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Ayn Rand ( – March 6, 1982), was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism.
Born and educated in Russia, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1932. She first achieved notoriety with The Fountainhead (1943), and her best-known work – the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged – was published in 1957.
Her political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the constitutional protection of the right to life, liberty, and property.
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Quotations
A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.
All work is an act of philosophy.
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
Source: The Romantic Manifesto - Introduction
Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.
Source: The Fountainhead
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.
Source: Atlas Shrugged Part Three / Chapter 7 This Is John Galt Speaking
His face was closed like a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that.
Source: The Fountainhead
Encyclopedia
Ayn Rand ( – March 6, 1982), was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism.
Born and educated in Russia, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1932. She first achieved notoriety with The Fountainhead (1943), and her best-known work – the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged – was published in 1957.
Her political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the constitutional protection of the right to life, liberty, and property. She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism, including fascism, communism, and the welfare state. Yet Rand held her metaphysical, epistemological and ethical views to be more fundamental than her politics, saying "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason." Her ideas and philosophical work remain controversial where studied, but her philosophy is largely ignored by academic philosophers.
Early years
Childhood and education
Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in 1905, into a middle-class family living in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the eldest of three daughters (Alisa, Natasha, and Nora), to Zinovy Zacharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum, agnostic and largely non-observant Jews. Her father was a chemist and a successful pharmaceutical entrepreneur who earned the privilege of living outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement.
Rand was twelve at the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, and her family life was disrupted by the rise of the Bolshevik party. Her father's pharmacy was confiscated by the Soviets, and the family temporarily fled to the Crimea. Rand then returned to Saint Petersburg to attend the University of Petrograd, where she joined the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history with additional studies in philosophy, philology, and law. She read Edmond Rostand, Friedrich Schiller, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, admiring his depiction of the hero in Thus Spake Zarathustra. She completed a three-year program and graduated in 1924, after which she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting.
Immigration and marriage
In late 1925, she was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She arrived in the United States in February 1926, at the age of 21, entering by ship through New York City, which would ultimately become her home. After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union, and set out for Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Already using Rand as a Cyrillic contraction of her surname, she adopted the name Ayn, which is of disputed origin.
Initially, she struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. A chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to a job as an extra in his film, The King of Kings, and to subsequent work as a script reader. She also worked as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios. While working on The King of Kings, she intentionally bumped into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, who caught her eye. The two married on April 15, 1929, and remained married for fifty years, until O'Connor's death in 1979 at the age of 82. Rand became an American citizen in 1931.
Fiction
Rand's first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios. Josef Von Sternberg considered it for Marlene Dietrich, but Russian themes were unpopular at the time, and the project came to nothing. This was followed by the courtroom drama The Night of January 16th in 1934, on Broadway.
Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living, appeared the same year. Set in Communist Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state. The novel was was made into a two-part film, Noi Vivi and Addio, Kira in 1942, despite resistance from the Italian government under Benito Mussolini, starring Alida Valli as Kira, Fosco Giachetti as Andrei, and Rossano Brazzi as Leo. The films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand's estate and re-released as We the Living in 1986.
The novella Anthem followed, a vision of a dystopian future world in which collectivism has triumphed to such an extent that even the word "I" has vanished from the language and from man's memory.
The Fountainhead
Rand's first major success came with The Fountainhead in 1943, a romantic drama and philosophical novel that she wrote over a period of seven years. The novel centers around an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark, and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers" — those who attempt to live through others, placing others above self. It was rejected by twelve publishers before finally being accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company on the insistence of editorial board member Archibald Ogden. The novel was adapted as a film in 1949, produced by Warner Brothers, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, with the screenplay written by Rand herself. She had already written screenplays for two other Hollywood movies, Love Letters and You Came Along.
The Fountainhead eventually became a worldwide success, bringing Rand fame and financial security. , it had sold over six million copies, and continued to sell about 100,000 copies per year.
Atlas Shrugged
Rand's magnum opus, the 1,100-page Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957. Because of the success of The Fountainhead, the initial print run was 100,000 copies, and the book went on to become an international bestseller, with many interviewees citing it as the book that most influenced them. It currently sells almost 200,000 copies annually. (See Popular interest and influence, below.)
The theme of Atlas Shrugged is the morality of rational self-interest. It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her idea of human greatness. The plot involves a dystopian United States in which industrialists and other creative individuals go on strike and retreat to a mountainous hideaway where they build an independent free economy. The hero, John Galt, describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the people that Rand saw as contributing the most to the nation's productivity and creativity. With their strike, they aim to demonstrate that, without "the men of the mind," the economy would collapse and society would fall apart. The novel includes elements of mystery and science fiction, and contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction, including a lengthy monologue delivered by John Galt.
Objectivism
Rand saw her views as constituting a complete philosophical system, which she called "Objectivism". She embraced philosophical realism and advocated rational egoism, or rational self-interest, as a guiding moral principle. Her politics are generally described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second. She wrote of Objectivism that it amounted to "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." The individual "must exist for his own sake", she wrote in 1962, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself".
She supported laissez-faire capitalism, holding that the sole function of government ought to be the protection of individual rights, including property rights. Rejecting faith as antithetical to reason, she opposed any form of mysticism or supernaturalism, including organized religion.
Rand saw the initiation of force or fraud as immoral, and held that government action should consist only in protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police), foreign aggression (via the military), and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt in criminal cases and to resolve civil disputes. In a 1976 question and answer session, she said that the most important parts of her philosophy were her "theory of concepts, my ethics, and my discovery in politics that evil—the violation of rights—consists of the initiation of force".
She was greatly influenced by Aristotle and found early inspiration in Friedrich Nietzsche, although she later rejected the latter's approach, holding it to be anti-reason. She was vociferously opposed to the views of Immanuel Kant, particularly those claiming the inability of reason to know reality "as it is in itself." Addressing the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974, she said that, "[f]or some two hundred years, under the influence of Immanuel Kant, the dominant trend of philosophy has been directed to a single goal: the destruction of man's mind, of his confidence in the power of reason," and continued:
She recognized an intellectual kinship with John Locke in political philosophy, agreeing with Locke's ideas that individuals have a right to the products of their own labor and have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Unlike Locke, she found the basis for individual rights in man's nature as a being whose survival depends upon his independent exercise of reason.
Objectivist movement
In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to 36 East 36th Street (across from the J.P. Morgan Library) in New York City, the city she most loved and admired. From 1965 to her death in 1982, she resided at 120 East 34th Street. In New York, she formed a group (jokingly designated "The Collective") which included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Leonard Peikoff, all of whom had been profoundly influenced by The Fountainhead. Rand launched the Objectivist movement with this group to promote her philosophy.
The group originally started out as an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy; later the Collective would proceed to play a larger, more formal role, reading Atlas Shrugged as the manuscript pages were written and promoting Rand's philosophy through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), established by him for that purpose. Many Collective members gave lectures at the NBI and in cities across the United States, while others wrote articles for her publications, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her non-fiction works, and by giving talks at several prominent universities, including Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan. "The Objectivist Newsletter, later expanded and renamed simply The Objectivist, contained essays by Rand, Branden, and other associates ... that analyzed current political events and applied the principles of Objectivism to everyday life." Rand later published some of these in book form.
After several years, Rand's close relationship with the much younger Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the consent of their spouses. It lasted until Branden (having separated from Barbara) entered into an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. The Brandens hid the affair from Rand, lied about it (by their own admission). When Rand found out, she abruptly ended her relationship with both Brandens and with NBI, which closed. She published a letter in The Objectivist repudiating Branden for dishonesty and other "irrational behavior", never disclosing their affair. Both Brandens remain personae non gratae with certain Objectivists, particularly the group that formed the Ayn Rand Institute.
Several prominent critics of the movement denoted it as a "cult" claiming that it exhibited typical cult traits, including slavish adherence to unprovable doctrine and extreme adulation of the founder. Objectivists counter that even if some of Rand's followers have acted like cultists, this was not intended by Rand, and note that Rand explicitly condemned "blind followers."
Epistemological views
Rand held that epistemology—the theory of knowledge—was fundamental to philosophy. She wrote that her advocacy of capitalism in politics and egoism in ethics was only a consequence of her advocacy of reason in epistemology. She defined "reason" as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses."
To defend and explain her position on reason, she developed a theory of sense-perception that distinguishes between the form and object of perception, holding that the form in which an organism perceives is determined by its physiological means of perception but that in whatever form it perceives, what it perceives—the object of its perception—is reality. She rejected the Kantian dichotomy between "things as we perceive them" and "things as they are in themselves." Perception, she held, is the unchallengeable given; perception, being physiologically determined, cannot make mistakes or err. Apparent errors, such as in "optical illusions," she regarded as errors in the conceptual identification of what is seen, not in the seeing itself. Perception is, she argued, automatic, infallible, and provides the base for the non-automatic, fallible processes of conceptual interpretation and inference that is the sphere of reason.
In her 1979 work, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand presented her novel theory of concepts—in effect, her solution to the age-old "problem of universals." In essence, her theory holds that concepts (abstract ideas) are classifications of existents that possess commensurable characteristics. Things that are similar, she held, have "the same characteristic but in different measure or degree." Seeing many links between concepts and mathematics, her theory of concepts uses such mathematical terms as "unit," "measurement," and "common denominator." Her definition of "concept" is: "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted."
In other areas of epistemology, she advanced a theory that concepts, and knowledge generally, is both contextual and hierarchical. She rejected the "analytic-synthetic" dichotomy, holding that the meaning of a concept includes all the characteristics of its referents, including those yet to be discovered. Her overall theory of the cognitive function of concepts was that they expand man's range of awareness by condensing the number of units one needs to hold in mind in one frame of awareness ("unit-economy").
A strong advocate of Aristotelian logic, she titled the three parts of Atlas Shrugged with the names of the three axioms of Aristotelian logic: "A is A," "Non-Contradiction," and "Either/Or." In regard to inductive logic, she held that her theory of concepts would provide the basis for a new approach to validating inductive generalization, and Leonard Peikoff has attempted this development.
Ethics
Rand's ethical egoism is her most well-known position. She advocated "rational selfishness." In The Virtue of Selfishness she gave an original validation of her moral code, claiming to have bridged the infamous gap between "Is" and "Ought"—or between facts and values. She begins by asking "What are values? Why does man need them?" She argues that the concept of "value" depends upon the concept of an "alternative" in the face of which one must act. "Where no alternatives exist, no goals and no values are possible." The next point in her derivation is to argue that "there is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action....It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death....It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."
All living organisms, she held, act to gain values—i.e., the items their survival requires. An organism's own life is its ultimate value. But man enters the sphere of moral values because man has free will: one does not automatically hold his own life as his ultimate value. Whether he acts to promote and fulfill his own life or not is up to him, not hard-wired into his physiology. "Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history." The purpose of a moral code, Rand held, is to provide a standard of value and a code of virtues by reference to which man can achieve the values his survival requires and which enhance his life. Her standard of value is: "Man's life qua rational being," and rationality is the primary virtue of this code. The derivative virtues of her Objectivist morality are: independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics."
Integrating with this is her view that the primary locus of man's free will is in the choice: to think or not to think. "Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make."
She concludes that "for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'"
Political and social views
Rand held that the only moral social system is laissez-faire capitalism. Her political views were strongly individualist and hence anti-statist and anti-Communist. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of rational egoism and individualism. As a champion of rationality, Rand also had a strong opposition to mysticism and religion, which she believed helped foster a crippling culture acting against individual human happiness and success. Rand detested many prominent liberal and conservative politicians of her time, including prominent anti-Communists, such as Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, Hubert Humphrey, and Joseph McCarthy.
Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, considers Rand one of the three founders (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) of modern American libertarianism, although she rejected libertarianism and the libertarian movement.
War
While Rand often criticized conventional motivations for U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, she approved American action when strictly justified in response to an attack, as in World War II. She strongly denounced pacifism: "When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for—and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense."
Rand opposed the Vietnam War, but also believed that unilateral American withdrawal would be a mistake of appeasement that would embolden communists and the Soviet Union. Her opposition to the Vietnam War was based on her view that no actual American self-interest was involved, that it was an exercise in self-sacrifice, not self-defense. She vehemently opposed the draft and her argument that a draft violates the right to life motivated some of those in the Nixon Administration who worked for the draft's repeal.
Rand supported Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which she saw as an attack by a primitive society on a government that largely supported individual rights. While Rand characterized Israel as "a mixed economy inclined toward socialism," this was secondary to the consideration that "when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can".
Economics
Rand expressed qualified enthusiasm for the economic thought of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, and The Ludwig von Mises Institute notes that "it was largely as a result of Ayn's efforts that the work of von Mises began to reach its potential audience." Later Objectivists, such as Richard Salsman, have claimed that Rand's economic theories are implicitly more supportive of the doctrines of Jean-Baptiste Say, though Rand herself was likely not acquainted with his work.
Charity
Rand did not see charity as a moral duty or a major virtue and held charity to be proper only when the recipient is worthy and when it does not involve sacrifice. She opposed all forms of aid given by governments, just as she opposed any other government activity not directed at protecting individual rights.
Gender and sex
Rand's views on gender role are controversial. While her books champion men and women as intellectual equals, she thought that physiological differences between the sexes led to fundamental psychological differences that were the source of legitimate gender roles, revolving around the man's initiatory role in the sex act. Rand denied endorsing any kind of power-difference between men and women, stating that man's "metaphysical dominance" in sexual relations refers to the man's role as the prime mover in sex and the necessity of male arousal for sex to occur. According to Rand, "For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to man." Rand believed that sex in its highest form is a physical response to intellectual and spiritual values, a means of giving concrete, physical expression to values that could otherwise only be experienced in the abstract.
In a McCall's magazine interview, Rand stated that while women are competent to be President of the United States, as a matter of psychology, no rational woman would enjoy being in that position (as a woman in charge of men); she later explained that it would be psychologically damaging to the woman. She strongly opposed the modern feminist movement, despite supporting women needing careers and being the intellectual equals of men. Feminist author Susan Brownmiller called Rand "a traitor to her own sex," while others, including Camille Paglia and the contributors to 1999's Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, have noted Rand's "fiercely independent—and unapologetically sexual" heroines who are unbound by "tradition's chains ... [and] who had sex because they wanted to."
Some of Rand's fiction features sex scenes with stylized erotic combat that some claim borders on rape. Rand said that if what The Fountainhead depicted was rape it was "rape by engraved invitation." In a review of a biography of Rand, writer Jenny Turner opined, "the sex in Rand’s novels is extraordinarily violent and fetishistic. In The Fountainhead, the first coupling of the heroes, heralded by whips and rock drills and horseback riding and cracks in marble, is ‘an act of scorn ... not as love, but as defilement’—in other words, a rape... In Atlas Shrugged, erotic tension is cleverly increased by having one heroine bound into a plot with lots of spectacularly cruel and handsome men.
Race
Rand vehemently opposed ethnic and racial prejudice on moral grounds, in essays like "Racism" and "Global Balkanization," while still arguing for the right of individuals and businesses to act on such prejudice without government intervention. She wrote, "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism ... [the notion] that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors," but opposed governmental remedies for this problem: "Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue—and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism."
HUAC testimony
In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee. Her testimony regarded the disparity between her personal experiences in the Soviet Union and the whitewashed portrayal of it in the 1944 film Song of Russia. Rand argued that the film grossly misrepresented the socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union and portrayed life in the USSR as being much better and happier than it actually was. Furthermore, she believed that even if a temporary alliance with the USSR was necessary to defeat the Nazis, the case for this should not have been made by portraying what she believed were falsely positive images of Soviet life:
After the hearings, when Rand was asked about her feelings on the effectiveness of their investigations, she described the process as "futile".
Declining health and death
In 1973, she was briefly reunited with her youngest sister, Nora, who still lived in the Soviet Union. Although Rand had written 1,200 letters to her family in the Soviet Union, and had attempted to bring them to the United States, she had ceased contacting them in 1937 after reading a notice in the post office that letters from Americans might imperil Russians at risk from Stalinist repression. Rand received a letter from Nora in 1973 and invited her and her husband to America; but her sister's views had changed, and to Rand's disappointment Nora voluntarily returned to the USSR.
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974, and conflicts continued in the wake of the break with Branden and the subsequent collapse of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI). Several more of her closest "Collective" friends parted company with her, and during the late 1970s her activities within the Objectivist movement declined, especially after the death of her husband on November 9, 1979. One of her final projects was work on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. She had also planned to write another novel, To Lorne Dieterling, but did not get far in her notes.
Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982 at her 34th Street home in New York City, years after having successfully battled cancer, and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
Rand's funeral was attended by some of her prominent followers, including Alan Greenspan. David Kelley read her favorite poem Rudyard Kipling's "If—". A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket.
Honors
Beginning in 1960, Rand was a visiting lecturer at several universities such as Yale University, Princeton University and Columbia University. In subsequent years, she went on to lecture at University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and MIT. She received an honorary doctorate from Lewis & Clark College in 1963.
For many years, she gave an annual lecture at the Ford Hall Forum, responding, afterwards, in her famously spirited form to questions from the audience.
Legacy
After decades of dismissal or outright hostility from the profession, Rand's ideas have found some recognition within academic philosophy. Several American universities have established chairs or centers for the study of Rand's views, and fellowships have been establish to support individual scholars. Her books continue to be widely sold and read, with 25 million copies sold (as of 2007), and 800,000 more being sold each year. Following Rand's death, continued conflict within the Objectivist movement led to establishment of independent organizations.
Institutes
A range of institutes dealing with her work have been established since Rand's death.
In 1985, Leonard Peikoff, a surviving member of "The Collective" and Ayn Rand's legal heir, established "The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism" (ARI). The Ayn Rand Institute "works to introduce young people to Ayn Rand's novels, to support scholarship and research based on her ideas, and to promote the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism to the widest possible audience." In 1989, Dr. David Kelley was denounced by Peikoff in a doctrinal dispute and expelled from the Ayn Rand Institute, at which point Kelley founded The Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society, which has its own web site and publications is focused on attracting readers of Ayn Rand's fiction. The associated Objectivist Center division deals with more academic ventures. The Atlas Society/Objectivist Center also publishes The New Individualist (formerly Navigator).
Organized in 2000 by historian John McCaskey, The Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship provides for the pursuit of scholarly work on Objectivism in academia. Recent grants have gone to the University of Pittsburgh (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) and to philosophy departments at the University of Texas at Austin.
Popular interest and influence
Although Rand's influence has been greatest in the United States, she has a growing international following. Her books were international best sellers, and they continue to sell in large numbers. For example, Atlas Shrugged is consistently in the top few hundred best sellers at Amazon.com; 185,000 copies were sold in 2007, fifty years after it was first published.
When asked in a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club what the most influential book in the respondent's life was, Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible. Readers polled in 1998 and 1999 by Modern Library placed four of her books on the 100 Best Novels list (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living were in first, second, seventh, and eighth place, respectively) and one on the 100 Best Nonfiction list (The Virtue of Selfishness, in first place), with books about Rand and her philosophy in third and sixth place. However, the validity of such polls has been disputed. Freestar Media/Zogby polls conducted in 2007 found that around 8 percent of American adults have read Atlas Shrugged.
Rand has had an influence on a number of notable people in different fields. Examples include philosophers such as John Hospers, George H. Smith, Allan Gotthelf, Robert Mayhew and Tara Smith, economists such as George Reisman and Murray Rothbard, psychologists such as Nathaniel Branden, historians such as Eric Daniels, and political writers such as Charles Murray. Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, U.S. Congressmen Ron Paul, and Bob Barr, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Clarence Thomas have acknowledged her influence on their lives. The "Randex" website lists recent media references to Rand or her work. Although not an Objectivist, former United States President Ronald Reagan described himself as an "admirer" of Rand in private correspondence in the 1960s.
BioShock, an award-winning video game released in the summer of 2007, is built around a story influenced by Rand's philosophy and Atlas Shrugged.
Rand appears on a 33 cent U.S. postage stamp, which debuted April 22, 1999 in New York City.
Objectivist novelist Kay Nolte Smith's early novels The Watcher, Catching Fire and Elegy for a Soprano are romans a clef about Rand, Branden, and the circle around them. Rand figures prominently in William F. Buckley's novel Getting it Right.
The Canadian rock band Rush has explored many Rand themes in their lyrics, most notably, the concept album "2112", which is loosely based on the novel Anthem.
Rand's work and academic philosophy
During Rand's lifetime her work was not given much attention by academic philosophers, and currently only a few universities consider Rand or Objectivism to be a philosophical specialty or research area. Many adherents and practitioners of continental philosophy criticize her celebration of self-interest, and as a result there has been little focus on her work in this intellectual discipline. However, since her death in 1982, there has been an increase in interest in Ayn Rand's work. In a 1999 interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra said, "I know they laugh at Rand", while forecasting a growth of interest in her work in the academic community.
However her views have either been dismissed, or ignored her entirely, by the philosophical establishment, some of whom have been scathing about her lack of rigour and her apparently limited understanding of philosophical subject-matter.
Fellowships for the study of Ayn Rand's ideas have been established by the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship at academic institutions with world-class philosophy programs such as the University of Texas at Austin (where a $300,000 fellowship was sponsored by the foundation in 2001). Rand's ideas have also been made the subjects of study at Clemson and Duke universities.
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS), a self-described "nonpartisan" peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of Ayn Rand—principally her philosophic work—is published twice yearly, while the Ayn Rand Society, founded in 1987 and affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, has been active in sponsoring seminars.
In 2006, Cambridge University Press published Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, a volume on Rand's ethical theory written by ARI-affiliated scholar Tara Smith, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin. A review of Smith's book by Helen Cullyer of the University of Pittsburgh, published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, ends with the following:
Criticism
Rand has remained controversial. On the left, linguist and analytic philosopher Noam Chomsky considers Rand "[o]ne of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history." On the right, conservative commentator and founder of the National Review William F. Buckley declared: "Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn."
In a 1984 article called "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand", Nathaniel Branden criticized Rand for her "scientific conservatism" and indifference to "anything more recent than the work of Sir Isaac Newton", reporting his astonishment at hearing her describe the theory of evolution as "only a hypothesis". Her insistence that Objectivism was an integrated whole, the departure from which necessarily lead one into logical error, led him to conclude that her philosophy was "for all practical purposes" a "dogmatic religion".
Rand scholars cite Rand's perceived hostility to academic philosophy in part for her cool reception. However, the motives of many of her detractors have been called into question, as many of the criticisms directed towards Rand are not directed with the same hostility towards other philosophers. For example, Chris Matthew Sciabarra discusses criticism of Rand, saying, "The left was infuriated by her anti-communist, procapitalist politics, whereas the right was disgusted with her atheism and civil libertarianism." Hostility may also be a result of Rand's dismissals of professional academics in general. Ronald E. Merrill writes: "Objectivism did not grow out of the academic mainstream, even as a revolt against it; if it had, it might have been better received." "Above all, academia finds Objectivism totally indigestible because of the philosophy's inherent and aggressive anti-relativism." Rand scholars such as Sciabarra, Tara Smith, and Allan Gotthelf have made attempts to introduce her into formal academia, while others, such as Ronald E. Merrill, have claimed that academic rejection of Rand stems from fear of it as a "living" philosophy as opposed to an academic "game." Merrill writes in The Ideas of Ayn Rand: "Will the day ever come when Objectivism gets a place in the philosophy curriculum?" and answers, "That will be the day when professors no longer fear Objectivism-because it will be dead."
Philosophical criticism
Online U.S. News and World Report columnist Sara Dabney Tisdale says academic philosophers have generally dismissed Atlas Shrugged as "sophomoric, preachy, and unoriginal." In addition, Greg Nyquist has written that Rand's philosophy fundamentally misunderstands the very core of human nature.
On his blog, Kant scholar William Vallicella has been scathing in describing what he calls her lack of rigour and limited understanding of philosophical subject-matter.
One significant exception to the general lack of attention paid to Rand in academic philosophy is the essay "On the Randian Argument" by Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick, which appears in his collection, Socratic Puzzles. Nozick is sympathetic to Rand's political conclusions, but does not think her arguments justify them. In particular, his essay criticizes her foundational argument in ethics—laid out most explicitly in her book The Virtue of Selfishness—which claims that one's own life is, for each individual, the ultimate value because it makes all other values possible. Nozick says that to make this argument sound one needs to explain why someone could not rationally prefer dying and thus having no values. Therefore, he argues, her attempt to defend the morality of selfishness is essentially an instance of begging the question. Nozick also argues that Rand's solution to David Hume's famous is-ought problem is unsatisfactory. Tara Smith responds to this criticism in her book Viable Values. Philosophers Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have also responded to Nozick's article, arguing that there are basic misstatements of Rand's case on Nozick's part.
Rand has also been accused of misinterpreting the works of many of the philosophers that she criticized in her writing. According to Fred Seddon, author of Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the History of Philosophy (2003), Nathaniel Branden stated that Rand never read any of Immanuel Kant's works.
Finally, Murray Rothbard (who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism), Jeff Walker, and Michael Shermer (libertarian and founder of the The Skeptics Society), have accused Objectivism of being a cult, claiming that it exhibited typical cult traits, including slavish adherence to unprovable doctrine and extreme adulation of the founder.
Literary criticism
Rand's novels, when they were first published, "received almost unanimously terrible reviews" and were derided by some critics as long and melodramatic. However, they became bestsellers due largely to word of mouth. Scholars of English and American literature have largely ignored her work, although Rand has received occasional positive reviews from the literary establishment.
The most famous review of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged was written by the conservative author Whittaker Chambers and appeared in National Review in 1957. It was unrelentingly scathing. Chambers called the book "sophomoric"; and "remarkably silly," and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term." He described the tone of the book as "shrillness without reprieve." Chambers accused Rand of supporting the same godless system as the Soviets, claiming "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To the gas chambers—go!'" Five decades later, Capitalism Magazine published a reply, arguing that Chambers had not actually read the book, as he misspelled the names of two major characters and used no quotations from the novel in his critique.
Another critic, Mimi Gladstein (author of The New Ayn Rand Companion), called Rand's characters flat and uninteresting, and her heroes implausibly wealthy, intelligent, physically attractive and free of doubt while arrayed against antagonists who are weak, pathetic, full of uncertainty, and lacking in imagination and talent.
Rand stated in a 1963 essay, titled "The Goal of My Writing", that her fiction was intentionally different in that its goal was to project a vision of an ideal man: not man as he is, but man as he might be and ought to be. Rand, who described herself as a "romantic realist", presented her theory of aesthetics more fully in her 1969 book, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.
Bibliography
Fiction
Nonfiction
Posthumous works
Screenplays and film adaptations
Without Rand's knowledge or permission, We the Living was made into a pair of films, Noi vivi and Addio, Kira in 1942 by Scalara Films, Rome. They were nearly censored by the Italian government under Benito Mussolini, but they were permitted because the novel upon which they were based was anti-Soviet. The films were successful, and the public easily realized that they were as much against Fascism as Communism. These films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.
Signed to a contract to write for Hal Wallis at Paramount Pictures in 1945, Rand collaborated on screenplays of You Came Along and the Oscar-nominated Love Letters, both filmed in 1945.
The Fountainhead was a Hollywood film (1949, Warner Bros.) starring Gary Cooper, for which Rand wrote the screen-play. Rand initially insisted that Frank Lloyd Wright design the architectural models used in the film, but relented when his fee was too high.
A film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged is in pre-production as of early 2008, with production possibly starting in December if the script can be revised in time. In September 2007, Lions Gate Films reported that it had hired Vadim Perelman to revise Randall Wallace's script and to direct the film, with screen star Angelina Jolie cast in the role of Dagny Taggart. Jolie's 2008 pregnancy and Perelman's departure have cast the project into doubt.
Films about Rand
The Passion of Ayn Rand, an independent film about her life, was made in 1999, starring Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy and Peter Fonda. The film was based on the book by Barbara Branden, one of her former associates, and won several awards including an Emmy for Helen Mirren and a Golden Globe for Peter Fonda. This film's accuracy and fairness to Rand has been questioned by The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, by James Valliant, and even by associates of Barbara Branden, such as Robert Bidinotto.
A documentary film about Rand's life, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary of the Year.
Further reading
External links
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