expects that Rearden made it to be used by the giants of productive energy who themselves would think of creative and innovative ways to use it and for appreciative average people who would be thankful for the innovation and the innovator. When Rearden affirms this, d’Anconia asks if he would have worked so hard for a bunch of whining rotters who never create anything but still demand that others pay their way, people who think their need is a higher claim to reward than his effort. Such people sneer and curse the very geniuses whose products they are using and whose inventions make their lives easier. Subsequently, at his trial for illegally selling the Rearden metal he has developed, Hank Rearden delivers a speech that Rand has titled “The Moral Meaning of Capitalism.” Of particular significance in this presentation is his questioning of the premises underlying the concept that the good of the group is more important than the individual’s rights. This concept, foremost in the philosophy of collectivism of every stripe, is based on false logic. To illustrate this, Rearden goes to the root of the oft-repeated principle—the public good. First, he asks, who is the public and who determines what is in their interest, their good? Then he questions the difference between a public that would appropriate someone else’s property because it decides it needs it and a burglar who does the same. Logically, if the public good is served by the sacrifice of one, then the violation of the rights of the one is ultimately the violation of the rights of all, as the public is made up of single individuals. Why should one be sacrificed and not another? “A public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction” (116). Rearden rejects as the

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most contemptible of evils a society that is built on turning some, usually the most able, into sacrificial animals for the sake of those who cannot survive on their own. “The Meaning of Sex” is the selection that follows, and its context is a conversation between d’Anconia and Rearden; although they are both in love with Dagny, they do not, at this point in the plot, know that theirs is a mutual love object. What Francisco tries to explain to Hank is that just as there is more to wealth than just material resources, there is an intellectual dimension to its creation and maintenance, so there is more to sex than just the physical capacity. Speaking for Rand, Francisco questions the old bromide that love is blind and impervious to reason. He states instead that he can tell a lot about a man by what he finds sexually attractive and that the woman he sleeps with is a good indicator of his evaluation of himself. Thus if a man chooses the highest type of woman, a woman he admires and finds strong and hard to conquer, then he is demonstrating his attraction to a woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself. A man of self-esteem chooses a heroine. Sex is a most selfish act, performed for one’s own enjoyment, one that develops from a sense of being desired and being worthy of desire. Therefore, he argues, a man will be attracted to a partner who represents his most profound sense of self because the woman’s attraction to him allows him to either verify his self-esteem or fake it. Sex with a “brainless slut” is no achievement. One does not gain value through sex; one expresses it. For Rand there is no conflict between the values of the mind and the desires of the body. By contrast, Francisco explains, the man who does not think highly of himself will be drawn to a woman he thinks little of. Such a woman can give him a momentary illusion

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of his own value. However, only a man who despises himself can gain self-esteem from sexual adventures. For Rand, sex is not the cause but the effect of a man’s sense of self. She wrote in her journal that sex is “the means for expressing in physical form one’s greatest celebration of life, of joy, of one’s highest self-exaltation and one’s highest moral values” (606). “Love is our response to our highest values,” according to Francisco. People who damn existence as evil are attracted to evil. If one feels damned, then depravity is what will attract. Only the man who claims that love is divorced from desire is capable of the “depravity of desire devoid of love.” “From Each According to His Ability, to Each According to His Need” is the heading of the next section, which explores the consequences when the premise underlying the concept of a Marxist state is put into practice. Jeff Allen, one of the survivors of the wreckage, tells Dagny Taggart the story of the destruction caused when the heirs of a vital industrial plant, Twentieth Century Motors, put a plan based on this premise into effect. Allen accepts the guilt for what happened because he, like most of the other workers at the factory, voted for a plan they thought was based on noble ideals, ideals that had been preached to them continually through schools, by ministers, and in the media. He calls himself and others who lived through four years of the plan marked men, damned because of their contribution to the ensuing evil. In practice, he explains, trying to make that plan work is like pouring liquid into a container that has a drainage pipe at the bottom with the additional caveat that the more that is poured in, the wider the pipe becomes, so that more and more is needed. The able are called on to increase their hours and their production for the needs of

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thousands of others. The devil, of course, is in the details. How are need and ability established? It was decided at Twentieth Century Motors that to determine need and ability, the entire group would vote. The result turned workers into beggars because they would have to prove their need to the others. Ability is also voted on, so people began to hide their capabilities because it would only earn them more work, without benefit. When those who are capable, creative, and productive realize that rather than earning rewards for their abilities, they will only be assigned more work, they soon slow down and are not forthcoming. Allen theorizes that although competition in a profit system has been called vicious, there is nothing more vicious than the competition to do poorly, not to display ability. Nor is there anything more pernicious than when one chooses to do poorly rather than one’s best. When efforts are not rewarded, effort ceases. In a parallel manner, when one’s efforts go not to one’s own welfare but to those more needy and unfortunate, the needy become, not the object of concern, but the objects of resentment. In a collectivist system of mandated equality, everyone gets a share of the benefits, but if there is not enough for everyone, then no one gets anything. Thus, Allen explains, although a man had worked all his life to send his son to college, because there wasn’t enough to send everybody’s sons to college, no one was sent. A man who loved phonograph records and had no other pleasures in life, as he was a widower with no family, was deprived of funds to buy any records as that was called a “personal luxury” and not a need. Those who were truly responsible, reduced their draw on “the family” funds, whereas the irresponsible and shiftless found innumerable ways to take advantage of the system, procreating irresponsibly,

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adding worthless relatives to the family rolls, and nurturing all kinds of sicknesses and disabilities. The result, ironically, is that those who tried to live up to the “morality” of the system they had accepted found themselves punished for it. “Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected” (128). Consequently, although the group began as hard working and able, the cream of the country’s laborers, working under this system that punished productivity, eventually turned them into chiselers, trying to outsmart the system. Theoretically, the underlying moral law is to love one’s brothers as one’s self. In practice, when one’s brothers are bums, loafers, moochers, cheats, or just plain incompetent and one is expected to become their beast of burden, to make one’s virtues the slave of their vices, then rather than love, one begins to hate—to hate them for their constant needs, for their illnesses, or if they found love because that might add a new burden to the group. Allen questions why so many educated and cultured people could possibly accept a premise as flawed as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” He theorizes that when people choose to profess a system that cannot possibly work, there is some underlying reason. Thus, he explains, “There wasn’t a man voting for it who didn’t think that under a setup of this kind he’d muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself.” The effect then is that the best left almost immediately once the plan was instituted because no one with self-esteem wishes to be turned into a public spigot. As more and more of the competent and able left, the factory production and reputation suffered. In the world of production, need is not a consideration. One does not give orders for airplane

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engines to factories that produce defective motors no matter how much they “need” the orders. The “noble” experiment of Twentieth Century Motors produced bankruptcy in four years, yet professors and leaders and thinkers want to institute such systems on a global scale. Like many collectivist apologists, Ivy Starnes, one of the heirs who instituted “the plan,” explains that the plan was based on noble premises but that human nature was not good enough for it. But, for Rand, what this excerpt illustrates is that there is nothing noble about the underlying premise that the best and the most honest should become sacrificial animals for the criminal and inept. A smaller excerpt titled “The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine” is a brain surgeon’s clarification of his reasons for joining the strike of the men of the mind. Dr. Hendricks explains that he left his practice when medicine was put under state control. He questions the ability or right of any bureaucrat or politician with no medical education or knowledge to set the conditions of a doctor’s work, the patients he should serve, and how much he should charge. Furthermore, he reveals that in the discussion of why a state-run health system is needed, the welfare of the patients is paramount and really the only thing discussed, whereas no attention is paid to the situation of those who will provide that care. He wonders about the thinking process of those who feel they have the right to enslave, control, and force a doctor and then expect that same doctor to be a man of sufficient moral integrity to trust their lives to. Hendricks contends that a man who would work under these conditions of compulsion is not to be trusted. Furthermore, overworked doctors cannot provide a sufficient level of individual care.

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From the world of science to that of the artist, the strikers are a varied group. The next section is titled “The Nature of an Artist” and is part of a conversation between Dagny Taggart and Richard Halley, the composer of the novel’s recurring musical theme, his heroic fifth concerto. Halley has quit at the point of his greatest success and joined the strikers mainly because he is appalled by the implication that an artist owes his audience any amount of struggle, suffering, and acceptance of their negative reactions, their sneers and contempt to teach them to accept his work. He explains to Dagny that what he appreciates most is her understanding of his work, the fact that she evaluates and judges his work intelligently by the same values he used to create it. He does not want to be evaluated by intuitive, emotional, or causeless response—not by the heart but by the head. Halley sees the artist as a trader who exchanges his performance for a customer who appreciates it. Rand, in her journals, explores the false dichotomy between art and entertainment. She questions the popular fallacy that art is serious and dull, whereas entertainment is empty and stupid but enjoyable. The source of this misconception she identifies as an altruistic morality that likens the good with the painful and the enjoyable with the sinful. Her faith in the public is such that she is sure that they do not buy into this morality. The issue of a gulf between popular and critically acclaimed literature is ever present. In Rand’s case, time has proven that her very popular but critically unappreciated works have initiated some very serious responses. The concluding section of the excerpts from the fiction is John Galt’s climactic speech from Atlas Shrugged, captioned “This is the Philosophy of Objectivism” by Rand.

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In the plot of the novel, John Galt appropriates the airwaves to explain to the government officials and the nation the rationale for the strike of the productive and creative people. Although what Galt has to say has been foreshadowed by d’Anconia, Hendricks, Halley, Danneskjöld, and other of the strikers, it is not until this lengthy and detailed working out of the philosophical bases for their actions, or should we say inaction, that the reader has the complete case. The speech, a carefully considered and meticulously presented philosophical rationale, is an explanation of and argument for the morality of the producers. It is the thematic summation of Atlas Shrugged. There are four major parts to the speech. A brief introduction (142–145) is followed by a section on the moral argument of the producers (145–166). The next segment presents the possibilities inherent in alternative moralities or what is essentially an argument between the producers’ morality and that of their opponents (166–222). Finally, Galt concludes with a consideration of how the moral truth explained in the earlier sections ought to be reflected in action (223–242). Thus it is a diagnosis of the maladies that infect the world and a prescription for their cure. The critical situation that brings the plot to this point is that production has dried up, and it is not only quality of life that is affected but also life itself that is at risk. All the directives and government intervention have not and, as Galt argues, will not improve the situation. The world is in crises because of a disagreement about moral questions. At base is the fact that the strikers (people of the mind) reject the popular understanding of good and evil. As the morality preached by political leaders and popular psychology gurus is that producers are selfish profit seekers, so Galt counters, how is it that with these people removed

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from society, there has not been a positive benefit? The evil profit seekers have withdrawn themselves. Galt then develops the moral argument for himself and his fellow strikers.7 First he establishes the principle that survival is a universal human desire. He argues that it is fundamental to the species but one not easily achieved. There is a difference between having a desire and having that desire fulfilled. Unlike other animals, human beings do not have an instinct for self-preservation, but must choose how to act in order to survive. Humans are beings of volitional consciousness. They must use reason to choose to act in ways that will further their purpose, which is survival. Those choices that bring about survival are good, and those that are detrimental to it are bad. Human life, then, remains as the standard of morality, and one’s own life is its purpose. Galt goes on to explain that he and his cohorts are on strike in the name of a single axiom, one that is at the root of their moral system and one that the mystics and misguided philosophers deny: that axiom is that existence exists. This implies both the end and means of moral action, for as life (existence) is, so the first and fundamental objective of human beings should be to preserve their existence as human beings. The appropriate means is human reason. To accept the axiom that existence exists is also to assume a conscious subject to perceive that something exists. That conscious being must identify the something that exists, and reason is the tool for doing so. Human beings must use reason to determine what exists. They must know what is true, or right, to survive. Reason operates according to a rule, the law of identity. It is the law of identity, “A is A,” that allows human beings to identify the facts of reality in a noncontradictory fashion. It is on these two basic

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premises, that things exist and that human beings are able to understand that particular things exist because they are rational beings, that Galt builds a morality. Virtuous actions achieve virtuous things. As the established goal is human existence, humans should choose those values that enhance it. Those values, according to Galt, are reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Reason is essential because it is the means to the acquisition of the knowledge that is needed to live. Purpose is valuable because it provides a goal for reason to achieve. Self-esteem is important because with it human beings can believe themselves worthy of life and able to achieve it. Virtues are the qualities that yield the values. Ironically, rather than seven deadly sins, Galt enumerates seven life-affirming virtues. They are rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride. Rationality is the recognition that the mind is the tool to both judge and guide, and faith is a destructive substitute. Independence is the understanding that no one but yourself has the responsibility of judgment and acceptance of another’s mind as substitute for your own is a form of self-abasement. Integrity permits no breach between body and mind, between matter and consciousness, or between action and thought. It is being true to one’s own consciousness. Honesty is refusing to accept anything unreal as having value and the realization that love, fame, or money obtained by fraud has no value, for then you have chosen to live as a dependent on the stupidity of others. Honesty is a selfish virtue because it is a refusal to sacrifice one’s own reality for another’s delusion. Justice is evaluating and treating others according to what reason shows to be their real worth. Productiveness is acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s own purpose. Productive work is creative when done by a thinking mind

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but not when done by an automaton. Galt warns against cheating one’s way into a job bigger than your mind can handle and also against settling into a job that is less than requires your mind’s full capacity, for that sentences you to stultification and decay. Finally, Pride is acknowledgment that one has acquired the values and lives a self-made life, that one is a being of self-made soul. Once he has established his basic premises, Galt goes on to address the issue of how virtuous human beings should deal with each other and that, he asserts is voluntarily in a trading situation where the self-interest of each is served. Thus the most immediate virtue at issue is justice and he contends “the moral symbol of respect for human beings is the trader” (163). A trader respects his own reason as well as that of others, understanding what is valuable. The trader does not seek to take valuable things without earning them, and he does not give the valuable things that are a result of his efforts to others without their earning them. Disagreement as to value may disrupt trade, but the premise behind trade remains respect for human reason in selves and in others. Having established the principles of good values and virtues, Galt turns to the question of evil. The one act of evil that no person may commit is the initiation of physical force against another. The use of force negates rationality. It makes human beings do other than what their reason directs. The use of force denies reason, and therefore denies that existence exists, for the person doing the forcing as well as the person forced. The one who uses force assumes that human beings are irrational and thus is, as a human being irrational as well. The use of force can be reasonable only in defense of reason or in defense of the consequences of the axiom that existence exists. Thus, force is

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just in defense of oneself against another who has initiated the use of force, for that is the defense of the human and rational against the nonhuman and irrational. With the explanation of how the observation that “existence exists” leads to the logical conclusion that no human being should initiate the use of violence against another, Galt has completed his basic explanation and defense of his and his fellow strikers’ moral code. He has explained more thoroughly than d’Anconia why money, as the medium of the trader, is the root of good. He has made a more complete argument than was made earlier by Ragnar Danneskjöld about when it is appropriate to use force. Above all, he has defended the strikers’ profit seeking and withdrawal from society as actions of the most just of human beings. He is ready, then, to compare his moral code to that of those who are in control of the society, those he calls moochers and looters from which he and the other producers have chosen to remove themselves. The first level of that comparison is on the basis of results. In a world where producers are allowed to act according to their material beliefs, everyone benefits from the resultant products and development. However, it is not just the material that concerns Galt. His more basic philosophical argument refers back to the introduction of his speech where Galt explained that for ages, the battle of morality was waged between the religious realm, those who claimed your life belongs to God and the political realm, those who preached that your life belongs to your brothers; in either case the premise was self-sacrifice, either for what Galt calls the ghosts in heaven or for those he calls the incompetents on earth. These two seemingly opposing forces have fundamentally similar moralities. Galt gives them the names of “mystics of spirit” and “mystics of muscle.”

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Both are “mystics” because both moralities reject the fundamental rule of rational proof, that A is A. Both reject the axiom that existence exists. Both are thus examples of the “Morality of Death” (167). The mystics of the spirit are those who claim that moral truth is not derived from human reason but from divine revelation. In the teaching of these mystics, man is naturally evil, born with “original sin” or a natural tendency to evil that originates in the body. Evil things are those things that human beings do to secure the survival and pleasure of the body. According to Galt’s interpretation, the mystics of the spirit have divided humans into two, setting the sides against each other. The mystics of the spirit teach humans that their bodies and consciousness are enemies, of opposite natures and contradictory claims, that to benefit the one is to injure the other. Furthermore, the “soul belongs to a supernatural realm” and the “body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth, and that the good is to defeat the body” (170). This puts things that serve the body in a category of evil. Thus, the mystics of the spirit who privilege consciousness above the physical are denying that existence exists. In denying the legitimacy of the body, they also deny the independence of the human mind along with the validity of its conclusions. When they claim that the body and its needs and desires are evil, the spiritualists argue that what appears to exist, the physical world, is not what really exists. But it is perception of the physical world that makes human consciousness manifest, so that in disavowing the reality of the physical world the mystics of the spirit deny consciousness as well. They appeal to human consciousness with an argument that allows no proof for the existence of that consciousness.

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Thus, the spiritualists make an irrational argument. Their claims are not supported by reason but by faith, and they tell human beings that they must not live by their minds but must live according to their faith in the truth of revelation. Galt derides the mystics of the spirit who claim that they have a knowledge that transcends reason, that they have a special pipeline to some other world power. By claiming special knowledge that others supposedly lack, the mystics of the spirit are running, what he calls “a protection racket” (190). They use the threat of eternal damnation to make human life miserable by branding as vices all the virtues like pride, independence, rationality, and productiveness that are necessary to make human life secure and happy. The mystics of muscle appear very differently. They are materialists, whereas the mystics of the spirit are spiritualists. The spiritualists abjure the physical, whereas the materialists decry consciousness. They argue that the only thing that exists is matter in motion. Things such as truth, knowledge, and concepts have no objective existence—it is not possible to know things. Therefore, they argue that there is no absolute knowledge, that one cannot know the truth about what is good; therefore the good is whatever most people—that is, whatever society—decide it is. They declare that when the good of society is sufficiently well served, that is, when human beings become “moral” and subordinate their selfish desires and actions to the good of all, people in the future will experience a sort of heaven on earth where each material desire will be satisfied. The key to the materialists’ case is their claim that human beings should not trust their own reason because they cannot know things that are not material. They teach that axioms, concepts, ideas, and arguments have no

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objective validity. Human ideas are created by material circumstances. Ideas do not control matter; matter controls ideas. Individual ideas are not responsible for changes in the quality of material life, but rather society and the material means of production are responsible for generating individual ideas and changes in material existence. Galt argues that the materialists’ argument is selfcontradictory; they assert the independence of human consciousness in the very act of declaring all claims to rational truth are delusions: “We know that we know nothing,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness to be able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved. (192) It follows from Galt’s arguments that both the mystics of the spirit and the mystics of the muscle make assertions for their moralities that are fundamentally flawed. Both deny what must be true in order for them to attempt to make the denial. Galt’s most important argument against both sets of mystics is at the elemental philosophical level. That is, his concern is to show that neither teaching can result in human happiness because both are fundamentally flawed theories. His primary objective, an objective not present in any of the earlier speeches in the book, is to show

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the rational errors that result in the practical problems people face. In addition, the speech is replete with challenges to common misconceptions. In it Rand presents some provocative ideas, confronting our traditional ways of viewing and defining things. The impotence of evil is one example. Galt explains that the only way evil is able to succeed is if the good serves it. He also contends that in any compromise between good and evil, it is evil that wins. Another thing he questions is praising nonprofit ventures while damning the profit ventures that are necessary to sustain the nonprofits. The definition of public welfare is also questioned. Why should public welfare be the welfare of those who do not earn it, whereas those who do earn it are entitled to no welfare? They are part of the public too. An expression that Rand finds particularly abhorrent is the one that asks, “Who am I to judge?” In the context of a rational society, refusing to judge is evil in that it is an escape from responsibility, which eventuates in the responsibility for much of the blood spilled in the world. In sum, Galt affirms that the achievement of one’s happiness is the moral purpose in one’s life. His rationale for government, then, is that its purpose is to protect human rights, to create a society wherein life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are maximized. He emphasizes that there are basically only three fitting functions for government. All have to do with protection of some sort. First there are police to protect one from criminals; then an army to protect one from foreign invaders. Finally, the government should maintain courts to protect property and contracts from breach or fraud and to settle rational disputes according to objective law. Antithetically, a government that initiates force against its neighbors or its own citizens

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is a bully that substitutes the law of ‘might makes right’ for the law of reason. The role of the mind is emphasized again as Galt moves into the conclusion of his speech. He maintains that every one who produces an idea, who discovers new knowledge, is a permanent benefactor of humanity (234). He explains that although material products are consumed by individuals and thus used up, the idea can be shared by all and continually reproduced. Finally, Galt exhorts all citizens to join the strike, to refuse to allow the looters to continue using their abilities. He calls on them to be silent, not to volunteer, to vanish if possible. Without the consent of the capable, looter states will collapse. It is only then that all the people of ability can build a rational society with the dollar sign as its symbol, a sign of free minds and free markets, to rebuild the nation as it once was, a sanctuary for the rational being. In this exhortation not to act, Galt’s arguments echo ideas developed earlier by both Henry David Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau in “On Civil Disobedience” maintains that when laws are unjust, then just men belong in jail. In like manner King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” distinguishes between just and unjust laws, emphasizing the “moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” In Atlas Shrugged the strikers resolve not to obey unjust laws and directives. However, their choice is not to go to jail. Instead they follow a course of passive resistance, a tool Mahatma Gandhi found effective in bringing Great Britain to the negotiation table and gaining independence for India. Martin Luther King Jr. also used a type of passive resistance, fine-tuned into what was called the “sit-in” for a nonviolent method of protest. In effect, Rand’s strikers are following suit. They sit in the

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world by being in it but not being of it; that is, they do not use their abilities to help power its motor. Some do drop out rather than sit in. One speech Rand did not choose to include in For the New Intellectual is Ragnar Danneskjöld’s excoriation of the Robin Hood myth. Danneskjöld is one of the triumvirate that originates the strike and has chosen to be a pirate in the collectivist world of Atlas Shrugged. What he does is rob from the undeserving and thieving collectivist states and return the money to its rightful owners. In doing so, he is a kind of reverse Robin Hood. The context for the presentation of his ideas is a dark and lonely road where he accosts Hank Rearden, not to rob him but to give him gold. When Rearden questions his actions, Danneskjöld explains that when robbery is done in the daylight, sanctioned by law, then the only recourse for acts of honor and restitution is to go underground. It is a variation on the theme of when the laws are unjust, just men belong in jail. He challenges the morality of the Robin Hood myth by reversing what Robin Hood did. Of course, he acknowledges that in the original Robin Hood narratives, Robin Hood is robbing from an unjust King and looting Barons and that he returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but the myth as handed down has become shorthand for robbing the rich and giving to the poor. In Danneskjöld’s mind, Robin Hood is remembered for assuming a crown of virtue by practicing charity with wealth he did not own and giving away property that he had not produced. As he puts it, Robin Hood made “others pay for the luxury of his pity” (AS 534). As a pirate, Danneskjöld seizes only those transports that carry the results of looting, such as subsidy ships, loan ships, relief ships, and those vessels that are laden with materials and

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goods that were taken forcibly from those who earned or produced them and given to those who have neither paid for nor earned them. In addition, Ragnar sees himself as a policeman whose duty it is to protect people who have been and are being robbed and return their goods to them. In this case, it is the government that is doing the robbing, and what Danneskjöld returns to Rearden is gold in the amount of what Rearden has paid in income taxes for the last 12 years. He challenges the acceptance of death and taxes as the only certainties. Danneskjöld proclaims that humans have to change their way of thinking so that it is not death and taxes, but life and production that are at the heart of their moral code and considered the two absolutes in life. Rand’s celebration of work is another recurring fictional theme that is consistent with the idea of returning earning to those who have a right to them. In Atlas Shrugged and other of her works, Rand makes it clear that although her focus may be on the highly productive, a job well done is important at every level of society. Ability is the touchstone by which individuals are measured. In The Fountainhead, a key example is the character of Mike, one of Howard Roark’s good friends. Mike is an electrician whose full name is Sean Xavier Donnigan. Roark meets Mike on his first construction job. The man is passionate about his work and respects those who feel similarly: “He worshipped expertness.” Mutual passion and ability make the men lifelong friends. In Atlas Shrugged, although the strikers may have had important jobs on the outside, in their own hideout of Mulligan’s Valley, they do whatever job is necessary. When Dagny asks about a young brakeman who becomes a grease monkey in the valley, Ellis Wyatt explains to her that there is “no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men

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who don’t care to do it” (665). The statement parallels the theatrical bromide about there being no small roles, only small actors who don’t want to do them. In Rand’s hierarchy of values how well one does one’s work, no matter what that work is, is of key importance. The code of competence represents a gold standard in Rand’s assessment of productive and creative achievement. In this lengthy novel, with numerous philosophical speeches and plot turns, there are recurring references to three antipodes: (1) individualism versus collectivism, (2) egoism versus altruism, and (3) reason versus mysticism. Collectivism, altruism, and mysticism all work to undermine human potential and are the tools for destabilization and a counterproductive future. The paths to a vibrant future with maximum potential for human happiness are through reason, egoism, and individualism. Although the bulk of the For the New Intellectual is reprints from the fiction as synopsized above, Rand inaugurates this presentation of the essentials of her philosophy with a long essay bearing the same title as the book. In this essay, Rand declares that “America is culturally bankrupt” (3), “sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards” (4) and therefore in need of a new kind of intellectual, one who rejects the prevailing philosophical, psychological, literary, and political ways of thinking. Rand divides those who would rule and oppress the individual, the enemies of rationality into two archetypes: Attila (the brute) and the Witch Doctor (the mystic); in other words, force and faith. One seeks to conquer the body; the other subjugates the mind, and most often, in Rand’s reading, they make an alliance for their mutual power. She names force the “practical expression” of faith and asserts that these two have dominated every antirational epoch in history, be

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they chieftain and shaman, king and bishop, or dictator and logical positivist. Reason is their enemy. However, as they do not produce anything themselves, people who produce and think and work are the hosts upon which these parasites feed. Rand then presents her précis of Western History, beginning with the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, although she reads Plato’s system as “a monument to the Witch Doctor’s metaphysics” (19). Conversely, Aristotle’s philosophy she terms “the intellect’s Declaration of Independence” (20) and claims that his influence is apparent in “everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess” (20). Rand’s brief survey of Western History categorizes different periods according to whether they were ruled by Attila or the Witch Doctor, claiming Attila’s ascendancy in the Roman Empire, followed by the Witch Doctor in the Middle Ages. The Renaissance begins the liberation of the human mind, which then gains greater ground in the industrial revolution. Rand subsequently concludes, “The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America” (23). In Rand’s system of values, “a free mind and a free market are corollaries” [emphasis in the original] (23). The free market system Rand extols, although she allows that what the United States. has is not “full, perfect, totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism,” (24) is nonetheless capitalism, which in her values is a system that demands the best of every individual. Certain philosophers are indicted as buttressing the power of the Attilas and the Witch Doctors. Hume’s negation of the human mind is her first target, but the main focus of her condemnation for shutting philosophy off

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from reason is Immanuel Kant. In Rand’s reading Kant “turned the world over to Attila” (31) and the realm of morality to the Witch Doctor. The sorry state of contemporary philosophies she blames on the fact that they all have a Kantian base. Rand heralds the “astounding feats” of scientists in every field of knowledge during the nineteenth century and the achievements of businessmen in combating poverty and misery as they opened trade routes and created machines to liberate humans from back-breaking labor and drudgery. She indicts Hegel for proclaiming that “matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea” (34) and Marx who claims the opposite—that matter is everything, and the mind does not exist. In her opinion, “The great treason of the philosophers was that they never stepped out of the Middle Ages” (37). The cover for the first printing of For the New Intellectual claims that the book “presents the essentials” of Rand’s philosophy, and the cover flap notes indicate that the book “may serve as an outline or program or manifesto.” Rand’s intent was to eventually create a full systematic presentation of Objectivism, her philosophy. In the fiction and the early nonfiction, she focused on the political and ethical, moving toward more metaphysical and epistemological themes. She saw her philosophy as a system and, in her lifetime, approved such methodical presentations as Nathaniel Branden’s courses in the basic principles of Objectivism. After the rupture with Branden, Leonard Peikoff offered a course in the “Philosophy of Objectivism.” Rand’s own response to a challenge to present the essentials of her philosophy while standing on one leg was, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: Self-interest. Politics: capitalism.”

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A few years after the publication of For the New Intellectual, Rand took up the cause of rational self-interest. One of Rand’s signature techniques is to take a term or concept and challenge the traditional interpretation of it. It was a technique she used effectively in Atlas Shrugged with Francisco’s “Money is the Root of All Good” speech and Ragnar’s denunciation of the concept that Robin Hood was a positive symbol. In The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (1964), Rand takes the concept of selfishness that had developed a negative connotation and begins with its dictionary definition or denotation. Rand’s introduction clarifies that the definition of “selfishness” is “concern with one’s own interests” and emphasizes that the dictionary definition does not include a moral dimension about whether such concern is good or evil. Rand blames the ethics of altruism for encouraging what she calls the “two inhuman tenets” (vii) that concern with one’s own interests is evil and that force is in one’s own interest. Rand indicts Altruism as a philosophy that holds that anything done for the benefit of others is good and that action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. What is needed to counteract the antihuman happiness ideas and moral relativism of altruistic ethics is a new concept of rational morality. Rand provides one in her chapter “The Objectivist Ethics,” originally one of her lectures. Rand warns against reading her explication of the virtue of selfishness or objectivist ethics as a license to do whatever one pleases or to adopt a Nietzschean egotistic stand. She qualifies Objectivist Ethics as derived from the goal of rational self-interest. After her introduction, the book contains a group of her previously published essays along with some additional pieces by Nathaniel Branden. Rand also cautions the reader that the collection is not a systematic

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discussion of ethics but often responses to questions that derive from related issues. Following from the fact that it was by reading her novels that readers were attracted to her philosophy is Rand’s penchant for quoting her fictional characters in her nonfiction explications. “The Objectivist Ethics” begins with John Galt’s declaration that what is needed in a world beset by collectivist and altruistic ethics is not a return to morality but the need to discover it (13). Rand affirms that the first step in developing a code of ethics or morality is the need to answer the questions “What are values? Why does man need them?” (13). She makes clear that the concept of values presupposes a living entity capable of originating and having goals. In her devolution the fact that there is a living entity establishes what it ought to do. Altruism is again a target for Rand’s disquisition on “The Ethics of Emergencies.” The emergencies she addresses are things such as whether one should risk one’s life to help a person who is drowning, trapped in a fire, stepping in front of a speeding truck, or hanging precariously over an abyss. The result of an acceptance of the ethics of altruism would, in her reading, lead to lack of self-esteem because one is focused on sacrificing one’s life rather than leading it and a negative attitude toward others as they would all be viewed as constantly in need of one’s help. In addition, altruism provokes a reading of the world as malevolent and/or a lethargy or indifference brought about with excessive concern with emergency situations that are unlikely to happen. As Altruism is primarily concerned with helping others, it creates for the individual a sense of impending sacrifice, what Rand calls a “sacrificial blank check.”

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Rand’s definition of sacrifice is slightly different than the dictionary’s in that she adds the words “greater” and “lesser” to the idea of giving up one thing for another. The dictionary definition includes the idea that what is given up is cherished or valued, but does not specify a value for the something else that replaces the sacrificed object or thing. Rand defines sacrifice as the giving up of a greater for a lesser or nonvalue. Her argument continues that as love and friendship are personal, selfish values, actions taken on behalf of those one cares about are an expression of rational self-interest and not a sacrifice. Rand defines the virtue of helping those one loves and/or cares about as integrity, not selflessness or sacrifice. Rand does not eschew helping others altogether as she concludes that in helping others one is expressing one’s reverence for life, a sort of solidarity of species. However, she emphasizes the fact that helping strangers is something one should do “only in an emergency” (53), with the caveat that all human suffering and misfortune do not qualify as an emergency or a mortgage on the lives of others. Emergencies, by definition, are the exception, not the rule. In her essay about conflicts of interest, Rand defines four interrelated considerations that are central to the principle she espouses that there are no conflicts of interest among rational men.8 The four are reality, context, responsibility, and effort, and she spends the rest of the essay defining and clarifying them. In Rand’s analysis of reality, she explains that the term “interests” is such a broad abstraction that it can encompass the whole field of ethics as it includes a person’s values, desires, goals, and their actual achievement in reality, all of which are dependent on another. For example, a person’s values will determine desires and consequently also goals. Values are chosen by the rational

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mind. She warns that desires are not tools of cognition and that just because one desires something it does not necessarily follow that something is good. Furthermore, in choosing one’s goals, one should be motivated not by feeling, but by thinking. For Rand the law of identity holds in all cases, A is A, and there are no contradictions in reality. When a person’s interests are in conflict with reality, she insists, then, that the problem is not a philosophical one, but a psychological one. Moving to the issue of context, Rand explains that any rational being must consider context in all cases. “Context-dropping is one of the chief tools of psychological evasion,” she states. The whole of a person’s life is the appropriate context for setting goals. The question of the achievement of those goals leads to the issue of responsibility. One of Rand’s main explanations has to do with evading the responsibility for evaluating the social world, something she terms “metaphysical humility,” adjusting oneself blindly to what one considers unknowable about the world. Rand offers many examples of people who desire things without trying to figure out how those desires can be achieved. The issue of effort concludes this chapter, and as Rand has established the premise that rational beings should know the means to achieve their goals, they also know that benefits have to be produced. Among the key concepts Rand underlines in this section is that the gain of one does not mean the loss of another and that achievement is not earned at the cost of the nonachiever. She also contends that only passive and parasitical individuals see competition as a threat, and that is because they do not regard themselves as worthy and therefore are threatened by the idea of merit. In conclusion, Rand reminds the reader that all of the aforementioned concepts work only in a free society where people

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are free to avoid the irrational. In a nonfree society, she sees only the possibility of slow destruction. Rand articulates her attitudes toward compromise in a brief but to-the-point essay on the topic. Concluding that in the area of moral principles there can be no compromise, Rand first clarifies exactly what she defines as compromise. When one violates and goes back on one’s convictions, it constitutes a compromise. It is not a compromise when all that is affected is one’s comfort. For Rand, doing something one doesn’t like, following an employer’s orders, or attending an event one doesn’t care for to please a mate are not compromises. She clarifies what does constitute compromise in those instances, that is, pretending to share an employer’s values or giving in to a mate’s irrational demands for the sake of social conformity. There are, however, many areas where there can be no compromise such as between freedom and government controls, between truth and falsehood, and/or reason and irrationality. Compromise is legitimate mutual concession or trade, not betrayal of basic principles or fundamental issues. Concluding, she quotes from Atlas Shrugged that in any compromise between food and poison, only death can win and in any compromise between good and evil, only evil will benefit. “One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment” is Rand’s answer to the question of how one can lead a rational life in an irrational society. This is her response to what she defines as a prevalent moral agnosticism, both a refusal and a failure to pass judgment, to praise virtue, and condemn vice. Rand is not unmindful of the responsibility that judging includes. She is unflinching in her assessment that not to judge is to bear responsibility for allowing evil to continue. No moral neutrality is allowed in situations where moral values are at issue. Indiscriminate

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forbearance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites, writes Rand, but variations on the same refusal to judge. The relativistic bromides that nothing is fully right or wrong, that there is some good in the worst and some bad in the best and the question of who is qualified to judge are all lethal to the creation and maintenance of a rational society. A rational society cannot develop from moral cowardice. Following from her warnings about accepting relativistic attitudes is Rand’s condemnation of what she terms “The Cult of Moral Grayness,” which derives from the “fashionable” dictum that holds that everything is a shade of gray as there are no blacks and whites. This she warns is a “stolen concept” as there can be no gray if there is no black or white. White and black here are symbols for good and evil, and one must be able to identify each. In Rand’s sense of values, once one has determined which is which, there is no excuse for choosing the evil, although more often than not, people will rationalize a choice for the black by trying to pretend that the black in only gray. However, she also qualifies moral choices made as a result of errors of knowledge as not gray but white because humans are not infallible or omniscient. At the same time, she does not excuse the one who does not desire to know as gray; evading knowledge is morally black. The fact that, for any number of reasons, most people are imperfect does not negate the need to pursue perfection, to try to achieve morality. Unless one is willing to deny morality altogether and to make no distinction between small infractions and great crimes, one must still discriminate among the various shadings of gray and in order to do that, there must be clear definitions of black and white.

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In addition to refuting the concept that as no one is perfect and that perfection should be eschewed, Rand attacks the misreading of the concept that there are two sides to every issue. Just because there are two sides, she forewarns, is not reason to believe that both sides are equally valid. Although there can be complex situations where no side is wholly right or wrong, for the most part one side will be more justified than the other. A basic error in these areas is that people often forget that morality is involved only when something is an issue of choice. Not being able is not the same as not being willing. Thus, she translates the statement about there being no black and white as really being about not being willing to be totally good and therefore also asking others not to judge one as totally evil. After a lengthy explication of why most mixtures of gray eventually become black, and in keeping with her statement that one must always pronounce moral judgment, Rand asserts that the appropriate response to the question of whether one sees things in terms of the absolutes of black or white should be, “You’re damn right I do!” Among the most pertinent essays for contemporary contexts of multiculturalism and globalization is Rand’s essay on “Racism.” She calls it “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism” (172). Rand decries judging individuals by inherited physical factors that are beyond their control. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., she calls for people to be judged by their character and actions. Racism, she derides as a form of determinism that ignores human reason and choice. For those racists who attempt to prove the superiority of one group or another by claiming the achievements of its members as evidence, Rand counters that there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind and therefore

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there can be no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. The individual creates achievements and cultures are the aggregate of the intellectual accomplishments of individuals. Furthermore, she argues that even if it were so that one or another group had a higher incidence of individuals with superior brain power, it would prove nothing about this or that individual in the group. “A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race” and vice versa she reasons (174). A Nazi murderer is not superior just because his race is the race of Goethe, Schiller, and Brahms. Rand sees the psychological root of racism as a sense of inferiority on the part of the racist. She categorizes racism with other collectivism as a pursuit of the unearned that is, automatic self-esteem. Rand equates racism with collectivism, that is, statism, something she terms an institutionalized form of gang rule. She uses the illustrations of both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as examples of how people were discriminated against or for as a group, in both cases on the bases of descent. One had to be Aryan in the one case and proletarian in the other. The philosophy of individualism and its corollary political/economic system of laissez-faire capitalism are the only antidotes to racism, be it that of the Fascists or that of the Communists. Rand argues that racism was strongest in the countries with the most controlled economies and weakest in countries such as England with less state control of the economy. Addressing the situation for American Negroes (the appropriate term when Rand was writing this essay in 1963), Rand decries the contradictions in the behavior of many of the so-called conservatives who should be champions of freedom, capitalism, and property rights but who advocate racism. She reminds them that denial of

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individual rights to one group undercuts the support of individual right for any and all groups. Thus the would-be defenders of capitalism are helping to undermine it. Nor does she ignore the contradictions of the so-called liberals who call for the sacrifice of the one to the majority. They claim to be champions of minorities, but as she reminds her reader, the individual is the smallest minority on earth. Finally, she addresses the contradictions in the behavior of the so-called Negro leaders who at one and the same time claim to be fighting racial discrimination but are arguing for their own kind of racial discrimination in the form of racial quotas. Instead of advancing the cause of color blindness, they want to make color a primary consideration. Blatant racism is the only term for penalizing a person just because of his skin color, of making today’s White laborer the inheritor of what could or might not be the sins of his ancestors. After all, much of the United States population is descended from people who were not even in the country during the time of slavery. Finally, Rand contends that just as the government and other public institutions have no right to discriminate against any citizen based on the race or other ethnic background, so by the same principle the government and other public institutions have no right to discriminate for individuals on the same basis. Although she despises racism as evil, irrational, and morally contemptible, she is concerned about the difference between the public and private realms. For all of her abhorrence, she maintains that freedom of speech must be protected. Finally, she warns against the racism of blaming all Negroes for the racist demands of some of their leaders, remonstrating that most groups of the time lack in moral and intellectual leadership and representation.

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Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal was published two years after The Virtue of Selfishness. More than any of the other books published in her lifetime, it is a composite, containing not only her articles but also those of Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen, and Nathaniel Branden. Greenspan, the economist of the group, contributed three essays, whereas Branden wrote two and Hessen one. Rand introduces the volume by alerting the reader that what follows is not a treatise on economics but “a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism” (vii). In the context of Objectivism, laissez-faire capitalism is the only system appropriate for the life of a rational being. Rand stresses that Objectivists are not conservatives but radicals for capitalism. The book is necessitated because, in her opinion, all previous defenders of capitalism have contributed to its precarious status in that they have not fought for it on a moral–philosophical basis. Rand identifies capitalism as the politico-economic system that has more than any previous or subsequent system in history, benefited humankind while being attacked and misrepresented. Her concern was that young people were not being presented with an appropriate explanation of its moral basis. Composing her texts in the early 1960s, Rand was writing at the height of the global conflict between Communism and Capitalism. She did not live to see the validation of her critique of the flaws and failures of a collectivist economic system, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the adoption of a form of Capitalism by the largest Communist system in the world. “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government,” two essays previously published in The Virtue of Selfishness, are reprinted in this book because Rand contends that every political system is based on a theory of ethics and therefore readers need a clear understanding of the concepts

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of rights and governments to appreciate her presentation. As she suggests, readers should be familiar with them prior to dealing with the issues of Capitalism, a capsule summary of each is in order. In “Man’s Rights,” Rand asserts that the basis for a free society is individual rights and that historically the dominant political systems have been based instead on some form of what she calls “altruistic–collectivist doctrine,” a doctrine that subordinates the individual to some higher authority, be it in the form of religion (mystical) or state (social). Of particular importance, as so many collectivist–altruistic systems place society outside the moral code, is Rand’s decoding of the concept. Rand declares that there is no such thing as “society” because society as an entity is made up of individuals and thus must not be placed outside the moral law. For her, the fact that society is subordinated to moral law in the United States is a significant revolutionary accomplishment. The United States does not regard the individual as belonging to the state or society but as an end in himself. He is protected against the state and the state’s powers are limited by the constitution. One of Rand’s main concerns in this essay is that the definition of a “right” is being adulterated. In her reading there is only one fundamental “right” and that is the right to one’s own life. From that right derives the freedom to take those actions necessary to sustain and enjoy that life. The right to property is an implementation of the right to life, thus the individual has a right to the fruits of his own efforts. One who produces but has the fruits of his efforts dispensed by others is a slave. She is very clear on the fact that the government was created to protect individual rights and the Constitution to protect the individual from the government.

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The danger she decries is the altruistic–collectivist attempt to enlarge the concept of rights to such an extent that it is meaningless. The “gimmick,” she explains, is switching from the political to the economic. Citing the Democratic Party platform of 1960 for illustration, she quotes language in it, which declares an “economic bill of rights.” Thus, a “right” to a job, a home, medical care, a good education, and even protection from economic fears are proclaimed. Rand’s main question about the creation of all these new “rights” is about who will pay for them. As these “rights” are not natural rights, they have to be produced by human beings. If one human being is entitled to the fruits of the labors of another, it makes the latter a slave, thus the supposed rights of one is a violation of the rights of another. Rand questions the right to enslave. She points out that one’s rights do not include the obligation of others to provide them. One example she uses is that just because one has the right to free speech, it does not follow that anybody has to supply the microphone, lecture hall, or broadcast medium through which to make that speech. She reminds the reader that rights are moral principles, and while they define and protect one’s freedom of action, they do not entail obligations on others. She directs the reader to the precision of language used in the United States founding documents; the language is of the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness. Therefore, while all can do what may be necessary to achieve happiness, there is no guarantee that others have an obligation to make one happy. The same applies to other rights such as property and free trade. Rand encourages the reader to remember that criminals are a small minority of the population in every era and place. Whatever harm they do is minute when compared

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with the devastation, horrors, bloodshed, and destruction caused by governments. Rand cautions that a government is potentially, if not limited, the most dangerous threat to the individual and that it was against the dangers of government power that the Bill of Rights was written. Rand’s concern about the erosion of individual liberty by the blurring of the distinction between government and the individual is expressed in her analysis of the issue of “censorship.” The term is used promiscuously to include such things as the refusal of a newspaper to hire a writer who espoused views contradictory to its own or for businessmen to refuse to advertise in a magazine that denounces them. Rand clarifies that the term “censorship” applies only to government action. For the individual it is a matter of free speech or choice. In conclusion, Rand declares that the crucial issue is political rights versus economic rights. She declares that there are no such things as economic rights, collective rights, or public-interest rights. They only kind of rights are individual rights, a term she sees as redundant because there is no other kind of rights. In the essay on government Rand addresses the issue of whether humans need an institution that holds exclusive power to enforce rules within its jurisdiction. Rand first acknowledges the benefits of a social existence but qualifies it as being positive only if it’s a society that accepts the basic principle of individual rights. As a person’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force, a precondition of a civilized society is that reason will be the only basis for social interaction and that all physical force will be barred. However, the right of self-defense is necessary, and the use of retaliatory force requires evidence and proof as well as objective rules to classify degrees of

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punishment and enforcement rules. Therefore, Rand concludes that one appropriate role for government is to put the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control, emphasizing that the individual is allowed to do all that is not forbidden by law, whereas the government official can do nothing that is not proscribed by law. Another instance in which a government is needed is in the case of contract disagreements or breaches, whether intentional, criminal, or owing to irresponsibility or neglect. Rand reiterates her thesis that the proper function of government falls into three categories, all of them involving the use of physical force but only to protect individual rights: to protect men from each other—the police; to protect against foreign invaders—the military; and to settle disputes among people—the law courts. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is divided into two sections: Theory, and History and Current State. Beginning with a definition of terms, Rand calls into question the bases of twentieth century psychology and political economy that “attempt to study and to devise social systems without reference to man” (3), ignoring the fact that the community or the group is made up of the individual human being. This focus on the group or community Rand attributes to a tribal view of man that developed out of European culture, whose intellectuals never quite assimilated the American philosophy of the Rights of Man. In her reading of European intellectual history, the concept of being a serf under the rule by a feudal lord or king was replaced by the concept of the citizen being subservient to the needs of the state, what she calls “switching from slavery to a tribal chief into slavery to the tribe” (5). As evidence of the depth of the penetration of this tribal view, Rand deconstructs the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on capitalism, an

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article she calls “disgraceful” for its failure to understand that capitalism is a system that was able to outstrip previous economic systems in that it gave individuals the freedom to create wealth; Rand is especially put out with a statement in the article that capitalism succeeded because it used the “social surplus” productively. Rand denied the existence of a “social surplus,” noting “all wealth is produced by somebody and belongs to somebody” (6). Like Pope who wrote, “The proper study of mankind is man,” Rand explains that one can learn about society by studying the individual man but nothing about the individual man by studying society. To study man, then, is to understand his essential characteristics, the main one being his rational faculty with the mind as his basic tool for survival and only means of accumulating knowledge. The issue of war is also important in the context of Rand’s defense of capitalism. For her, there is only one kind of war that is morally acceptable and that is a war of self-defense. She reiterates here that the initiation of force is wrong. As she reads the history of the Western world, it is capitalism that creates the most propitious situation for peace, having inaugurated one of the longest periods of peace in recent memory, that period between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and World War I in 1914. Rand sees war as essentially an act of looting, theorizing that societies that have freedom to produce do not need to loot from others, therefore capitalist systems do not cause wars. It was statist governments that caused both World War I and World War II. Rand is also opposed to the draft, which she sees as an infringement of individual rights. In her view, the best army is a volunteer army and that is what results when individuals value their rights and freedom or when a country is under attack.

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Among the other topics that Rand tackles in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal are “The Pull Peddlers” and “The Property Status of Airwaves.” In the former, she decries the sorry state of the United States foreign policy, which she calls “grotesquely irrational.” It is defended either by an “idealistic” or a “practical” argument, the one arguing that we have a duty to support “underdeveloped” countries that will sink without our help while arguing that we need to buy the favor of these same countries or they will become a threat to us. The contradiction defies logic, and Rand contends that when a country persists in following a suicidal course, there is obviously a disjunction between reality and the proclaimed rationale. The sad truth she contends is that there is no truth that the rationalizations are hiding, but only “scurrying cockroaches,” responding to foreign lobbies. Going to the root of the problem, Rand explains that as long as such concepts as the public interest or national or international interests are considered valid principles by those making the rules governing lobbying, this government by “pull” will continue. Again, she questions the rational justification and objective criterion for defining “the public interest.” Even the wisest person in the world will not be able to define a criterion for an unjust and irrational principle. Who is regarded as “the public?” The ones with the most effective lobbyist? Rand blames the suicidal bleeding of US foreign aid on “the manipulations of little lawyers and public relations men,” taking advantage of a cynical and bankrupt culture, and intellectuals with worn-out ideologies. In the chapter about the airwaves, Rand begins by reaffirming her premise that when something is produced by human action and would not exist without that action, then that thing should be a private property and subject to the

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application of property rights. For its failure to define how those property rights will be applied to the airwaves, she blames the American government and predicts disastrous results. Rand questions Justice Frankfurter’s argument that because radio waves are limited and therefore not available to everybody, they should be public property. She counters that oil, wheat, diamonds, land, and most other material things exist in limited quantities, yet they are not public property. As the government is charged with protecting individual rights, it should have, as soon as this new realm opened, defined the property rights. Her suggestion is that the same method as was used in the Homestead Act of 1862 should have been applied. As with any venture that is the result of human creativity and invention, radio stations should be the property of those who establish them and be subject to the vagaries of the free market. Again Rand reiterates her quarrel with the whole notion of such a thing as public property, a thing she calls a collectivist fiction because the public as a whole can never really own that property; instead it will be controlled by some political “elite” and/or bureaucrats. Concluding, Rand calls for healing the breach between scientific achievements and ideological development. Moving from the realms of economics and politics to the world of the esthetic, Rand clarifies her philosophy of art and establishes a defense of her artistic taste. In The Romantic Manifesto (1969), subtitled A Philosophy of Literature, Rand defines art as “a selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” She then develops an argument about the connections between art and a sense of life, an explanation of the basic principles of literature, the goals of her writing and a definition of Romanticism. Rand identifies herself

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as a writer of “Romantic realism” and indicts the abandonment of rational esthetics as the cause of what she sees as the contemporary degradation of art; “cultural sewer” is the expression she uses to describe it. Identifying herself as a link to the great artistic achievements of the nineteenth century, she argues for an esthetic Renaissance to the high art of Romanticism. Unlike her earlier nonfiction works, The Romantic Manifesto contains only essays by Rand, all except one having been published previously in the Objectivist journal or newsletter. It is also the most unified and coherent of her nonfiction productions. Rand’s philosophy of literature develops from an Aristotelian base. She is in accordance with Aristotle’s justification for literature as occupying a higher level of truth than history, for history represents things only as they are, whereas poetry (literature) represents them as they might be or ought to be. Literature thus presents principles and universal truths and is a conveyer of moral ideals. Communicating moral ideals in the persons of her heroes and heroines is exactly what Rand’s art does. Rand explains that if she were to compose a dedication page for an anthology of all her works, it would read “To the glory of man.” In Rand’s estimation nineteenth-century Romanticism was a product of an Aristotelian sense of life, fueled by capitalism and rebellion against the prevailing Classicist esthetic establishment but without an under girding philosophy. Her quarrel is with what she considers a misreading of Classicists as exemplars of reason and Romanticists as advocates of the primacy of emotions. This she contends is definition by nonessentials; the key, she explains is that primacy of values was the essential Romantic qualifier. Rand then presents her hierarchy of Romantic writers, placing

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Victor Hugo and Feodor Dostoevsky in the primary category for novelists and Friedrich Schiller and Edmond Rostand as the leading playwrights. In the second tier of Romanticists, she places Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. A special favorite, and one she tried to emulate early in her writing career, is O. Henry for his ever-inventive imagination and his zestful playfulness as well as his role as a popularizer of Romanticism’s psychological mission of making life interesting. Among the novels that she cites for their Romantic vision are Quo Vadis? and The Scarlet Letter. Still, for all her admiration for the Romantics, Rand saw their inability to create a convincing image of a heroic or virtuous man as a major flaw. Their main heroes remain abstractions or cardboard figures, she argues, while at the same time the best-drawn characters are the semivillains or villains. In the twentieth century, Naturalism was a prevailing literary mode and the antithesis of Romanticism. Whereas Romanticism proceeds from a moral base and the concept of human beings as capable of free will, Naturalism attempts a nonjudgmental approach and depicts humans as the victims of a deterministic universe. Its founder, Emile Zolá, actually called for writers to approximate the scientific method and evaluate human beings mainly on the basis of heredity. Rand rejects what she calls Zolá’s journalistic methods and points out the flaws in a deterministic view. She demeans Shakespeare as the spiritual precursor of nineteenth-century Naturalism and names Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy as his heirs. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina she indicts as “the most evil book in serious literature” (104) because of its message of hopelessness. Rand explains that Naturalists, having eschewed the elements of plot and even of story, concentrate

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on characterization and thus the most effective of the Naturalist writers can accomplish a level of psychological perceptiveness. Third-rate writers of the school of Naturalism may succeed to a greater extent than thirdrate Romanticists because the standards are much less demanding. Romanticists must be ingenious, imaginative, and have a sense of drama for they create a story from the ground up. The Naturalist is not required to construct or create an integrated plot and theme but only a progression of not necessarily purposeful events. An interesting aspect of The Romantic Manifesto is Rand’s evaluation of the literature of her time, particularly popular literary genres. Rand is willing to give good writers their due, even if she disagrees with their esthetic principles. Therefore, she points out that Naturalism did include some novelists of great writing talent. Sinclair Lewis is complimented for the perceptiveness of his critical acumen and John O’Hara for his insightful intelligence and closely controlled style. In terms of Romantic writers, however, she categorizes what she calls remnants of Romanticism that sneak themselves into the peripheries of our culture. One such remnant she identifies as literature of the supernatural with Rod Serling as one of its most talented purveyors, although he had to place his stories in another dimension, The Twilight Zone, to get his theme across. Alfred Hitchcock is complimented for getting away with Romanticism by his technique of quirky horror plots and a sneaky sort of malevolence. Rand follows up on her ideas about the way Romanticism is indirectly expressed in our culture with an essay titled “Bootleg Romanticism.” Before she begins explaining the specifics of how Romanticism is bootlegged into the art of our culture, she starts with some sweeping statements

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about the nature of art and its relationship to the state of a culture or civilization. She situates art as a barometer that reflects a society’s profound philosophical values, that is, the way that society views man and existence. Using the analogy of a patient revealing naked truths about himself on a psychiatrist’s coach, Rand declares that an analysis of the culture is easily achieved by studying its art. From her perspective, the patient is in dire shape. The cause is having been nursed on generations of antirational philosophy that produces fear, guilt, and pity (a pity she identifies as self-pity). Her scorn for what she terms “the sewer school of art” is manifest in every paragraph. Most especially she highlights the evil way that “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers are concocted. Thrillers, she identifies, as the last refuge of the Romantic qualities of life, color, and imagination in the popular art of her age. The thriller plot form can, if utilized with the creative skill of a Victor Hugo or Doestoevsky, lead to a masterpiece. In less-skilled hands, what results is the contemporary thriller, which although it can follow the classical plot structure, does not reach the full potential of a piece of Romantic literature. Rand calls them kindergarten arithmetic, simplified and elementary versions. Rand’s hostility toward what she identifies as the tonguein-cheek approach to contemporary thrillers is not that she objects to humor per se, but that humor is not an unalloyed virtue. When the humor is at the expense of not the stupid, mean, miserly, but the bright, heroic, and generous, then it is a tool of destruction, an exercise in malice. She sees it as a possible way to camouflage moral cowardice and is particularly disgusted by the appropriation of the positive for the purpose of undercutting it. The popularity of such best-selling writers of her time as Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming are evidence to Rand of

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the common desire for literature of a Romantic nature. Both Mike Hammer (Spillane’s detective) and James Bond (Fleming’s secret agent) are exemplars of the heroic.9 Concluding her chapter, Rand follows through with her use of the bootleg metaphor by calling for a repeal of the Joyce-Kafka Amendment (likened to the 18th Amendment that established prohibition).10 Rand equates Naturalism with rotgut, an inferior and potentially dangerous alcoholic mixture, often sold by moon shiners and bootleggers during Prohibition. In his 1997 Academy Award nominated documentary film about Ayn Rand, Michael Paxton chose the subtitle of “A Sense of Life” to communicate his theme. “Sense of Life” was a trait that Rand found essential to understanding individuals and evaluating art. In her essay “Art and Sense of Life” she defines an individual’s sense of life as that part of the psychology that governs a person’s responses to humanity and existence. It would therefore be central to an artist’s choices about subject matter, theme, and even style, and consequently also govern how the viewer and/ or reader responds to a particular work of art. It is by what the artist chooses to emphasize, what the artist considers important that a sense of life is conveyed. If one’s sense of life is in accord with that of the artist, then one appreciates the art. Ronald E. Merrill challenges Rand’s definition, pointing out that many will choose art that expresses not the sense of life they have but the one they would like to have.11 Merrill notes that in her novels Rand depicts a world where great things can be accomplished, but only after difficult and tortured battles against great odds. However, in her choice of music, for example, she appreciated what she called her “tiddlywink” music, a lighthearted and challenge-free music that projected pure happiness.

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The Romantic Manifesto contains much of Rand’s esthetic philosophy and critique of the literature of her time. Thirty-one years after its publication and after Rand’s death, her informal lectures were edited and published as The Art of Fiction. Of interest for those who wonder about the evolution of her thought is that these lectures were offered in her living room in 1958 before the essays written and republished in the manifesto. The book could serve as a Creative Writing and Literary Criticism class in one. The year 1971 brought the publication of The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. The zeitgeist of the times was dropout, drugs, and rebellion and though the publication decade was the seventies, it was in terms of happenings, the heyday of what we have come to associate with the sixties. Rand addresses some contemporary phenomena that may seem anachronistic for our times, but in her analysis of what movements such as the hippies and “smorgasbord education” will bring about, Rand was right on target. Perhaps the most prescient of her observations is in the extensive, five-part article called “The Comprachicos.” In it she dissects and reveals the harmful effects of the United States education system. The title alludes to a section from Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs in which he describes a seventeenth-century association of that name (comprachicos—child buyers). These people would buy children and then purposefully deform them to create freaks that would be saleable as entertainment for courts and sideshows. Rand then makes the analogy between that group and the United States education system. Her thesis is that our progressive nursery schools begin an educational process that stunts the mind in a manner analogous to the way the comprachicos twisted the

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bodies of the hapless children that fell in their clutches. To compound the horror, the comprachicos of the mind do their mutilations openly, without having to buy the children but instead having them approvingly delivered to them. Rand quotes an old Jesuit dictum that claims that if they can teach a child up to the age of seven, that child will forever bear the implant of those teachings. Rand traces the development of a child’s cognitive and integrative development and quotes extensively from Dr. Maria Montessori’s handbook of her educational methods as an example of rational educational methods, the opposite of the progressive schools Rand condemns. In 1983 a blueribbon commission appointed by President Reagan issued its findings about the United States education system in “A Nation at Risk.” “Goals 2000” and subsequent reports by various commissions and think tanks verify that American students are falling behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations. A recent report places them seventeenth in worldwide math and science skills. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of “A Nation at Risk” and nearly four decades after Rand’s indictment “Strong American Schools,” a nonpartisan organization, reports that few of the commission’s recommendations have been enacted and that the United Stated education system, although it spends more per student than its peer countries, rarely comes in first or even second by most international measures. Rand’s sweeping denunciation was not heeded and, in fact, she was condemned as reactionary by left-leaning groups. Time, however, has vindicated her predictive abilities. The New Left: An Anti-Industrial Revolution has gone through a number of editions. In 1975 it was published with the added essay “The Age of Envy.” Return of the

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Primitive: An Anti-Industrial Revolution, edited by Peter Schwartz and with additional essays written by him was published in 1999. Ironically, although a theory of knowledge is basic to philosophy, Ayn Rand did not publish her Introduction to Objectvist Epistemology until 1979, just three years before her death.12 In it Rand presents chapters on “Cognition and Measurement,” “Concept-Formation,” “Abstractions from Abstractions,” “Concepts of Consciousness,” “Definitions,” “Axiomatic Concepts,” “The Cognitive Role of Concepts,” and “Consciousness and Identity” as her section of the text. She then offers a brief summary. What follows is a substantial essay “The Analytic– Synthetic Dichotomy” by Leonard Peikoff that occupies about a third of the book. In 1990 Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff published an expanded second edition that included material from workshops Rand had conducted from 1969 to 1971. Transcriptions of the question and answer period of these workshops are the heart of the additional material. Rand clarifies that this work is mainly concerned with the nature of concepts and that the organization of concepts into propositions and the broader principles of language are not addressed except minimally since for Rand concepts function in the field of cognition as numbers do in the field of mathematics, the function of a proposition being like that of an equation. She warns that a proposition can function properly only if the concepts that compose it are precisely defined. Rand begins with a discussion of how it is that in the form of percepts humans first grasp the evidence of their senses and apprehend reality. The concept of “existent” being implicit in every percept, it then goes through

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three stages of development in the mind from entity to identity to unit. Integrating two or more units based on their same distinguishing characteristics then forms concepts. Moving through the formation of abstractions to the issues of definition and axiomatic concepts, Rand goes on in her concluding section to once again lay the assault on man’s conceptual faculty at the feet of Kant who she blames for attacking man’s rational faculty. Rand stresses the importance of epistemology because it answers the second crucial question basic to every conclusion or decision. The first is: What do I know? And the second is: How do I know it? The last work Ayn Rand planned is Philosophy: Who Needs It, published shortly after her death in 1982. The title is taken from a speech Rand gave to the graduating class at West Point in March of 1974, and it serves as the first chapter of the book. Like her other nonfiction books this is a compilation of previously written pieces, either for Objectivist publications or to deliver as a speech. The other speech in the volume, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” delivered at both Brooklyn College and Columbia University, dates back more than two decades to 1960; most of the rest of the chapters are dated in the early 1970s. The fundamental contention of the opening essay is that there are three questions every human being should ask: (1) Where am I? (2) How do I know it? (3) What should I do? Trouble comes if one does not seek to answer these questions and philosophy is the tool by which they are answered. Rand then correlates each question with the branch of philosophy that deals with the answers to that question, specifically identifying metaphysics and epistemology as the theoretical foundation of philosophy and

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ethics as its technology. As ethics determines how humans should treat other humans, so politics deals with questions of proper social systems. Finally, she identifies esthetics, the study of art, as being determined by the other branches, excepting politics. As this was originally an address to the cadets at West Point, Rand uses military metaphors to explain why it is so important for them to study not only Aristotle, whom she considers positively, but also philosophers whose direction has been and is, in Rand’s perspective, the destruction of the human mind. Just as armies need intelligence about the enemy’s weaponry and maneuvers to effectively fight them, so in philosophy one must understand the opposition’s ideas and arguments to be able to rebut and counteract them. Rand commends West Point graduates on their proud and disciplined posture and exhorts them to study philosophy so that their minds achieve the same proud and disciplined stance. The archenemy Rand identifies is Kant, and she likens his philosophical system to a booby trap. In Rand’s perception, a Kantian–Hegelian–collectivist establishment threatened the culture. The attacks on ROTC and the defense budget are all part of their strategy for destroying the country, which they hate for its being a refutation of a Kantian universe. Rand emphasizes the importance of philosophy as a weapon with which to counter the arguments of those who undermine reason. Rand lauds the cadets for preserving those characteristics she identifies with the founding of the nation: earnestness, dedication, and a sense of honor. Concluding her presentation she reiterates her principles about the appropriate use of force as self-defense and in retaliation against those who initiate its use, thus subordinating might to right.

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Many of the essays in this work proceed along an antiKantian trajectory although he is named only in the title of one: “Kant Versus Sullivan.”13 The Sullivan of the title is Annie Sullivan, the woman who taught the blind–deaf– mute Helen Keller language. Rand thinks that The Miracle Worker, the play that dramatizes the education of Helen Keller, may be the only epistemological play ever written in that it illustrates the transformative power of language, thus the development of conceptual learning. Sullivan uses the sense of touch to help Helen connect things with her spelling of them in the girl’s palm. At first, it is just a meaningless game without understanding, but in the climax of the play Helen absorbs the connect between the word and the thing, gaining understanding that opens the world for her through what Rand calls the “priceless possession: language.” It must be remembered that Rand’s works of nonfiction were compilations, for the most part, of occasional pieces that had been published or presented previously. As such, they do not have the same kind of coherence as more traditional academic works of philosophy. Notwithstanding this, a number of scholars have, since her death, attempted to systematize her philosophy both for purposes of rebuttal and clarification.14 Ed Younkins is one of a number of analysts who have attempted to clarify and synthesize Rand’s philosophy. In a recent anthology chapter, he attempts to “introduce, logically rearrange, and clarify through rewording the ideas scattered throughout” Rand’s books and essays to the end of explaining her “philosophy for living on earth.”15 He summarizes Objectivism accordingly. In Rand’s metaphysical philosophy, reality is objective and absolute. For her epistemological system, the mind is capable of discovering valid information of that which exists.

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Because of her basic premise that man is a rational being and an end in himself , he has a right to choose those values and goals that best serve his purpose to be the best person he can be. This is in accordance with her moral theory of self-interest. Younkins reinforces Rand’s contention that a coherent philosophy that includes metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics must precede and determine politics and that politics then precedes and determines economics. Leonard Peikoff, her chosen intellectual heir, published Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand in 1991; he calls it the only comprehensive study of her philosophy. A paperback copy was issued in 1993. There is also an audio CD of the course on Objectivism that Peikoff offered when Rand was still alive. Currently, The Objectivist Academic Center offers a 26-week course that can be audited.

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Reception and Influence of Rand’s Work

Compared to her later novels and works of nonfiction, Ayn Rand’s early works created minimal stir or buzz in the publishing or political world. Her play Night of January 16th, although not a big hit, did have a respectable run on Broadway, opening in late 1935. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times was dismissive, but most of the other reviews were appreciative of the gimmick of having audience members picked each night to act as the jury; some approved the perceived melodrama of the action. Few addressed Rand’s thematic concerns. Opening night, Jack Dempsey, heavy weight boxing champion was part of the jury; another significant jury member was Helen Keller at a performance for a blind audience. The play closed after a run of 283 performances. Two road companies performed the play, and it is a staple of summer stock and community theatre.1 In 1941 a film version of the play starring Robert Preston and Ellen Drew was released. Rand had nothing to do with the screen adaptation and claims that it bears little resemblance to her play except for character names and a line of dialogue. She had a low opinion of it. Although Rand’s first professional writing impact was as a playwright, it is curious that she never had another successful play mounted during her lifetime. In 1940, her

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adaptation of We the Living was produced under the title The Unconquered. Barbara Branden catalogues all of the factors that went into making the play a disaster, among them a famous comedy director who was not good at directing a serious play, poor casting, and a script that had been doctored too much. The reviews pronounced it a mishap and unimpressive (1986, 150–54). After a five-day run, the play closed, and Rand never again exercised her playwriting ability. Ideal and Think Twice, two other plays she had written in the early period of her career were neither published nor produced in her lifetime. One positive effect of Rand’s first professional success was that the royalties from the box office of Night of January 16th allowed Rand and her husband to live comfortably for the first time since their marriage. Shortly after Night of January 16th closed its Broadway run, We the Living was published. Rand’s success as a playwright did not translate into much interest in publishing houses for her novel, initially titled Airtight. Perhaps, this was caused by the seemingly great difference in subject matter between the play and the novel and in the distinct genres that often attract different readers. The play, set in the United States, is a courtroom drama, basically with what Rand called a “sense of life” theme. The novel depicts the destructive happenings in the Soviet Union and its tragic and crushing effects on both its proponents and antagonists. Rand’s clear indictment of the Soviet system, during this period that is often called the “Red Decade,” is another likely cause for the lack of promotion of her first novel. Condemnation of the Soviet experiment did not cohere with the national zeitgeist of sympathy for the communist revolution, particularly among the intelligentsia. Rand’s contract with MacMillan, the novel’s initial

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publisher, was preceded by rejections from such major publishing houses as Dutton, Knopf, Little Brown & Co., Longmans Green, Viking Press, Bobbs-Merrill, Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, and Appleton-Century-Crofts (Ralston 2004, 157). We the Living is the opening volley in Ayn Rand’s lifelong battle against the forces of collectivism. But, if the publishing houses did not recognize the significance of the novel’s plot and theme, Rand was quite clear about the import of her novel. She understood that this work was unique in that it was the first novel in English to present, from one who had witnessed it firsthand, the everyday mind-numbing and spirit-destroying reality of life for middle-class Russians during and after the Bolshevik takeover of the revolution. In a letter to her initial agent Jean Wick, Rand wrote, “The American Reader has no knowledge of it [existence in Leningrad]. . . . If he had—we would not have the appalling number of parlor Bolsheviks and idealistic sympathizers with the Soviet regime, liberals who would scream with horror if they knew the truth of Soviet existence” (Berliner ed. 1995, 17–18). A significant early ally was H.L. Menken who wrote to her that he sympathized with her position and thought it important to counter Communist propaganda (Ralston 2004, 136). As could be expected, reviews of We the Living often divided along political lines. Strangely, although Ayn Rand’s memory is of reviews “not appearing” or that those that appeared were mostly negative (B. Branden 1986, 126), Michael Berliner reports that there are some 125 reviews in the Ayn Rand Archives and that it was the “most reviewed of any of her works” (2004, 147). Both major New York papers, The Times and The Herald

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Tribune reviewed it, the Times finding artistic flaws and a tendency to propagandize but not questioning the accuracy of Rand’s depiction. In contrast, The Tribune reviewer called the novel “passionate and powerful” (quoted in Berliner 2004, 147). Interestingly enough, reviewers who had never been to Russia often questioned the accuracy of Rand’s depiction of the desperate state of the bourgeoisie or remarked as did Ida Zeitlin, the Tribune reviewer, that she was sure things had improved for the people in Soviet Russia since the time Rand was depicting. Another criticism was of Rand’s choice of Kira Argounova as a spokesperson. Ben Belitt, writing in The Nation, reveals more about his moral values than about his appreciation of the novel. He cannot respect Kira’s actions because she chooses to sleep with Andrei to save Leo. He sees her as shuttling about “aimlessly from bedroom to rostrum.” Going through Rand’s archives Berliner comments about which reviews she circled and her response to the phenomenon of wildly contradictory reviews. Besides the major review venues, We the Living received attention in such diverse print media as Salt Lake City’s Desert News, the Oklahoman, and the Indianapolis Times. Inexplicably and notwithstanding the critical attention and the fact that all of the first printing sold out, Macmillan destroyed the plates and thus lost the rights to publish Rand’s next novel. It also meant that We the Living was out of print in the United States for a generation until 1959 when Random House published the second edition. However, this did not mean that the novel sank out of sight. Of note is that although it was out of print in the United States, Cassell & Co., Ltd., Rand’s British publisher released it in 1937 and kept it in print for some time; Rand received royalties for ten years. The

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reviews in the British Isles were generally complimentary, although The Times Literary Supplement opined that, given the material, Rand could have written a more interesting novel. A number of the British reviews remarked on Rand’s command of the English language. The Irish Press review assessment was that Rand’s depiction of the miserable situation under Communism was “as convincing as a Rembrandt drawing” (quoted in Berliner 2004, 150). We the Living was also reviewed in Australia where the critics were of many minds. One found fault with Rand’s command of the language, another rightly understood that her theme was against state tyranny in all its manifestations. Another took a love story message from it, deducing that although there may be political changes, a woman’s heart resists new orders. Rand also received a handsome royalty check from the Danish publisher and the book was so popular in Italy that an Italian movie company pirated it and made an unauthorized film version during World War II (Ralston 2004, 141). Of course, the Italian fascists read it solely as an indictment of Communism and Soviet Russia. The lengthy film, made in two segments actually, Noi Vivi and Addio Kira, was popular in Italy. It starred Alida Valli, Rossano Brazzi, and Fosco Giachetti; after the war Valli and Brazzi became popular with American audiences. A shortened and subtitled version was released and first shown to American audience at the 1986 Telluride film festival. It was reviled, as could be expected from a left-leaning press, with such adjectives as “fanatic,” “simplistic,” “political kitsch,” and “not quite nutty enough to qualify as camp.”2 Berliner assesses the British reviews as “generally more intellectual” than those in the United States, as more often than not, they got the anticollectivist message.3 Notwithstanding, it was also

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hailed as an “amazing piece of cinema” and as both “ambitious and ingenious.” Once Rand became a major novelist with the success of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, a new and revised hardback edition of We the Living was published and followed by a paperback edition. Sales continue to do well and over three million copies have been sold to date. Also noteworthy is the fact that the book was finally published in Russia in 1993 and has also sold well there. Of course, as a creative writer, Rand was always concerned with plot and character, but from the onset, the importance of theme was paramount in her hopes of reaching her kind of reader. A July 1936 letter to John Temple Graves, a reviewer from Alabama, expresses her appreciation of the fact that his review recognizes that the novel is not “merely an argument against Communism, but against all forms of collectivism, against any manner of sacrilege toward the Individual” (Berliner ed. 1995, 33). Rand’s second novel experienced a similar trajectory to her first, that is, difficulty finding a publisher at first, going out of print and then a renaissance when it was reissued. But, unlike We the Living, Anthem could not find any American publisher initially and was first published in England in 1937 by Cassell & Co., who had put out the British edition of We the Living. After the success of The Fountainhead, Anthem was published in the United States by Pamphleteers, a small press dedicated to promoting liberty. That was in 1946 and then Caxton Press put it out in hard cover in 1953. In the transition from England to the United States, a number of changes were made to the manuscript. Mayhew (2005) surveyed significant and minor differences between the two versions, among them more word count, precision, clarity, accuracy, elimination

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of excessive and Biblical language, and some interesting philosophical changes. Like Rand’s first novel, Anthem is still in print, selling some 100,000 copies a year, with over three-and-a-half million sold as of 2005. Early reviews were not plentiful, but mostly positive, especially in England. British reviewers were generally appreciative of Rand’s message against the “submergence of the individual in the State” and cognizant of the fact that “collectivist tyranny is threatening us, whether labeled Communism or Fascism” (quoted in Berliner 2005, 50). Anthem may be one of Rand’s better-known works in the public schools. Because of its novella-like length, it is more accessible for the classroom than her lengthy later works. The Fountainhead, first published in 1943, is the work that catapulted Rand to national and international attention. It has become cliché to notice the parallels between Rand’s description of the trajectory of Roark’s career in the novel and the path she and this novel took in reaching their readership. In the novel, people with firsthand souls, people who want to build to suit themselves and not follow the crowd, see a Roark building and then look for its architect. In keeping with the novel’s title, Rand uses the metaphor of a stream that builds below ground, quietly and unobtrusively, but then bursts forth, bubbling to the surface until it builds into a full torrent. As The Fountainhead began to find its readers, mostly by word of mouth, sales grew and interest in Rand built among those readers who were open to her ideas about individualism. It was The Fountainhead that drew to her that core of fans that would first develop and spread her ideas, individuals who would become her closest friends and confidantes. If the reviews of We the Living and Anthem were generally positive, the reviews of The Fountainhead were less so.

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Ironically, although The Fountainhead was the work that made Rand famous and was a best-seller twice, once in 1945 and again when the movie came out in 1949, Berliner reports that there were far fewer reviews of it than of We the Living that went out of print in the United States after its first run (2007, 77). However, The Fountainhead did receive strong commendation in such important venues as The Saturday Review of Literature and The New York Times. In the one, Rand’s work was described as strong and dramatic, whereas in the Times, Lorine Pruette recognizes the work as not only brilliant, beautiful, and bitter but also as a novel of ideas. The sale of film rights to The Fountainhead necessitated a move back to California from New York, as Rand was to write the script. It also gave the O’Connors a certain level of financial security. In the years between the publication of the novel and the making of the film version, Rand became active in anticollectivist politics in Hollywood. She was keenly conscious of the overt and covert inroads Communist propaganda was making in the film industry and wanted to do her part to thwart it. As a start, and because she did not want force to be used, she suggested some voluntary guidelines for filmmakers in a pamphlet written for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In “Screen Guide for Americans” Rand recommends against hiring Communists to write, direct, or produce pictures with political themes. She opposes glorifying failure and the collective, while smearing the independent individual, free enterprise, industrialists, and American political institutions. In 1947 Rand was asked to speak before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating Communist infiltration of the film industry. The experience was, in

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Rand’s words, “a disgusting spectacle.” However, Rand did take credit for helping to encourage a much better image of the businessman and greatly reducing Communist propaganda in Hollywood movies. Her “Screen Guide” was reprinted in the New York Times and a number of other papers. Gary Cooper played the lead in the film version of The Fountainhead with Patricia Neal, a newcomer at the time, playing the role of Dominique. Near universal disapproval characterizes the reviews. Adjectives such as pathetic and affected were used to describe the acting, with the terms muddleheaded, stagy, pretentious, and ideological fury used to describe the plot and theme. Neither Rand nor anyone else was very pleased with the finished product. Although the film version may not have been a success except as far as it helped by influencing book sales, in terms of influence, The Fountainhead was arguably Rand’s most effective work. Its consequences are still felt today for it was The Fountainhead that made fans of Nathan Blumenthal [later Nathaniel Branden], a psychology student, and Barbara Weidman [Barbara Branden], a philosophy student, two Canadians studying at UCLA. Their mutual admiration for the book had begun in Canada and then, in 1950, when Nathan Blumenthal wrote a fan letter to Ayn Rand, events were set in motion that would affect many lives and inspire the development of a movement that serves as the basis of contemporary Objectivism, in its sundry manifestations. The Brandens were the catalyst for the creation of a group, fans of the novel, who would become that nucleus of admirers Rand would call, alternately “the children” or the “class of ’43.” Sometimes they would ironically refer to themselves as “the Collective” as their commitment to

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individualism was the diametric opposite. Leonard Peikoff, Barbara Branden’s cousin, later the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, would become Rand’s heir after her break with the Brandens. When Rand and her husband and the Brandens moved to New York, Elayne Kalberman, Nathaniel Branden’s sister, a nurse, and her husband Harry Kalberman, a broker, joined the group. Kalberman became the first circulation manager for The Objectivist Newsletter. Mary Ann Rukavina, later Sures, was an art historian; she and her husband, Charles Sures, maintain their connection with the Ayn Rand Institute to this day. Others in the group who met with Rand to discuss her ideas were Allan Blumenthal, Nathaniel’s cousin, and Joan Mitchell, Barbara’s childhood friend who was married first to Alan Greenspan and then to Allan Blumenthal. Blumenthal was a physician who studied music at Julliard. Joan Mitchell, an artist, introduced Frank O’Connor to drawing, providing for him a consuming passion for much of the rest of his life. Members of the group were treated to regular philosophical discussions at Rand’s apartment and the privilege of reading Atlas Shrugged as it was being written. Of all of that initial group of enthusiasts, perhaps none would go on to greater international fame than Alan Greenspan, whose initial contact was a result of his marriage to Joan Mitchell. During his record-setting tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006), Alan Greenspan was arguably one of the most powerful men in the United States. Stories about Greenspan often allude to the impact that Rand had on his life, an influence he embraced wholeheartedly in his 2007 autobiography where he calls her a “stabilizing force” in his life (51). Greenspan credits Rand with broadening his horizons, with taking him from being a talented technician to one who studied

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“how different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways” (2007, 53). She stood by his side when he took the Oath of Office as part of President’s Ford’s administration. They were friends till her death in 1982. Nathaniel Branden claims that the idea of teaching and discussing Ayn Rand’s philosophy beyond the scope of their group of friends “was sparked by the enormous amount of fan mail” Rand was still receiving in the 1950s as more and more readers found The Fountainhead (1989, 191). He first broached the subject with her, before the publication of Atlas Shrugged, originally thinking to offer a series of lectures and use a list of those, within the New York City environs, who had sent fan mail, as a contact list. However, it was not until January of 1958, after Atlas Shrugged was published that Branden offered the 20 lectures that became the first course in “Basic Principles of Objectivism.” A small group of 28 students met in a room at the Sheraton-Russell hotel on Park and Thirty-Seventh Street. That group of 28 grew to 45 students the next time the course was offered and then to 65, finally achieving an average attendance of 160 per class; the classes were offered twice a year. Nathaniel Branden Lectures was the original name for the enterprise, which when incorporated became The Nathaniel Branden Institute. Ayn Rand had no business interest in the project, although it could not have gone forward without her approval. The impact of this project cannot be overemphasized. This was the launching of Ayn Rand as a public philosopher; it was the catalyst for a movement. The subject matter, at first, was mainly Rand’s philosophy and some of Branden’s ideas on psychology. With success, courses multiplied to include, at one time or another, lectures by other members of the

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“collective.” Alan Greenspan spoke on “the Economics of a Free Society”; Barbara Branden presented a course in “Principles of Efficient Thinking”; Mary Ann Sures delivered “The Aesthetics of the Visual Arts”; and Leonard Peikoff gave “A Critical History of Philosophy.” From the onset of the intellectual movement that would come to be known as Objectivism, adherents represented a variety of disciplines. The publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957 was a watershed event in the promulgation of Rand’s ideas into a variety of disciplines. Although The Fountainhead makes forays into the underlying premises of art and architecture, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s plotline encompasses the whole world and challenges predominant political, economic, religious, and philosophical thinking of the time. Rand’s challenge was met with multivocal and strident hostility. Many of the reviews, particularly from those to the left of the political spectrum, were blistering. Granville Hicks, writing in the New York Times, found the book misanthropic, because of what he perceived as the author’s glee at the destruction of the world. He calls it a book “written out of hate.” In the Saturday Review Helen Beal Woodward is appreciative of Rand’s writing ability. She calls her a writer of “dazzling virtuosity” but remarks that Rand is wasting her writing gifts because of her remorseless hectoring and prolixity. Like Hicks, Woodward finds the book “shot through with hatred.” Woodward lists Rand’s objects of hatred as moralists, mystics, professors, evangelists, Communists, altruists, and bureaucrats. One particularly nasty episode in the negative onslaught against Atlas Shrugged is the review it received in National Review, the journal founded by William F. Buckley. The antipathy between Buckley and Rand was well known.

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Its genesis had to do with Buckley’s combination of Catholicism and capitalism, which Rand saw as implying “that reason and science are on the side of collectivists” (quoted in Branden 1999, 201). The story goes that the first time they met, Rand suggested that Buckley was too smart to believe in G-d. The relationship went downhill from there. Buckley assigned Whittaker Chambers, a former communist, to write the review of this strongly anticollectivist work. Chambers allies Rand’s strikers to Nazis as he comments that “from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ” This is a particularly egregious analogy as many of Jewish-born Rand’s family perished in Russia during World War II and Rand equated Fascism with Communism as collectivist political philosophies. Chambers has issues with Rand’s tone, which he terms dictatorial; he also denounces her “overriding arrogance,” “shrillness,” and total lack of any humor to alleviate the above. Time did nothing to ameliorate Buckley’s hostility and at Rand’s death in 1982, he published an almost gleeful obituary, proclaiming: “Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn” (1982, 380). He lived to see himself proven wrong as interest in Rand flourished after her death, and her philosophy is taught at institutes and summer seminars across the United States. Equally hostile is the review by Charles Rolo in Atlantic Monthly. Rolo dismisses Rand’s magnum opus as “execrable claptrap” and a “solemn grotesquerie.” The Time reviewer found much that he considered Nietzschean, particularly the idea of an übermensch and so opens the review with a play on the classic introduction of radio’s Superman series: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superman.”

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The Time version reads, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman—in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?” Some of the reviews were more evenhanded. Richard McLaughlin was cognizant of the significance of Rand’s message and compared Atlas Shrugged to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of political importance. Although he does fault the author’s “long-windedness,” he is complimentary about her skillful arguments. The New York Herald Tribune’s John Chamberlain saw the novel as functioning on multiple levels. Therefore, the reader could satisfactorily approach it as science fiction, a “philosophical detective story,” or as a political parable. Chamberlain points out how Rand develops her theses through a method of Socratic dialog. In the aftermath of the disappointing reception of Atlas Shrugged, Rand went through a period of depression. Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden who were both very close with Rand during this period posit a number of theories about its causes. One idea is that having accomplished her goal of creating the ideal man, there was nowhere else for her to go with her fiction. Barbara Branden reports that after the enormity of the task of writing Atlas Shrugged, which had been Rand’s focus for the better part of 14 years, physical, emotional, and intellectual exhaustion overtook her (1986, 302). Rand’s disappointment at the lack of acknowledgment of her signal accomplishment by the leading intellectuals of the period was profound. She wondered about an audience for her ideas; she was concerned with the state of the culture. Notwithstanding her disappointment with the professional reviewers, she did respond to fan mail. To one fan, who misinterpreted the “trader principle” of Atlas Shrugged

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and thus offered Rand money to meet her, she explained that “the currency must be appropriate to that which is traded” (Letters 1995, 498). Rand goes on to advise the man that “good premises” is a better expression in writing to her than “good luck.” To another, she counsels that thinking is more important than feeling for a writer. A 16-year-old fan is praised for his writing ability and his ability “to think in terms of essentials” (501). One of her letters, shortly after Atlas Shrugged was published, was to the actress Barbara Stanwyck. Rand greatly admired Stanwyck and hoped she would consider the role of Dagny Taggert in a film version of the novel. (Years earlier, although her original choice was Greta Garbo for the role, Rand had lobbied for Stanwyck to play Dominique in The Fountainhead movie.) Stanwyck responded that she was highly complimented that Rand wanted her to do it but that she was sure that the Hollywood moguls would want someone younger for the role. It is poignantly ironic to think that both Rand and Stanwyck are dead and a film version is yet to be made.4 Though the Journals of Ayn Rand demonstrate that Rand had a number of ideas for fiction writing after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, none of these ideas was carried to fruition in her lifetime. Her attention turned instead to nonfiction as the medium through which to articulate her philosophical ideas. The first of these nonfiction works was For the New Intellectual (1961), a compilation of the major philosophical speeches from her works of fiction with an introduction which presents an overview of her interpretation of those forces, historically, that had undermined human happiness, Attila who stands for force and the witch doctor who represents faith. By contrast, the best in humanity are the producers, the thinkers, and the reasoners, individuals who make human survival

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possible. The book was not widely reviewed, but a few who did write about it approved the idea of having all the main philosophical speeches gathered in one book while others found it redundant. Rand obviously rejected the idea of redundancy as a negative; instead, she adopted it as a strategy, repeating many of her previously published articles or speeches in her nonfiction books. Her main sources were the periodicals, newsletters, and journals published in connection with the Objectivist movement. They are The Objectivist Newsletter, published from January 1962 through December of 1965; The Objectivist, published from January of 1966 through September of 1971; and finally The Ayn Rand Letter, published from October of 1971 through February of 1976. Besides these publications of limited circulation, in 1962 Rand also wrote a newspaper column for The Los Angeles Times. The topics run the gamut from the joys of stamp collecting to the death of Marilyn Monroe. The columns were published in a book titled The Ayn Rand Column years after Rand’s death. Many critics, particularly altruists, castigated Rand for promoting a selfish lifestyle. Rand’s response was The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). Although she had effectively dealt with the subject in her fiction, The Fountainhead in particular, the introductory essay allows her to clarify the essential definition of selfishness. Rand makes clear her ethical standards, particularly the concept that one’s life should be one’s ethical purpose and that values should be chosen that forward that purpose. Just as the title challenges the widespread idea of selfishness as a negative trait, so in a number of essays in the book, Rand refutes the morality and logic of many popular platitudes, such as “There are no black and whites, there are only grays” or “Who am

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I to judge?” She explains why accepting such premises is harmful to one’s moral health. The book includes a number of essays by Nathaniel Branden, essays in which he sets the foundation for concepts about romantic love and self esteem that he would enlarge in future books. Some reviewers of this book found correlations between Rand’s philosophy and existentialism. The Virtue of Selfishness, subtitled “A New Concept of Egoism,” was one of Rand’s bestselling nonfiction books. Rand called her next book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), “a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism.” Rand, who sometimes called herself a radical for capitalism, thought that capitalism was the only moral politico-economic system in history. In her thinking, capitalism was a great boon to humankind, having produced goods and technology that enhance the quality of life. The anthology is also noteworthy as it contains three articles by Alan Greenspan as well as one each by Robert Hessen and Nathaniel Branden. Two of the essays from The Virtue of Selfishness, one on rights and one on the nature of government, are also included. Reviews were not enthusiastic and a number of them pointed out that these essays were all already available in other sources. The book was distinctive, however, in that Rand was a lone defender of capitalism on moral grounds and her deflation of many of the then current anticapitalist myths was eye-opening to a public that had heard little but negative critiques of capitalism. This book reinforced her image as a heroine to the world of business and industry. A key quality of Objectivism is that it embraces such a wide variety of topics; thus it is not surprising that after a foray into the world of economics Rand should turn to aesthetics. It follows that once one has ingested the basic

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premises of the philosophy, one can deduce opinions on subjects as diverse as abortion and literary criticism. Underlying Rand’s ideas in The Romantic Manifesto is her definition of art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” As reason is a prime value of Objectivism, Rand condemns modern and postmodern art for its celebration of the irrational. Rand’s philosophy of art develops from an Aristotelian base and in her reading of Aristotle, art is justified because it represents things not just as they are, but as they might be or ought to be. For Rand, communicating moral ideals through her heroic characters is a main purpose of her writing. Additionally, in a series of articles, mostly published first in The Objectivist, Rand developed a theory about how human beings form concepts, abstractions and definitions. These were then published in book form as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. After her death, an expanded version with transcriptions of her workshop on the theory of knowledge was issued. At the height of the Objectivist culture during Rand’s lifetime, the movement came under fire from a number of quarters. Among Rand’s targets as antithetical to human happiness, both in the fiction and nonfiction, is religion, which she identifies as mysticism. A self-proclaimed atheist from an early age, Rand found religious belief suspect as it was founded on faith and not on reason. It is not surprising that people of faith would engage Rand’s arguments. In 1971 John W. Robbins published Answer to Ayn Rand: A Critique of the Philosophy of Objectivism. The initial part of the book points out what Robbins perceives as the inconsistent aspects of Objectivism, arguing that its “epistemology must lead to skepticism, its metaphysics to

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the void, its ethics to hedonism, and its politics to anarchy” (12). Robbins, who identifies himself as responding to Rand in the name of Jesus Christ, makes clear that he does not believe in reason; he is a champion of revelation. Albert Ellis, a pioneer figure in cognitive- behavioral therapies, accuses Objectivism of being a religion, in light of the fact that its adherents more often than not exemplify the ten characteristics of “true believers.” In Is Objectivism a Religion? (1968) Ellis argues, among other things, that Objectivism in harmful to the psychological health of its practitioners. After his break with Rand, Nathaniel Branden stated that one of his objectives in writing The Disowned Self (1971) was to undo some of the psychological damage that might have been done to students of Objectivism. Another critique of Rand’s philosophy that was written during her lifetime was William F. O’Neill’s With Charity Toward None (1971). O’Neill is admiring of Rand’s intellectual and moral courage and of the importance of her as an intellectual catalyst. However, in his analysis of her philosophy, using the scientific verification process, he faults Objectivism for ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Another of the critical books about Rand published during her lifetime was Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, an amusing and satirical sojourn through the mazes of right-wing politics. The first two chapters take aim at the contradictions in Rand’s applications of her own theories, particularly in his pointed satire of “The Collective’s” anything but ironic exemplification of its name. He too concludes that Objectivism is very much like a substitute religion. Rand’s imperious behavior and the devotion of her adherents were also attacked for being cult-like. In his reminiscence, Bennett Cerf, her editor at Random House, recalls her

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as a “remarkable woman,” but blames what he calls “her sycophants” for contributing to her difficult behavior. Cerf compared her to “a movie queen with her retinue, or a prizefight champion who’s followed by a bunch of hangers-on, or a big crooner and his worshippers” (251). Like them, he thought that she came to depend on the adulation. Eventually, many of those who found Rand’s ideas convincing but who clashed with Rand were either purged from the group or became disenchanted with aspects of Objectivism, such as Rand’s infallibility. As Barbara Branden explained in her response to her own excommunication, she had to choose between Ayn Rand and the values Rand had taught her. Any discussion of Rand’s influence must include, although Rand would publicly distance herself from them, both feminists and libertarians. Neither feminism nor libertarianism is a monolithic structure and so adherents to the underlying philosophy of each may believe in different approaches to putting their beliefs into practice. Feminism, as it developed in its twentieth century United States manifestation, has a decidedly left-leaning bent. Therefore it is not surprising that many feminists would disavow Rand. Her rejection of what she termed “Women’s Lib” as “the caricature to end all caricatures” was based on her conclusion that the contemporary movement was riding “on the historical prestige of women who fought for individual rights against government power” in order to get “special privileges by means of government power” (Schwartz ed. 1999, 147). Of feminists, Rand would write derisively that with their “screaming” demands, they “support the worst prejudices of the bitterest misogynist.”5 On the one hand, those feminists who see government solutions to all problems and capitalism as one of the

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main agents of female subjugation see Rand as an apologist for the enemy. Susan Brownmiller, who wrote Against Our Will, one of the era’s pioneer antirape texts, calls Rand a traitor to her sex for what Brownmiller sees as the romantization of rape in The Fountainhead. On the other hand, although leftist feminists deride Rand, among individualist feminists there are strong voices in appreciation of her relevance for their cause. In her introduction to the anthology Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Wendy McElroy defines individualist feminism or ifeminism as based in “the belief that all human beings have a right to the protection of their persons and property” and that individuals, male or female, have the right “to make any peaceful choice whatsoever with her or his own body” (5). Camile Paglia explores “Libertarian Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” pointing out the political biases of the established women’s movement and calling those who are opposed, like herself, equity feminists. Billie Jean King, a towering figure in women’s sports, credits Rand with turning her life around by teaching her, among other things, the importance of being selfish.6 Barbara Branden, her authorized and unauthorized biographer, sees in Rand’s life a feminist manifesto, albeit she was a reluctant one.7 Like feminists, libertarians come in a variety of casings. On the one end are the anarcho-libertarians who would have no government to interfere with human autonomy; whereas at the other are the minarchists, who believe in a limited government, taking their cue from Thomas Jefferson who said. “That government is best that governs least.” Many of the significant figures in the early libertarian movement in the United States came to it as admirers of Rand. However, if many libertarians credit Rand with

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inspiring them and admire her work, Rand did not return the compliment. She accused libertarians of being publicity seekers, calling the libertarian movement a “leftist discard,” and hippies on the right. Rand thought that the libertarian movement had plagiarized her ideas, modifying and perverting them. The enmity between Objectivists, at least those allied with the Ayn Rand Institute, and the libertarian movement continued after her death. Neo-objectivists, those who do not view Objectivism as a closed system, often work with and identify themselves with the libertarian movement. The Cato Institute was the site for one of the events for the 50th Anniversary celebration of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. Many individuals allied with The Institute for Humane Studies also participated.8 The reception and influence of Rand in the last quarter of her life were considerable. Signal honors came her way. Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, presented Rand with the honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. Her appearance at Yale Law School required overflow speakers in the corridors for those who could not get into the packed auditorium. She was invited to be the Graduation Speaker at West Point; she was the object of a Playboy interview. She was a regular speaker at the Ford Hall Forum. Growing national interest in her ideas was such that she was a guest on a number of popular television shows. Edwin Newman interviewed her on “Speaking Freely,” as did Phil Donahue on the show bearing his name and Tom Snyder on the “Tomorrow” show. She appeared on “Johnny Carson.” She was invited to the White House for a State Dinner honoring Malcolm Fraser, then Prime Minister of Australia. Fraser specifically requested her presence, as she was his favorite author.

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Ayn Rand’s final years were marred by ill health, probably a result of the cigarettes she had used so effectively as a symbol in Atlas Shrugged. She also suffered the devastating loss of her beloved husband and life’s mate, Frank O’Connor. Through it all, she remained a figure of influence in the world of ideas, accepting speech engagements and writing as long as she could.

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4

Contemporary Relevance

The year: 2007. The occasion: the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. The amount of attention and the diversity of sources of this attention speak volumes about the continuing impact of Rand’s ideas. A U.S. News & World Report article calls her “one of the most prominent figures of the late 20th century” because of her impact on American individualism.1 In a 2007 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Brian Doherty reminds readers that Rand’s virtues as a political thinker and polemicist touch on the most important matters of modern politics (A11). An article in The New York Times, a newspaper whose editorial philosophy is often antithetical to Rand’s ideas, terms Atlas Shrugged “one of the most influential business books ever written.”2 Book TV C-SPAN2 tapes the panels of the October 6, 2007, fiftieth anniversary celebration in Washington DC and broadcasts and rebroadcasts them to a national audience. This celebration was organized and sponsored by the Washington-based Atlas Society of the Center for Objectivism. The organization of the panels and the span of disciplines included are other indicators of the breadth and depth of Rand’s impact on contemporary thought. Typically, a conference celebrating a work of fiction would feature mostly literature professors or creative writers. In

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this case the far-reaching influence of Rand’s work is evident in the diversity of professions and areas of interest represented by the various panelists. If I am not mistaken, although the panels included professors from disciplines such as Philosophy, Economics, Business Ethics, I was the only Literature professor on the program.3 Anne Heller, Rand’s latest biographer comes to an interest in Rand from a financial angle. It was Rand’s writing about money that first interested her in the author of Atlas Shrugged. Before beginning the Rand biography, Heller had collaborated with Suze Orman, known for her financial advice television show and columns, on two books, The Road to Wealth and The Laws of Money. Edward Younkins, who edited a volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged that was published as part of the anniversary celebration, is a professor of Accountancy. The business world was represented by Ed Snider, who heads Comcast Spectacor, a Philadelphia-based enterprise that owns a variety of sports and entertainment entities such as the Philadelphia Flyers Hockey team, the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team and sports venues such as the Wachovia Center and the Wachovia Spectrum, that combine to make the most prominent sports and entertainment complex in that city. Highlighting the program, as the Gala Banquet’s keynote speaker was John Stossel, whose 19 Emmy Awards are testaments to his status as a television news correspondent and commentator. On the West coast, The Ayn Rand Institute’s celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged was spaced out over a number of weeks and included speakers and an exhibit. The exhibit, which contained items from the Ayn Rand Archives, ran from October 8 to December 11, 2007 at the Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Library and included a reception

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on the actual date of the publication, October 10. The series of speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute spoke on capitalism, morality, foreign policy, and environmentalism. In New York City, the NYU Objectivist Club sponsored a full-day event on April 7, with speakers such as Dr. Andrew Berstein, Dr. Shoshana Milgram, and Peter Schwartz. Further testament to the continuing relevance of the novel Atlas Shrugged is its presence on nationwide polls. In a 1991 Library of Congress poll, readers rated it second only to the Bible among books that had had the most influence on their lives. That influence on readers continues. More recently, on April 9, 2008, Reuters posted an article about a Harris poll that asked people to rate their 10 most favorite books. Atlas Shrugged made the list along with To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Rings, and The Bible. Two years before the Atlas Shrugged anniversary, Rand’s centenary year, 2005, was marked by celebratory events and evaluative scholarship. Writing for a two-part Centenary Symposium in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, scholars explored everything from Rand’s influence on American fiction to teaching economics through Rand. In terms of her contemporary influence, the proliferation of her impact on the culture is telling. From meaningful treatment in a variety of scholarly journals, reference works, and books to a marked effect on illustrated media, “Rand has so profoundly entered the Zeitgeist” that she has become an “iconic” figure.4 Both Jeff Riggenbach and Chris Sciabarra also highlight Rand’s direct and indirect presence in popular culture. Steve Ditko, the cocreator of “Spider-Man,” and Frank Miller, noteworthy for his Batman “Dark Knight” series, are two who openly credit their debt to Rand.5 In more tradition fiction genres

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Rand-like characters and out-and-out references to Rand are present in everything from Gene Bell Villada’s The Pianist Who Loved Ayn Rand to Tobias Wolff’s Old School. Riggenbach identifies three waves or generations of writers of what is packaged as popular fiction who have been influenced by Rand. The first generation (Antediluvians) is the group that began publishing during Rand’s lifetime; the first generation began to publish after her death and the second generation is that group writing and publishing in the twenty-first century.6 A recent example of the latter group is Nicholas Dykes’s Old Nick’s Guide to Happiness, which John Hospers describes as being an “enthralling philosophical mystery story” that does justice to Rand’s views.7 In addition to Rand’s emergence as an iconic figure in popular culture, the literary scholarship since her death has shown a marked increase. The 1990s were a breakthrough decade for Rand literary studies.8 Noteworthy in this upsurge is the international character of the critical interest. The Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand anthology includes scholars from Norway, France, and Australia. In the United States, The Ayn Rand Institute and The Atlas Society are the two most prominent contemporary advocates for Rand’s enduring significance.9 The Atlas Society is an offshoot of the Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS), which David Kelley founded after his split with Peikoff and ARI in 1991. The IOS then became The Objectivist Center (TOC). When the Center moved from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Washington DC, it became The Atlas Society (TAS). The Ayn Rand Institute, located in California, created an arm of its program, The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, in Washington DC in 2008. The Center is described as their public policy and outreach

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division. These two Objectivist groups publish magazines, journals, sponsor campus and community groups as well as a number of Internet sites and forums. Both ARI and TAS sponsor yearly weeklong summer conferences at different sites around the country. In 2008 the Objectivist Summer Conference, sponsored by ARI was held in Newport Beach, California; the 2007 Conference was in Telluride, Colorado; in 2006 Boston was the site and is projected as a return site for the 2009 conference. The nine-day conference includes optional courses as well as general session lectures. The Atlas Society calls their event a Summer Seminar. Portland, Oregon, was the 2008 venue; in 2007 Towson University near Baltimore, Maryland, was the site of the Summer Seminar. Chapman University in Orange, California, was the location in 2006. In 2008, besides the Summer Seminar a Graduate Seminar was also offered at George Washington University in Washington DC. Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, UCLA, and George Mason University are some of the universities that have Objectivist Clubs. Nor are the clubs restricted to the United States. McGill University in Montreal, Canada, also has an active Objectivist Club. ARI’s annual report to members indicates its support of more than 40 college and university campus clubs around the world. An ongoing project of both ARI and TAS is to provide the Objectivist perspective on any number of contemporary issues. Members get regular e-mails announcing that this or that person will appear on television or radio. For example, Ed Hudgins, TAS Executive Director, spoke at a Tax Day press conference at the National Press Club. The event was broadcast several times on CSPAN TV. Yaron Brook of ARI appears weekly on Fox Business News Network. Opinion pieces (Op Ed) appear from time to

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time in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers. In the field of education, Rand’s relevance has grown considerably and all indications are for a continuing impact. In the early days of the movement, there was consistent complaint from Objectivist circles about the academy’s antagonism toward Rand and her ideas. In literature departments her works were not considered worthy of serious literary reflection. In philosophy departments she was dismissed as a figure of popular culture. Indications are that the situation is changing. In July 13, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education devoted a substantial portion, four lengthy articles, of its “Research and Faculty” section to “Ayn Rand’s Academic Legacy.” David Glenn, the main author, notes that his report is mostly about that group of scholars who see the serious study of Rand in academe as a key to cultural renewal. However, the articles also cover evidence of resistance to securing Rand a place in the university canon. In “Advocates of Objectivism Make New Inroads” Glenn chronicles the story of why the philosophy department of the San Marcos campus of Texas State University turned down a longterm grant from the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Studies to fund the salary for a professor whose specialty would be Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Glenn cites faculty who objected to the idea of buying “a spot in the philosophical canon for Rand” and their concerns that the grant would be “enforcing rigid ideological conformity” (2007, A7). One of the professors who led the opposition to accepting the grant cited the questionable scholarly practices associated with ARI, such as the refusal to acknowledge the work of scholars not allied with it. A sidebar, humorously titled “Rand Grant Universities,” lists seven universities in

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that category: Ashland, Brown, Princeton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburg, the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas State University at San Marcos, which had accepted a small grant to fund a lecture series before it rejected the larger grant cited above. Much of the brouhaha in Higher Education has to do with the academic ethics of accepting grants from foundations that require an ideological litmus test for possible grantees. The Anthem Foundation (Anthem being the title of Rand’s dystopian novel) was founded in 2001 by John McCasky and a group of like-minded friends in the software industry. Their common concern was that Ayn Rand, who had been a key influence in their lives, was not being taught at universities, and they sought a way to remedy that. Another substantial support for Objectivist studies is BB&T. In 2002 the BB&T Charitable Foundation made a $1,000,000 gift to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s philosophy department to support a visiting professor or postdoctoral fellow. The chair of the department at UNC stated that neither BB&T nor Anthem have tried to direct department curriculum or policy. The BB&T Foundation is the brainchild of John Allison IV, chair and chief executive office of BB&T Corporation, a financial holding company with billions of dollars in assets. In his address at the Atlas Shrugged fiftieth anniversary celebration in Washington, David Kelley presented his perspective on progress in the academy. Commenting on his own field of philosophy, Kelley observed that many textbooks on Ethics now include readings on Rand, particularly as an example of egoism. If there has not been much progress in accepting Rand’s ideas, he wryly reported that the vehemence of the hostility to her has diminished.

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Cutting it finely, he reported his findings that although university philosophers may not necessarily respect Rand, they now, at least, tolerate people who are engaged in scholarship on and respect Rand. Of key importance, in terms of academic respectability, is the establishment of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS). Unlike some of the other publications from Objectivist groups, JARS, edited by independent scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Professor of Literature Stephen Cox, University of California, San Diego and Professor of Philosophy Roderick T. Long, Auburn University, is a multidisciplinary refereed journal that is indexed and abstracted in major indices. The 2008 fall/winter issue marks its tenth year anniversary. Although financial investments go a long way toward assuring an Objectivist presence on college campuses, not all visions for maintaining Rand-friendly sites of higher education have been as fruitful as what has been accomplished by foundations. “Train Your Mind to Change the World,” an article by Elyse Ashburn reports on efforts to establish a for-profit liberal arts college in Virginia. Founders College is the dream of Gary Hull. Notwithstanding the financial support of Hull, the college, which opened in 2007, closed in spring of 2008. The failure of Founders, however, has not dampened the spirits of those who, appalled by the state of higher education in the United States, still have the goal of creating an institution of higher learning, free from government funds and intervention. Currently, Marsha Familiaro Enright, President of the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, who founded the highly rated Council Oak Montessori School in Chicago, is raising funds to create what she terms, a rational college alternative: The College of the United States.

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Higher Education is not the only target for Objectivist aspirations. Rand’s growing relevance in public education is even more marked. This is due mainly to the efforts of the Ayn Rand Institute. In 1993 ARI began a program of essay contests for high school and college students. Essay entries have increased almost every year of the program. A record was set in 2007 with 14,062 students submitting essays.10 The competition attracts contestants from all over the world. The 2007 Atlas Shrugged Essay winner was a Mr. John DeWald, a student at University College London in England.11 The increased prize money, twice as much as in the previous year for the top categories, attracted a large response; 50 students in all won prizes that ranged from US$50 to US$2000, the first place prize was US$10,000. In concert with the essay contest, ARI funds a Free Books to Teachers program. Books are provided to high school teachers who would like to teach Rand but are hampered financially by school funding deficiencies. In May 2008 the ARI newsletter Impact announced that more than a million copies of Rand’s novels had been distributed under the free books program. The article notes that although the great majority of students who read these books will not become Objectivists, some will and the others will be cognizant of Rand’s name and her importance as a writer and thinker. The article concludes that there is a “massive potential of the Free Books program” to “transform the culture.” As Rand’s philosophy encompasses many fields so does her contemporary relevance. If anything, the twenty-first century business world is even more tuned in to what Rand had to say than was the entrepreneurial community during her lifetime. It should be remembered that her last speech, shortly before her death, was to the National

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Committee for Monetary Reform. It is from that world of business that so many of the big donors and key supporters of the ongoing programs derive. Although there is no direct connection between Rand and The American Enterprise Institute, it is another of those organizations whose ideals and philosophy mirror and parallel the ones directly influenced by Rand. Like Libertarian and Objectivist think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute was created to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism. It is dedicated to limited government, private enterprise, and individual liberty and responsibility. The health of such an enterprise attests to the currency of the ideas Rand espoused. The entertainment world is still another venue in which Rand’s contemporary relevance is writ large. Over the years, the quality and cache of the individuals who sought to produce a film adaptation of Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, is ongoing testimony to her significance. Albert S. Ruddy, producer of The Godfather, is but one of the earliest key figures in the entertainment world who attempted to produce a film version of Atlas. He speaks of literally wooing Rand to get her consent to film the book. Their rapport foundered on her refusal to give up script approval. In the late 1970s, Rand worked with Sterling Silliphant, whose screen credits included the award-winning Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night, to write an eight-hour miniseries script for Atlas Shrugged. The project was never completed. Each time rumors were floated that a movie was in the offing, fans have played guessing games about possible casting. Early favorites for key roles including Rand’s own casting ideas, have long since past their primes or plausibility in the parts.12 A January 2007 New

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York Times article divides the blame for the failure of the various attempts to produce a film version among Rand herself, her Objectivist heirs, and the “vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.”13 Notwithstanding past failures, Rand’s continuing relevance has kept the prospect of the film project alive. As of this writing a group of what the New York Times calls “heavy hitters” is taking on the difficult task of making at once an entertaining movie and an acceptable presentation of the philosophy promulgated in this novel that has been called “The Bible of Objectivism.” John Tagliafero, CEO of Cybex International, has owned the rights for some 15 years. Now, Howard and Karen Baldwin, producers of Ray, the film biography of Ray Charles that won Jamie Foxx a 2004 Academy Award, have joined him as producers. Lionsgate is the production and distribution company. Randall Wallace, whose script for Braveheart was nominated for numerous awards, has completed a 129page adaptation and Angelina Jolie, surely one of the twenty-first century’s hottest box office stars, has signed on to play the lead role of Dagny Taggart. Vadim Perelman is the chosen director. Script magazine article calls their task one of the “legendary impossibilities” of filming an “impossible novel.”14 Not all assessments of Rand’s continuing relevance are sanguine. Writing in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Nicholas Dykes (2004) found limited interest in Rand and her ideas in England, even to the point that he could find only one obituary and that in an architecture journal (395). He does find one positive note, however, and that is that her novels are readily available in most British bookshops, indication, at least, of an abiding interest by readers.

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Evidence of that interest in Rand’s books also continues elsewhere. Strong substantiation is the fact that data compiled through the end of 2007 show that since publication 25 million have been sold, and the chart of paperback novel sales shows an upward trajectory. The year 2007 was a year of record sales. Impact of May 2008, lists individual sales numbers for the novels with The Fountainhead at more than 6.5 million and Atlas Shrugged at a bit more than 6 million. In all, the novels have sold more than 20 million copies with the nonfiction books bringing the total to 25 million. These numbers do not include sales of translations, which are often difficult to track. Three new titles in Spanish were recently announced: Filosopfia: Quién la Necessita, El Manifesto Romántico, and Capitalism: El Ideal Desconocido. The fact that new translations are being published is another indication of Rand’s ongoing relevance in more than the English-speaking world.15 Continuing interest in Rand is also evidenced by the small but steady increase in publications that explore her life, works, and influence. When she died in 1982, the only biographical study was a brief, carefully monitored essay called “Who Is Ayn Rand?” in a book by the same name. Barbara Branden taped some 40 hours of interviews in preparation for writing this authorized piece and used them and her personal experience, research, and numerous interviews with those who knew and worked with Rand to write the full-length unauthorized biography The Passion of Ayn Rand, published in 1986 after Rand’s death but in process while she was still alive. Branden says she called Rand and informed her of the project. There was enough interest in Branden’s biography to inspire a television adaptation, which was aired to much critical acclaim, including an Emmy for Helen Mirren for her portrayal of

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Rand. Barbara Branden’s biography was the first public acknowledgment of the sexual relationship between Ayn Rand and Branden’s then husband, Nathaniel Branden. Several years later in 1989, Nathaniel Branden added his version of the story in Judgment Day, followed a decade later by My Years with Ayn Rand, a revised version of the first book. Currently, there are two new biographies in progress. Anne C. Heller is working on one and Shoshana Milgram Knapp on another. Heller’s biography, due out in the spring of 2009 is titled, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Heller’s book is based on new research done in Russia and in other hitherto unpublished materials as well as interviews with those who knew and were affected by Rand. Knapp’s biography is being done with the cooperation and approval of the Ayn Rand Institute and thus will have access to primary sources held in the Ayn Rand Archives. Her study will present Rand’s vision of the human ideal— the individual, rational mind in triumphant action—as the integrating principle of Rand’s public and private life. It will cover the years up to the publication of the final novel, Atlas Shrugged. Although the Atlas Society and the Ayn Rand Institute are the direct purveyors of Rand’s ongoing legacy, other organizations or movements have been influenced by her ideas and are therefore important indicators of Rand’s ongoing intellectual heritage. The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University runs numerous summer institutes around the country. When it hands out T-shirts to all the students and faculty of those institutes, the T-shirts are emblazoned with a parody of the faces on Mt. Rushmore. Tom Jefferson’s likeness remains, but instead of the other presidents, he is joined by Murray

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Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand.16 The IHS was founded in 1961 by Dr. F. A. “Baldy” Harper, who had taught economics at Cornell University. He believed that through education about human affairs and freedom, students could develop the inspiration to foster peace and prosperity. Having lived through two destructive world wars and the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, Harper still believed in what he called “the practice and potentials of freedom.” The Institute for Humane Studies’ main mission is to educate intelligent and talented students in the principles and practice of freedom with the goal of helping to change the current collectivist climate of opinion to one that encourages liberty and individualism. To that end they award some US$400,000 in scholarships yearly to students from universities around the world to attend their summer seminars or for internships. In the earlier chapter about “Relevance and Influence” Rand’s impact on the early founders of the nascent Libertarian movement was noted. That influence continues into the twenty-first century. A November 2008 article “Bob Barr Talks” questions the best-known Libertarian presidential candidate thus far about his being influenced by Rand. Although he had formerly won election to the House of Representatives as a Republican, Barr joined the Libertarian Party in 2006 and was selected as the ninth man to head the Libertarian Party in the run for President in 2008. Asked about his philosophy, Barr noted his “very high regard for Ayn Rand,” although he observed that neither he was nor did he know any perfect Randians. Barr identified Rand’s ideas as being at the core of the Libertarian Party, especially in terms of the limitations of government power.17

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As world events unroll, particularly as government involvement in economies eventuate in disastrous effects, the relevance of Rand continues to loom large. A January 2009 Wall Street Journal article underlines the ominous parallels between the situation Rand depicts in Atlas Shrugged and the economic crisis in the United States at the time of the writing.18 The author, a senior economics writer for the newspaper, cites the similarities between the successive bailout and economic stimulus plans unveiled almost weekly in Washington and the “economic lunacy that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ parodied in 1957.” Noting the downward spiral created when politicians responding to crises create more regulations, programs, and laws that only make the situation worse, the article reminds readers that in a situation like that, the productive sectors of the economy eventually collapse under the burden. Rand named the wealth redistributionists in the novel, moochers and looters, who use benevolent language to mask the basic felonious intent of their laws and edicts. Moore makes the convincing argument that what was considered exaggeration in the novel is not as absurd as current reality, which seems to reward incompetence and malfeasance with handouts and subsidies, although it denigrates as greedy resourceful business people who create jobs and wealth. It is difficult to predict which writers and thinkers will continue to be read and discussed years after their death. For every Jonathan Swift, there are dozens of Wilkie Collins and Colley Cibbers. The names of many of the dramatists who won the laurels at the Dionysian festivals have long faded into obscurity, whereas we still read some second and third place winners. Even closer to our era, playwrights such as Karel Capek, whose R.U.R gave the world the term “robot,” was a staple in drama anthologies of the 1950s and

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1960s. He is nowhere to be found in contemporary theatre texts. On the one hand, reading Khalil Gibran was de rigueur in the twentieth century, but his works have little resonance in the twenty-first. On the other hand, writers once forgotten are resurrected. The women’s movement and the Black civil rights movements have resuscitated some of these writers. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. Now she is read as a leading light of African-American literature while her hometown is celebrated as an historic district in the middle of Orlando with a festival every year. Most of Faulkner’s works were out of print when he won the Nobel Prize. Now his works are considered a major stylistic influence on world literature. As has been demonstrated, Rand’s literary works are slowly moving out of a category of popular fiction into the realm of masterworks.19 However, Rand has an advantage over most creative writers in that, unlike writers who work only in the realm of fiction, Rand has the added benefit of being a major figure in both fiction and nonfiction. Her influence is felt in a diversity of disciplines, including economics, business, aesthetics, and politics. In the continuing and continuous conflict between those forces in the world that promote individuality, freedom, and human dignity and their opposite, those forces that encourage conformity, obedience, and subservience to the group, Rand’s relevance should continue to be felt.

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Notes

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The Life

Transliterations from the Cyrillic alphabet can vary. Publications from The Ayn Rand Institute spell her name Alisa. Chris Sciabarra, citing the Archive of the University of Leningrad, spells the name Alissa. On her liner ticket for the United States, she had already anglicized her name to Alice. On her marriage license, Rand also lists herself as Alice. See also “The Rand Transcript, Revisited,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, No. 1, (Fall 2005): 1–17. The specific information about the Stoiunim Gymnasium is on p. 16, n. 9. Shoshana Milgram Knapp has demonstrated a possible link between Steinbeck’s ideas in East of Eden and Rand’s The Fountainhead. “ ‘Nothing good was ever created by two men’: Parallel Passages in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden,” John Steinbeck: Global Dimensions. Kyoko Ariki, Luchen Li, and Scott Pugh (Eds). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 25–38. Sciabarra (1995) explored the validity of this recollection as a result of his interviews with both relatives and other academics, who were well acquainted with Lossky’s situation (84–91). Michael S. Berliner (Ed.), Ayn Rand Russian Writings on Hollywood. Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999. The volume includes the facsimiles and translations of two essays, “Pola Negri” and “Hollywood: American City of Movies.” In addition, there is a copy of Rand’s movie diary and lists of her favorite actors and actresses. Appearance, Donahue WGN-TV Chicago, IL, April 29, 1980. According to several people who knew the couple in those days, Rand’s ability to stay in this country legally was a key issue in bringing about the marriage. Branden quotes a number of their acquaintances about the fact that although Ayn was crazy

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about Frank, the same intensity of feeling was not reciprocated (Passion, 93). Robert Mayhew, “We the Living: ’36 and ’59,” Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living,” Robert Mayhew (Ed.), New York: Lexington Books, 2004, 185–219. Mayhew details the changes in everything from punctuation to philosophy. “Author Wins Royalty Row,” New York Times, February 11, 1936, 19. The term is used advisedly. Bennett Cerf (1974, 253) recalls that when he suggested reducing the length of John Galt’s speech to Rand, she countered, “Would you cut the Bible?” Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, 272; N. Branden, Judgment Day, 158, B. Branden writes that she, Nathaniel, and Frank (Rand’s husband) were “sworn to lifelong secrecy.” In N. Branden’s version five months after he and Ayn acquainted their spouses with the fact that they were in love with each other, their sexual affair began in January 1955.

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An Exposition of Rand’s Ideas

The Ayn Rand Institute continues to publish much of Rand’s unpublished works, mostly nonfiction, such as her marginalia, her journals, the letters, and her early work. The works I refer to here are the thematically philosophical work in progress or published during her lifetime. In-text page citations will be from For the New Intellectual for the speeches from the novels reprinted in it unless otherwise indicated. Airtight was Rand’s original title. Robert Merrill thinks otherwise. He calls her early writings “clearly and explicitly Nietzschean—so much so that even her later substantial textual revisions were insufficient to conceal the evidence” (1991, 21). However, he concludes that it was in the struggle against Nietzsche’s influence that she was able to clarify her philosophy of Objectivism (27). Later in The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand would challenge that conception and define selfishness as a positive value. Various studies follow from Rand’s declaration. Andrew Bernstein delivered a two-hour lecture, put out on cassette by Second

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Renaissance Books in 1994. His lecture is titled The Mind as Hero in Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto of the Mind is the title of my study for Twayne’s Masterwork series. Much of this explication of John Galt’s speech appears in “John Galt’s Argument for Human Productivity in Atlas Shrugged,” University of Windsor Review 21, No. 1, 1988, 73–83, coauthored with Robert Webking. When discussing Rand’s articulation of her ideas, in some cases I will use the term “men” in the generic sense because that is the way she used it. It is obvious that she meant all human beings, male or female. Spillane’s popularity has waned since Rand’s time, whereas Fleming’s James Bond is more popular than ever, particularly in his film incarnation. James Joyce, as the father of stream-of-consciousness style of writing, and Franz Kafka, whose nightmarish presentation of man in an unintelligible universe, would be two of Rand’s bêtes noires of modern literature. The Ideas of Ayn Rand, 124. Much of the book had been serialized in The Objectivist magazine from 1967 to 1968. “From the Horse’s Mouth,” the chapter that precedes “Kant versus Sullivan, “ is occasioned by Rand’s reading of a 1898 publication Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine. Works that refute or critique Rand’s philosophy will be covered in the chapters on reception and contemporary relevance. The main purpose of this chapter is an explication of her ideas as she presented them with minimal reference to other scholars of her ideas. “Ayn Rand’s Philosophy for Living on Earth,” Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond. Edward W. Younkins (Ed.) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005, 81–110.

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Reception and Influence of Rand’s Work

This author last saw the play in production in the 1990s in Ruidoso, New Mexico, a resort community.

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Michael S. Berliner. “Reviews of ‘We the Living,’ ” Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living.” Lanham, MD: 2004, 145–54. Berliner provides names and dates of the individual reviews. Rand did the major reediting. The black and white 174- minute fi lm with English subtitles is available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore. As of this writing, plans are to make a film of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie in the part of Dagny. However, over the years there have been numerous pronouncements of forthcoming versions, so it is difficult to be optimistic. I can only hope that by the time this book is published I will have been proven wrong. “The Age of Envy,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Peter Schwartz (Ed.), New York: Meridian, 1999, 147. This is a new and expanded edition of The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution published in 1971. Schwartz has added an introduction and additional essays. King elaborates on Rand’s effect on her in a Playboy interview in 1976. “Ayn Rand: The Reluctant Feminist,” Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (Eds). University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, 25–46. The Cato Institute is a nonprofit think tank with strong libertarian leanings, headquartered in Washington, DC. It regularly publishes studies, papers, and books and holds seminars on public policy. The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University acts as a libertarian talent scout, identifying, developing, and supporting the brightest graduate and undergraduate students with scholarships, internships, and seminars. The IHS is housed at George Mason University and sponsors seminars and workshops dedicated to the concepts of liberty.

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Tisdale, S. D. (2007), “A Celebration of Self: Ayn Rand’s Masterpiece—Or the Worst Book of Its Time.” U.S. News & World Report, 72. Rubin, H. (2007), “Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism,” The New York Times, September 15, C1, 8.

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The roster of speakers were, besides myself and Anne Heller, David Kelley (Philosophy), Tibor Machan (Philosophy), William Thomas (Economics), David Mayer (History), Charles Murray (American Enterprise Institute-Political Science), Edward Younkins (Accountancy), Ed Snider (CEO Comcast Spectacor), Rob Bradley (Institute for Energy Research), Fred Smith (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Edward Crane (The Cato Institute), Edward Hudgins (The Atlas Society-Economics), Nathaniel Branden (Psychology), and Barbara Branden (Philosophy). Sciabarra (2004) lists some 47 scholarly journals and 18 reference works as evidence. He even notes that Cliff Notes, a popular student aid series, includes three Rand titles. Sciabarra (2004) quotes a number of Rand-inspired passages in Ditko’s stories. Ditko’s character Mr. A delivers a speech parallel to d’Anconia’s “Money is the root of all good” in Atlas Shrugged (11). Miller states, in an “Afterword” how he was drawn to the ideas Rand developed in Atlas Shrugged (12). Riggenbach (2004) provides descriptions and critiques of these various generations of writers. He concludes his assessment, “Ayn Rand has exercised a truly decisive influence on a surprisingly large number of both well- and less-known authors of American popular fiction over the last forty years” (141). Other reviews and information about the book can be found at www.oldnicksguidetohappiness.co.uk My 2005 article details the paucity of critical studies before Rand’s death and the upward trajectory since the 1980s. For this chapter on Contemporary Relevance, I will focus mainly on the twenty-first century. Although I also reference things that happened before 2000, the main focus will be on twenty-first century activities. As Rand has been dead for over a generation, this best illustrates her continuing relevance. “New Record for Anthem Essay Contest” (2007), Impact 13, 5, 1–2. I note the 2007 winner to indicate that the entries are not limited to the United States. The 2008 winner is Robert Sanders, a math major from University of California, Los Angeles. Erika Holzer remembers long discussion with Rand on the topic. Holzer reports that Rand’s favorite for Galt was Robert Redford. Although they never settled on an actress to play Dagny, Rand

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being a Barbara Stanwyck fan, Holzer remembers Faye Dunaway as a strong contender. http://www.wordofatlasshrugged.com/eh ayn rand casts atlas shrugged.asp Brown, Kimberly (2007), “Ayn Rand No Longer Has Script Approval,” The New York Times, 9,14. Verini, Bob (2007), “The World on His Shoulders: Randall Wallace takes on Atlas Shrugged,” Script, 30-35. The New Ayn Rand Companion: Revised and Updated lists some 11 other translations of Rand’s works, 131. Hayek is the subject of another of the volumes in this series. “Bob Barr Talks,” Interview by David Weigel, Reason, November 2008, 27–34. Stephen Moore. (2009), “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” The Wall Street Journal, 9 January, Editorial Page. Volumes on both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were added to the Twayne Masterwork Series.

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Bibliography

I. Works by Rand 1. Books Anthem. (1938), London: Cassell and Company; revised edition, Los Angeles: Pamphleteers, 1946; Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1953. Paperback: New York: New American Library, 1946. 50th Anniversary Edition, New York: Dutton, 1996. Atlas Shrugged. (1957), New York: Random House, Paperback: New York: New American Library. 35th Anniversary Edition, New York: Dutton, 1992. The Ayn Rand Column. (1991), Oceanside, CA: Second Renaissance Books. Robert Mayhew (Ed.) New Milford, CT: Second Renaissance Books, 1995. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. (1995), Robert Mayhew (Ed.) New Milford, CT: Second Renaissance Books, 1995. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. (1966), New York: New American Library, Paperback: New York: New American Library, 1967. The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction. (1983), Leonard Peikoff (Ed). New York: New American Library, 1984. For the New Intellectual. (1961), New York: Random House, Paperback: New York: New American Library, 1961. The Fountainhead. (1943), New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Paperback: New York: New American Library, 1952. 50th Anniversary Edition, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1993. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. (1979), New York: New American Library, Paperback only. Expanded second edition, Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (Eds). New York: Meridian, 1990. Journals of Ayn Rand. (1997), David Harriman (Ed.). New York: Dutton.

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Bibliography

Letters of Ayn Rand. (1995), Michael S. Berliner (Ed.). New York: Dutton. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. (197l), New York: New American Library, Paperback only. Revised and expanded second edition 1975. Revised, expanded, and republished as Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (Ed.) With introduction and additional essays by Peter Schwartz. New York: Meridian, 1999. Night of January 16th. (1936), New York: Longmans, Green. Paperback: New York: World Publishing, 1968. New American Library, 197l. Philosophy: Who Needs It. (1982), New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The Romantic Manifesto. (1969), New York: The World Publishing, 1969. Paperback: New York: New American Library, 197l. The Virtue of Selfishness. (1964), New York: New American Library, Paperback only. The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. (1988), Leonard Peikoff (Ed.) and additional essays. New York: New American Library, 1988. We the Living. (1936), New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Cassell, 1937 . New York: Random House, 1959. Paperback: New York: New American Library, 1959. 60th Anniversary Edition, New York: Signet, 1996.

2. Newsletters Rand et al. (1962–65), The Objectivist Newsletter. Volumes 1–4. New York: The Objectivist . —(1966–71), The Objectivist. Volumes 5–10. New York: The Objectivist. Rand and Peikoff. (1971–76), The Ayn Rand Letter. Volumes 1–4. New York: The Ayn Rand Letter.

3. Articles, Short Stories, Letters “Ayn Rand Explains.” (1976), Letter. New York Times, August 11, 34, col. 5. “Ayn Rand Replies to Criticism of Her Film.” (1949), Letter. New York Times, July 24, sec. 2, 4, col. 1.

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“Introduction.” (1983), Calumet “K” by Merwin-Webster. Originally published New York: Macmillan, 1901. Version with Rand introduction reissued by Palo Alto Book Service. “Introduction.” (1983), The God of the Machine by Isabel Patterson. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943; 1964 version with Rand introduction published in Caldwell, Idaho, by Caxton Printers; reissued by Palo Alto Book Service. “Introduction.” (1982), The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Stein and Day. “Introduction.” (1983), Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, translated by Lowell Bair, New York: Bantam Books , 1962. Reissued by Palo Alto Book Service. “J.F.K.—High Class Beatnik?” (1960), Human Events, XVII, September 1, 393–394. “Let Us Alone!” (1964), Yale Political Magazine. Summer. “The Money-Making Personality.” (1963), Cosmopolitan, April, 37–41. “The New Left Represents an Intellectual Vacuum.” (1970), New York Times Magazine, May 17, 113, 116. “The Only Path to Tomorrow.” (1944), Reader’s Digest XXXIV, January, 88–90. Rand, Nader et al. (1972), “Do Our Tax Laws Need a Shake-Up?” Saturday Review of the Society, LV, No. 43 (Nov.), 45–52. “A Screen Guide for Americans.” (1947), Plain Talk, November, 37–42. “Textbook of Americanism.” (1946), The Vigil. “Why I Like Stamp Collecting.” (1971), Minkus Stamp Journal VI, No. 2, 2–5.

4. Translations These are the translations listed in the National Union Catalog and therefore easily accessible in major libraries.

Atlas Shrugged La Rebelion de Atlas . (1961), trans. Julio Fernandez-Yanez. Barcelona: Caralt. Mered ha-nefilim. (n.d.), Tel Aviv: S. Peridamo.

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The Fountainhead Der ewige Quell. (1946), trans. Harry Kahn. Zurich: Morgarten Verlag. El Manantial. (1966), trans. Luis de Paola. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. Ke-ma’yan ha-mitgaber: roman. (1958), Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at S. Fridman. La Fonte Meravigliosa. (n.d.), trans. Giangi Colombo Taccani and Maria Silvi (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi). La Source Vive. (1945), trans. Jane Fillion. Geneve: J. H. Jejeber.

Night of January 16th La Nuit du 16 Janvier. (1946), trans. Marcel Dubois. Paris: Editions Billaudot.

The Virtue of Selfishness Cnota egoizmu. (1989), Warszawa: Oficyna Liberalow.

We the Living Los Que Vivimos. (1965), trans. Fernando Acevedo. Mexico: Editorial Diana. Vi, der lever. (1946), trans. Else Brudenell-Bruce. Copenhagen: Berlingske forlag.

5. Soviet Publications Rosenbaum, A. (1926), Hollywood: American Movie-City. Leningrad: Cinema Printing. (Published without the author’s knowledge). —(1925), Pola Negri. Leningrad and Moscow: Cinematographic Publishing House of the Russian Federation.

II. Works about Rand 1. Books Alexander, J. (1988), Ayn Rand, Libertarians, and the Fifth Revolution. San Francisco: Sitnalta Press.

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The Film Crowther, B. (1949), “Gary Cooper Plays an Idealistic Architect in Film Version of ‘The Fountainhead,’ ” New York Times, July 9, 8, col. 5. —(1949), “In a Glass House,” New York Times, July 17, sec. 2, 1. McCarten, J. (1949), Review. The New Yorker, July 16, 46–7. Review in Good Housekeeping 129, July 1949, 200. Review in Newsweek, July 25, 1949, 76. Review in Time, July 11, 1949, 95.

4. Ideal “ ‘Ideal’: A Tour de Force from Ayn Rand,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1989, F 17.

5. Night of January 16th Atkinson, B. (1935), Review in New York Times, September 17, 26, col. 4. Barnes, C. (1973), “ ‘Penthouse Legend,’ A Courtroom Drama,” New York Times, February 23, 20, col. 1. “Blind Jury Finds a Slayer Guilty.” (l935), New York Times, December 16, 22, col. 5. Garebian, K. (1987–88), “ ‘Night of January 16th’: Play Review,” Journal of Canadian Studies Winter, 137–8. “Play Uses Audience in Jury Box on Stage,” (1935), New York Times, September 10, 26, col. 1.

6. The Unconquered Hartung, P. T. (1940), “The Stage and Screen,” The Commonweal, March 1, 412.

7. We the Living Belitt, B. (1936), “The Red and the White,” The Nation, April 22, 522–4.

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149

Bradford, R. W. (1996), “We the Revising,” (Review of 60th Anniversary Edition) Liberty, July, 54–5. Cannon, L. E. (1936), “The Quick and the Dead,” The Christian Century, July 1, 941. Straus, H. (1936), “Soviet Triangle,” New York Times Book Review, April 19, 7.

IV. Reviews of Rand’s Works: The Nonfiction 1. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia Hospers, J. (1997), “Leaving a Margin for Error,” Liberty, September, 67–8.

2. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal Christian Century. (1966), November 23, 1449. Gillett, E. (1967), “Other Books,” The Freeman 17, March, 189–90. O’Shea, D. G. (1967), American, January 21, 118–20. Tracy, H. (1966), “Here We Go Gathering Nuts,” New Republic, December 10, 27–8. VanDerhoof, J. (1966), Review in Library Journal, December 1, 84.

3. For the New Intellectual Browning, N. L. (196l), “Limping Crusade for Intellectualism,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 19, sec. 6, 5. Caritas, Sister M. C. H. M. (1965), Review in Social Justice Review, May, 69. Donahugh, R. H. (1961), Review in Library Journal, May 1, 1781. Hook, S. (1961), “Each Man for Himself,” New York Times Book Review, April 9, 3, 28. Review. (1960), Kirkus Service Reviews, December 15, 1065–6. Review. (1961), The Journal of Family Welfare, 8, No. 1, 50–1. Rosenblum, J. (1961), “The Ends and Means of Ayn Rand,” The New Republic 144, April 24, 28–9.

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Bibliography

4. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Bynagle, H. (1979), Review. Library Journal V. 104, May 1, 1062. O’Neill, W. F. (1980), Review. Teaching Philosophy 3, Fall, 511–16.

5. Journals of Ayn Rand Brooks, D. (1997), “The Wonder That Is Me,” The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 38. Sciabarra, C. (1998), “Bowderlizing [sic] Ayn Rand,” Liberty, September, 65–6.

6. Letters of Ayn Rand Bradford, R. W. (1995), “ Rand: Behind the Self-Mythology,” Liberty, September, 51–56. Cox, C. (1995), “Behind ‘The Fountainhead,’ ” The New York Times Book Review, August 6, sec. 7, 9. Frank, J. A. (1995), Review, Book World 25, July 9, 4. Overmyer, J. (1996), Review, Choice 33, February, 952. Sciabarra, C. (1995), “Rand the Living,” Reason 27, November, 52–4. Winters, D. (1995), Review, Choice 91, June 1–15, 1720.

7. Philosophy: Who Needs It Davis, L. J. (1982), “Ayn Rand’s Last Shrug,” Washington Post, December 12, 7. Den Uyl, D. (1983), “Rand’s Last Words,” Reason, May, 71–4. Svetkey, B. (1984), “The Resurrection of Ayn Rand,” Boston Review 9, December, 28.

8. The Romantic Manifesto Cattani, R. J. (1970), “Ayn Rand and All That,” Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 11. Hughes, J. W. (1970), “None Dare Call It Reason,” The New Leader, March 2, 21–2.

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Michelson, P. (1970), “Fictive Babble,” New Republic, February 21, 21–4. Review. (1969), Kirkus Service Reviews, September 15, 1049. Review. (1969), Publisher’s Weekly, October 6, 48. Wadsworth, C. E. (1970), Review, The Library Journal, February 15, 378–9.

9. The Virtue of Selfishness Brodie, J. M. (1967), “Summaries and Comments,” Review of Metaphysics, June, 729. Colimore, V. J. (1966), Review, Best Sellers, January 1, 386–7. Loughan, T. (1966), Review, American, February 5, 208. Review. (1965), Choice 2, April, 100. Review. (1965), Kirkus Service Reviews, October, 1060.

V. Reference Articles and Obituaries American Authors and Books. 1962 edition, 603. American Novelists of Today, 1951 edition, 350. (1982), “Ayn Rand, ‘Fountainhead’ Author, Dies,” New York Times, March 8, 6. (1982), “Ayn Rand, R.I.P,” Reason 14, May 1, 13. Bryant, J. H. (1970), The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and Its Intellectual Background. New York: The Free Press, 169–71. Buckley, W. F. (1982), “On the Right: Ayn Rand RIP,” National Review, April 2, 380–1. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of World Literature, 1973 edition. New York: Morrow & Company. Childs, R. A. Jr. (1982), “Ayn Rand 1905–1982,” Inquiry, April 26, 33–4. Chira, S. (1982), “Tributes to Ayn Rand Stress Wide Influence of Her Work,” New York Times, March 10, 3. Contemporary Authors. (1975), Vols. 13–16, Detroit: Gale Research, 654–6.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. (1975), Vol. 3, Detroit: Gale Research., 423–4. Contemporary Novelists, second edition. (1976), New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1139–41. Gladstein, M. (1981), “Ayn Rand,” American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, Vol. 3, Mainiero, L. (Ed.). New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. 438–39. Paperback, Vol. 2, 167–8. —(1989), “Ayn Rand,” Notable Women in the American Theatre, A. M. Robinson, V. M. Roberts and M. S. Barrenger (Eds). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. —(1989), “Ayn Rand—Sidelights,” Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, Vol. 27, Detroit: Gale Research, 395–9. Handbook to American Literature. (1975), 407. Heyl, J. A. (1995), “Ayn Rand (1905–1982),” Contemporary Women Philosophers, Vol. 4, M. E. Waithe, (Ed.). Boston: Kluwer Academic, 207–24. McDowell, E. (1982), “Ayn Rand: Novelist with a Message,” New York Times, March 9, 24. “Obituary Notes.” (1982), Publisher’s Weekly 221, March 19, 24. Oxford Companion to American Literature, fourth edition. (1965), New York: Oxford University Press, 694. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. (1995), New York: Oxford University Press, 739. Penguin Companion to American Literature. (1971), New York: McGrawHill, 213. Political Profiles: The Eisenhower Years. (1977), New York: Facts on File, 493–4. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, second edition. (1968), New York: T. Y. Crowell, 840. Saxon, W. (1982), “Writer Ayn Rand Dies at 77,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 7, A4, col. 2. Sciabarra, C. M. (1996), “Ayn Rand 1905–1982,” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement IV, Part 2, IN: Macmillan, 517–35. —(2001), “Ayn Rand,” Encyclopedia of Ethics, second edition, Vol. III, L. C. Becker and C. B. Becker (Eds). New York and London: Routledge, 1440–3.

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Teachout, T. (1882), “Farewell, Dagny Taggart,” National Review XXXIV, May 14, 566–67. Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement. (1955), New York: Wilson, 811–12. 200 Contemporary Authors. (1969), Detroit: Gale Research, 225–7. Webster’s New World Companion to English and American Literature. (1973), New York: World Publishing, 557–8. Wheeler, K. M. (1997), A Guide to Twentieth Century American Novelists. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 341. Who’s Who in 20th Century Literature, (1976), New York: Holt, Rinehart, 301. Writer’s Directory. (1976–78), 874.

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Index

Addio Kira (movie, AR) 91 see also We the Living “Advocates of Objectivism Make New Inroads” (article, Glenn) 116 “Aesthetics of the Visual Arts” (course, Sures) 98 Against Our Will (Brownmiller) 107 “Age of Envy, The” (essay, AR) 81 Airtight see We the Living 10 Allen, Jeff (Atlas Shrugged) 38 Allison IV, John 117 altruism 26, 29, 58, 59 American Enterprise Institute The 120 “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (Peikoff) 82 Anna Karenina 76 Answer to Ayn Rand (Robbins) 104–5 Anthem (novel, AR) 13, 21, 24–5, 92, 93 reviews of 92–3 Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Studies The 116–17 antipodes: Individualism versus Collectivism; Egoism versus Altruism; Reason versus Mysticism 55

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Argounova, Kira Alexandrovna (We the Living) 21, 22, 90 ARI see Ayn Rand Institute Aristotle 5, 56, 75 Art of Fiction, The (AR) 80 Ashburn, Elyse 18 Atkinson, Brooks 87 Atlantic Monthly 99 Atlas Shrugged (novel, AR) 16, 17, 21, 30, 62, 92, 97, 98, 111, 112, 113, 117, 122, 123, 125 anniversary celebration (50th) 1, 108, 111, 112 critical reception of 98–101 essay contest 119 film adaptation 120 main philosophical passages: “The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine” 41 “From Each According to His Ability, to Each According to His Need” 38–41 “The Martyrdom of the Industrialists” 34–6 “The Meaning of Money” 21, 31–4 “The Meaning of Sex” 21, 37–8 “The Moral Meaning of Capitalism” 36–7 “The Nature of an Artist” 42

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Atlas Shrugged—Continued “This is the Philosophy of Objectivism” 21, 42–53 the Robin Hood myth 53–4 sales record 122 title imagery 34 work ethic 54–5 Atlas Society: Center for Objectivism 1, 111, 114–15, 123 Attila 55–7, 101 Axelrod, George 25 Ayn Rand and the World She Made 123 Ayn Rand Archives 112, 123 Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights 114 Ayn Rand Column, The 102 Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) 1, 5, 19, 96, 108,113, 114–15, 119, 123 Ayn Rand Letter, The (newsletter, AR) 20, 102 Ayn Rand Russian Writings on Hollywood 127 n5 “Ayn Rand’s Academic Legacy” (article, Glenn) 116 Baldwin, Howard and Karen 121 Bannon, Charlie (Calumet K) 11 Barnes, Hazel 1 Barr, Bob 124 BB & T Foundation 117 Berliner, Michael 19, 89, 91, 92, 94 Bernstein, Andrew 113 Bill of Rights 70 Binswanger, Harry 82 Blumenthal, Allan 18, 96 Blumenthal, Joan (nee Mitchell) 96

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Blumenthal, Nathan (Nathaniel Branden) 16, 95 Bobbs-Merrill 15 Bolshevik Revolution 2 Bond, James 79 Branden, Barbara 2n, 3n, 6, 7, 18, 89, 95, 98, 100, 106, 107, 122–33 Branden, Nathaniel 16, 18, 58, 67, 95–7, 100, 103, 105, 123 Nathaniel Branden Institute 17, 18, 57, 97 Nathaniel Branden Lectures 18, 97 Britting, Jeff 3n Brook, Yaron 19, 115 Brooks, Cherryl (Atlas Shrugged) 31 Brown, Fern 7 Brownmiller, Susan 107 Buckley, William F. 98 Calumet K 11 Capek, Karel 125 capitalism 56, 67 Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (AR) 17, 67–74, 103 Cassell & Co. 13, 90, 92 Cato Institute 1, 108, 130 n8 Caxton Press 92 censorship 70 Cerf, Bennett 17, 105–6 Chamberlain, John 100 Chambers, Whittaker 99 Champagne, Maurice 3 “Charley’s Angels” (TV Show) 18 “children, the,” 95 see also “class of ’43” and “the collective”

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Index Chronicle of Higher Education, The 116 Cibber, Colley 125 class of ’43, 95 see also “the children” and “the collective” classicism 75 “collective, the” 95, 98, 105 see also “class of ’43” and “the children” collectivism (collectivist) 26, 30 as form of racism 65, 93 see also antipodes, individualism methods of 27 College of the United States, The 118 Collins, Wilkie 125 communism (communist) 30, 67, 92, 94, 99 “Comprachicos, The” (essay, AR) 80–1 compromise 62 concepts 82–3 conflicts of interest 60 Conrad, Joseph 10 conservatism 65 Cooper, Gary 15, 95 Cox, Stephen 118 “Critical History of Philosophy” (course, Peikoff) 98 “Cult of Moral Grayness, The” (essay, AR) 63 Cyrus, 11 see also Kira Argounova d’Anconia, Francisco (Atlas Shrugged) 21, 32, 34–6, 47, 58

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157

Danneskjöld, Ragnar (Atlas Shrugged) 47, 53–4, 58 DeMille, Cecil B. 7, 8, 9 Dempsey, Jack 87 DeWald, John 119 Disowned Self, The (Branden, N.) 105 Ditko, Steve 113 Doherty, Brian 111 dollar sign 20, 34, 52 Dominique 15 Donahue, Phil 8, 20, 108 Donnigan, Sean Xavier “Mike” (The Fountainhead) 54 Dostoevsky, Feodor 76, 77 Drew, Ellen 87 Dumas, Alexander 76 Dykes, Nicholas 114, 121 ecological movements 109, 110 education 1 egoism 25, 28, 58 Ellis, Albert 105 emergencies, ethics of 60 Encyclopaedia Britannica 71–2 Enright, Marsha Familiaro 118 equality 7–2521 (Anthem) 24, 25 evil 46 “existence exists” 44, 47 existentialism 13 “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” (speech, AR) 83 fascism 1, 30, 99 Faulkner, William 126 feminism 106–7

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Index

Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand 114 Fleming, Ian 78 Ford, Gerald 97 Ford Hall Forum, The 108 For the New Intellectual (AR) 21, 53, 55–7, 101 Founders College 118 Fountainhead, The (novel, AR) 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 30, 92, 93, 95, 97, 102, 122 “The Nature of the SecondHander” 21, 25–6 “The Soul of a Collectivist” 21, 26–8 “The Soul of an Individualist” 21, 28–30 plot summary, reviews of 93–4 sales record 122 screen version 16, 95 (original title Second Hand Lives) Francon, Dominique (The Fountainhead) 95, 101 Frankfurter, Justice Felix 74 Fraser, Malcolm 108 Free Books to Teachers program 119 free markets 56 Gaea (Liberty 5–3000) 55, 70 Galt, John (Atlas Shrugged) 11, 21, 42–52, 59 Gandhi, Mahatma 52 Garbo, Greta 101 George Mason University 123 Gibran, Khalil 126 “Girder and the Trellis, The” (Kathleen Collins) 135

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Glenn, David 116 “Goals 2000” (Commission report) 81 Gordon, Philip 135 government proper function of 51 “On Government” (essay, AR) 70 Graves, John Temple 92 Greenspan, Alan 18, 67, 96–7, 98, 103 Guzarchiuk, Vera (cousin) 6 Halley, Richard (Atlas Shrugged) 42 Halsey, Catherine “Katie” (The Fountainhead) 86, 106 Hammer, Mike 79 Harper, F. A. “Baldy” 124 Haydn, Hiram 17 Hayek, Friedrich 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 57 Heller, Anne 112, 123 Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms 11 Hendricks, Thomas, Dr. (Atlas Shrugged) 41 Herald Tribune, The 89–90 Hessen, Robert 67, 103 Hicks, Granville 98 Hitchcock, Alfred 77 Hitler, Adolph 28 Hollywood Studio Club 8 honesty 45 Hospers, John 114 House Un-American Activities Committee 94 Hudgins, Ed 115

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Index Hugo, Victor 3, 76, 77, 80 Hull, Gary 118 Hume, David 56 humor 78 Hurston, Zora Neale 126 Ideal (play AR) 14, 88 Impact 7, 119, 122 “In Answer to Ayn Rand” (Branden, N.) 19 “In Answer to Ayn Rand” (Branden, B.) 19 independence 45 individualism 24, 28 see also antipodes, collectivism individual rights 70 Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) 123, 130 n8 integrity 45 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (AR) 17, 82–3, 104 Irish Press 91 Is Objectivism a Religion? (Ellis) 105 It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (Tuccille) 105 Jefferson, Thomas 123 Jolie, Angelina 121 Journals of Ayn Rand 101 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 113, 118, 121 Joyce-Kafka Amendment 79 Judgment Day 19, 123 justice 45 Kahn, Eli Jacques 14

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159

Kalberman, Elayne 96 Kalberman, Harry 96 Kant, Immanuel 57, 84–5 “Kant Versus Sullivan” (essay, AR) 85 Keating, Peter (The Fountainhead) 25, 26, 28 Keller, Helen 85, 87 Kelley, David 114, 117 Kerenski, Alexandr Fedorovich 4 King, Billie Jean 107 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 52, 64 King of Kings 8 Knapp, Shoshana Milgram 113, 123 Knopf 15 Kovalensky, Leo (We the Living) 22, 23 Krueger, Ivar 12 laissez-faire capitalism 56, 65, 67 law of identity (A is A) 44, 61 leeches 14 see also looters, moochers, second-handers Lewis, Sinclair 11, 77 Lewis and Clark College 108 liberals 66 libertarian 106–8, 120, 124 “Libertarian Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” (Paglia) 107 Liberty for Women: Freedom, and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century 107 Liberty 5–3000 “Gaea” (Anthem) 24, 25 life-affirming virtues 45

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Index

lobbies 73 Long, Roderick T. 118 looters 14, 32 see also leeches, moochers, second-handers Los Angeles Times, The 102 Lossky, N. O. 5 Macmillan 15, 88, 90 Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain 11 “Man’s Rights” (essay, AR) 67–70 Man Who Laughs, The (Hugo) 80 Marx, Karl 57 Marxism 38 materialism 50 Mayhew, Robert 23, 92 McCasky, John 117 McElroy, Wendy 107 McLaughlin, Richard 100 Meland, Richard 15 Menken, H. L., 89 Merrill, Ronald E., 79 Merwin, Samuel (Calumet K) 11 Milgram, Shoshana see Shoshana Milgram Knapp Miller, Frank 113 Mirren, Helen 122 Monroe, Marilyn 101 Montessori, Maria, Dr. 81 moochers 14, 32, 35 see also looters, leeches, secondhanders Moore, Stephen 125 moral agnosticism 62 moral judgment 62 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals 94

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Mulligan’s Valley “Atlantis” 54 Mysterious Valley, The 3 mystics of muscle 47, 49, 50 mystics of spirit 47–9, 50 My Years with Ayn Rand 19, 123 Nabokov, Vladimir 2, 10 National Committee for Monetary Reform, The 20, 33, 119–20 National Review 98 “Nation at Risk, A” (Commission report) 81 Naturalism 76 “Nature of Government, The” (essay, AR) 67, 70–2 Neal, Patricia 15, 95 Neutra, Richard 16 New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, The (AR) 80–2 Newman, Edwin, (“Speaking Freely”) 108 New York Herald Tribune 100 New York Times, The 87, 90, 94, 95, 98, 111, 120–1 New York Times Book Review 15 Nietzche, Friedrich 5, 14, 23, 58, 99, 128 n4 Night of January 16th (play, AR) 12, 13, 87, 88 see also Penthouse Legend, Woman on Trial Non Vivi (movie, AR) 91 see also We the Living objectivism 17, 22, 57, 95, 98, 103–5, 120

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Index as cult/religion 105 and Christianity 105 and Libertarians 108 see also The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter, The Ayn Rand Letter Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Peikoff) 86 Objectivist, The 18, 19, 102, 104 Objectivist Academic Center 86 Objectivist Clubs 115 “Objectivist Ethics, The” (essay, AR) 58–9 Objectivist Newsletter, The 102 O’Connor, Charles Francis “Frank” 8, 9, 11, 16, 96, 109 Ogden, Archibald G. 15 O’Hara, John 77 O. Henry 11, 12, 76 Old Nick’s Guide to Happiness 114 Old School (Wolff) 114 O’Neill, William F. 105 Orman, Suze 112

161

Perelman, Vadim 121 Philosophy: Who Needs It? (AR) 83–4 Pianist Who Loved Ayn Rand, The (Villada) 114 Plato 5, 56 Playboy 108 Preston, Robert 87 pride 45–6 “Principles of Efficient Thinking” (course, B. Branden) 98 productiveness 45–6 Prometheus see also (Equality 7–2521) 25, 28 “Property Status of Airwaves, The” (essay, AR) 73–4 Pruette, Lorine 94 public good, the 36 public property 74 “Pull Peddlers, The” (essay, AR) 73 purpose 45 Quo Vadis? 76

Paglia, Camile 107 Paltons, Cyrus (The Mysterious Valley) 3 Pamphleteers 92 parasitism see also leeches, looters, moochers Passion of Ayn Rand, The (Branden, B.) 2, 11n, 19, 122 Paxton, Michael 19, 79 Peikoff, Leonard 18, 19, 57, 82, 85, 96, 98 Penthouse Legends also Night of January 16th, Woman on Trial

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racism 64–6 Rand, Ayn anti-collectivism and anticommunism 6, 9, 13, 22 as atheist 2 attitude toward art and entertainment 42 attitude toward cities 16 attitude toward education system 90–1 attitude toward family (Chicago) 6 attitude toward intelligence 2

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Rand, Ayn—Continued attitude toward music 3 attitude toward philosophy 107E attitude toward religion 99, 104 attitude toward Russia 6, 9, 10 attitude toward the United States 30, 56 attitude toward work 54–5 centenary 113 concepts, theory of 82–3 defense of egoism 14, 29 defense of gold standard 33 definition of art 74, 104 Doctor of Humane Letters 17, 108 essentials of philosophy 57 final years 20, 109 given name and chosen name 2, 7, 127, n1 as heroine 103 individualism of 3 lectures 17, 20 literary theory of 74–80 litigiousness of 13 pessimism/depression of 20, 100 philosophic journals of 14 on popular platitudes 102–3 public philosopher 97 schooling 3, 4, 5 on selfishness 29, 102 “Rand Grant Universities” 116 Random House 17, 90, 105 rationality 45 rational self-interest 58 Reagan, Ronald 81

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Rearden, Hank (Atlas Shrugged) 34–7 reason 27, 44, 45, see the antipodes: reason versus faith Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute 118 “Red Decade” 9, 88 Red Pawn (screenplay, AR) 11 relativism 63 Return of the Primitive: An Anti-Industrial Revolution 81–2 see also The New Left: An Anti-Industrial Revolution Riggenbach, Jeff 113, 131 n6 rights 68–70 RKO Pictures 9, 11 Roark, Howard (The Fountainhead) 11, 15, 25, 28 Robbins, John W. 104 Robin Hood 53 Rolo, Charles 99 romanticism 74–9 Romantic Manifesto, The (AR) 11n, 74–80 Rosenbaum, Alisa Zinovievna (Alice) 2, 6 see Ayn Rand Rosenbaum, Anna Borisovna (mother) 4, 5, 7 Rosenbaum, Zinovy Zacharovich (father) 2, 4, 7 Rostand, Edmond 76 Rothbard, Murray N. 124 Rothman, N. L. 17 Ruddy, Albert S. 120 Rukavina, Mary Ann (Sures) see Mary Ann Sures Russian Revolution 4

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Index Saturday Review 15, 94, 98 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 76 Schiller, Friedrich 76 Schwartz, Peter 82, 113 Sciabarra, Chris 2, 113, 118 Scott, Sir Walter 76 “Screen Guide for Americans,” (pamphlet, AR) 94 Script 121 second-handers 24 see also looters, leeches, mooches Second Hand Lives, (original title of The Fountainhead) 14 self-esteem 45 selfishness 58, 102 “Sense of Life” 79, 88 Serling, Rod 77 sexual attraction 37–8 Shakespeare, William 76 Silliphant, Stirling 18, 120 Snider, Ed 112 Snyder, Tom (“Tomorrow”) 20, 108 Soviet Union (Soviet Russia) 4, 5, 6, 88, 89 Spillane, Mickey 18, 78 Stanwyck, Barbara 101 Starnes, Ivy (Atlas Shrugged) 41 State Institute for Cinematography 5 Steinbeck, John 3, 127n3 Stoiunin Gymnasium 2 Stossel, John 112 St. Petersburg (Leningrad) 2, 4, 6 Sullivan, Annie 85 Sures, Mary Ann (nee Rukavina) 18, 96, 98

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163

Swift, Jonathan 125 Taganov, Andrei (We The Living) 22, 23 Taggart, Dagny (Atlas Shrugged) 31, 37, 42, 101, 121 Taggart, James (Atlas Shrugged) 31 Tagliafero, John 121 Think Twice (play, AR) 14, 88 Thoreau, Henry David 52 “tiddlywink” music 20, 79 Time 99–100 Times Literary Supplement 91 Tolstoy, Leo 76 Toohey, Ellsworth Monkton (The Fountainhead) 26 “To Whom It May Concern” (article, AR) 18 trader/trader principle 46, 100–1 “Train Your Mind to Change the World” (article, Ashburn) 118 Trilling, Diana 140 Tuchille, Jerome 105 Twentieth Century Motors (Atlas Shrugged) 39–41 Twilight Zone, The 77 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 100 The Unconquered (play, AR) 14, 88 see also We the Living United States of America 30 Universal Studios 11 U.S. News & World Report 111

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values 45 Villada, Gene Bell 114 Virtue of Selfishness, The (AR) 17, 67, 102–3 Wallace, Randall 121 Wall Street Journal 111, 116, 125 war 72 Watkins, Ann 15 Webster, Henry Kitchell (Calumet K) 11 Weidman, Barbara (Barbara Branden) 16, 95 West Point 83–4, 108 We the Living (novel, AR—original title Airtight) 10, 11, 13, 22, 87, 88, 89 reviews of 89–91 see also The Unconquered, Non Vivi, Addio Kira

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Wick, Jean 89 Witch Doctor 55–7, 101 Who Is Ayn Rand? (Branden, B. and N.) 5, 122 With Charity Toward None (O’Neill) 105 Wolff, Tobias 114 Woman on Trial 11–12 see also Night of January 16th, Penthouse Legend Woods, A. H. 12 Woodward, Helen Beal 98 Wyatt, Ellis (Atlas Shrugged) 54 Wynand, Gail (The Fountainhead) 25 Yale Law School 109 Younkins, Ed 85–6, 112 Zeitlin, Ida 90 Zola, Emile 76

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