Also includes two essays by psychologist Nathaniel Branden, three by economist Alan Greenspan, and one by historian Robert Hessen. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill, The novel of individualism, independence, and integrity that made Rand famous. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Philosophy : Who Needs It. The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, Paperback edition: New American Library, The Virtue of Selfishness. Also includes five essays by psychologist Nathaniel Branden.
We the Living. Macmillan, Binswanger, Harry. The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Los Angeles, CA: A. Press, Written by a philosopher, this is a scholarly work focused on the connection between biology and the concepts at the roots of ethics. Branden, Nathaniel. Cobden Press, Branden, Nathaniel, and Branden, Barbara. Who Is Ayn Rand? New York: Random House, Burns, Jennifer. Oxford University Press, Gotthelf, Allan and Salmieri, Gregory. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley-Blackwell, Gotthelf, Allan and Lennox, James.
Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge. University of Pittsburgh Press, Hessen, Robert. In Defense of the Corporation.
Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, An economic historian, Hessen argues and defends from an Objectivist perspective the moral and legal status of the corporate form of business organizations. Hicks, Stephen. Kelley, David. The Evidence of the Senses. Written by a philosopher working within the Objectivist tradition, this scholarly work in epistemology focuses on the foundational role the senses play in human knowledge. Mayhew, Robert. Lewis, and Immanuel Kant.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, Rand herself rejects a zero-sum picture of human relationships, so long as everyone in the relationship acts rationally. The philosopher who responds negatively to her work finds many biased and simplistic interpretations of philosophers and philosophical doctrines, including her claim that she is the first to consistently defend a morality of rational self-interest, all other philosophers having defended either altruism or mysticism Pojman Not only actually shooting someone, but also threatening him with a gun, is an act of force.
The non-initiation of force against others is the basic moral principle guiding our interactions with others, whether in a political society, or in the state of nature. This political principle binds not only individuals in their interactions with each other, but also, importantly, the government. But what exactly is a right? Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
These rights are based in human nature, and are basically rights to actions, not to things or outcomes, and they can be violated only through the initiation or threat of force, or through fraud.
The right to life means…the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like other libertarians, both right market and left egalitarian , Rand opposes state regulation of morality, as well as forced service to the state, whether military or civilian. She criticizes both conservatives and liberals as these terms are understood in American politics for wanting government to control the realm they regard as important: the spiritual or moral realm in the case of conservatives, and the material or economic realm in the case of liberals b.
Both sides thus betray a lack of understanding of the fact that human beings need to be free in both realms to be free in either. Critics have pointed out that if we have rights only because we need them for our survival and happiness, then we have no right to take actions that are contrary to our survival and happiness, such as blindly following a guru instead of thinking for ourselves, living off others because we prefer the life of a couch potato to fending for ourselves, wasting our property instead of using it wisely, or, most obviously, committing suicide Mack ; Zwolinski Yet the freedom to do only that which is morally good or rational is no freedom.
This need and the fact that we value our survival and happiness is the source of rights. As Rand says elsewhere:. A right is the sanction of independent action. Rand b Everything said so far shows that Rand believes that individuals have rights even in a state of nature, or a society without a government. In any case, Rand takes back her controversial statement by reiterating her earlier view that:.
A is A and Man is Man. Onkar Ghate and Harry Binswanger both defend this view. Ghate uses two scenarios involving individuals in a state of nature. Suppose you are by yourself on a desert island, and you domesticate a pig.
Then someone from a neighboring tribe steals it. Do you have a right to retaliate by stealing some of his property, or stealing from his relatives? Again, suppose Robinson Crusoe and Friday are strangers sharing an island, and Crusoe invents a superior spear. Does Friday have a right to copy it? Of course the tribe and you might not be able to reach a resolution satisfactory to both of you. Their view seems to imply that if the Founding Fathers had been shipwrecked for 5 years on a desert island, they could not have come up with a Bill of Rights that defined the limits of their liberties vis-a-vis each other, or set up a fair system of adjudication in the event of a dispute.
As many scholars have pointed out, starting in the 11th C, merchants from various countries created the body of law called the Law Merchant in order to protect foreign merchants not protected by the local laws Benson ; see the entry on law merchant at libertarianism.
The Law Merchant was uniform throughout Europe, and enforced by courts also created by merchants in European cities, without the involvement of any European government.
Rand argues that the only just social-political system, the only system compatible with our rational nature and with the right of individuals to live for their own sakes, is capitalism , b , that is,. State regulation of the market, she argues, is responsible for corrupting both state and market institutions, just as political regulation of religion or religious regulation of politics , wherever it exists, corrupts both state and religious institutions.
Regulation creates the opportunity for the trading of favors between politicians and religious leaders, and politicians and businesses.
She does, of course, praise capitalism or semi-capitalism for creating widespread prosperity, but this feature is itself explained only by the fact that it leaves individuals free to produce in peace.
She holds that for a short period in the nineteenth-century America came closer to a laissez-faire system than any other society before or since, but that capitalism remains an unknown ideal. Some critics complain, however, that in her non-fiction c Rand does not always recognize the aristocrats of pull in the real world—business leaders who lobby politicians for subsidies for themselves and restrictions on their competitors Rothbard ; Johnson In such a society, competition and opportunity will flourish, and prevent concentration of power in a few hands.
Is it true, however, that rational interests cannot conflict, or that, if they do, it follows that rights must also conflict? We think that whenever two or more people have a rational interest in one good, there is potential for conflict, and sometimes that potential is actualized.
To show otherwise, Rand considers a situation in which two people apply for the same job, and the better candidate gets the job. There is no conflict of interests here, she argues, because the better candidate has earned the job, and the loser cannot rationally wish to have been given the job.
Both points are well-taken. But what if the employer is not rational and gives the job to the somewhat less qualified applicant because, say, he reminds the employer of his long-lost brother? Or, what if the two candidates are equally qualified, and the hiring committee chooses one over the other by tossing a coin?
In both cases there is a conflict of interests between two rational applicants. The second possibility, that of two equally qualified candidates, she does not consider at all. Rand would be on firmer ground if she were to argue that there is no necessary conflict between rational interests, that is, that it is not in their nature to conflict.
When they conflict, it is due to contingent factors, such as only one job for two equally qualified people. In any case, a conflict between rational interests does not entail a conflict between rights, since, as Rand herself points out, neither party has a right to the job. Such a government is minimal, limited to protecting us from criminals and foreign aggressors, and enforcing individual rights and contracts with the help of the police and armed forces, using objectively defined civil and criminal laws and courts.
Accordingly, the government may use or threaten force only in retaliation against those who initiate or threaten force directly or indirectly. Statism in all its forms, from unlimited democracy to a mixed economy to dictatorship, is at odds with our status as independent, rational beings, as ends in ourselves.
The fountainhead of all progress is the human mind, and the mind does not function well when forced. There is a judge to arbitrate disagreements, but there has never been any need for arbitration.
Anarchist critics, such as Roy Childs [] and Murray Rothbard , have argued that a territorial monopoly on law and force government is not necessary, because people can establish a just and effective legal system in a competitive market of security providers see Long and Machan The Law Merchant, a body of law established and enforced in private courts by the merchants of various countries, illustrates the possibility of an effective voluntary legal system.
Cox a and b. The trader principle states that a voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange between independent equals is the only basis for a mutually respectful and rational relationship b: The trader principle applies to emotional relationships as well.
It would seem, however, that the trade between parent and child is unequal, given that the child receives both pleasure and material support from the parent. And it is unclear how the trader principle applies at all when a severe disability renders a beloved child or spouse a source of pain rather than pleasure.
Branden One literary critic argues that Dagny is the first, and perhaps only, epic heroine in Western literature because of the grandness of her vision, her courage and integrity, her unusual abilities, and her national importance Michalson In all three novels, it is the heroine who has the power to choose which of the men who love, admire, and desire her and only her she will have.
Her relationship to the feminist movement, however, was more complex. Branden ; Presley ; Sheaffer ; Taylor Another objects that Rand has internalized a masculine conception of human nature and virtue, and then created her ideal woman in light of this conception Brownmiller ; Glennon Brown At least as offensive to many are the violent sex scenes in her novels, especially the infamous scene in The Fountainhead that many regard as rape, where Howard Roark has sex with Dominique in spite of her resistance.
Those who reject the charge of rape argue that in the s and 50s, when Rand wrote her novels, it would have been seen as rough sex rather than non-consensual sex McElroy ; Sheaffer Rand holds that our actions need guidance by a vision of the fundamental nature of the universe and of the efficacy of human thought and activity—a vision that can be grasped directly rather than requiring the conscious repetition of long chains of abstract reasoning.
The chief function of art is to meet this psychological need by expressing abstract conceptual values and metaphysical truths in concrete perceptible form. There is controversy among Rand scholars as to whether what is re-created in art is certain elements of reality or reality as a whole, i. While art can be used to convey information or to advocate a position, such functions are secondary to its chief task: providing an object whose mere contemplation brings spiritual fulfillment.
Hence Rand does not regard her own novels primarily as vehicles for her philosophy, though of course they are that inter alia. Given her own worldview, Rand favors literature with a strong plot as a way of expressing purposeful human action in a world of causal regularity, and stories involving value-conflicts as a way of expressing the importance of free choice; hence her preference for romantic as opposed to, e.
Aristotle concepts egoism ethics: virtue incommensurability: of scientific theories justification, epistemic: foundationalist theories of libertarianism moral realism reference rights substance.
Introduction 1. Ethics 2. Social-Political Philosophy 3. In her own words, her philosophy, in essence, is 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. Her novels show the importance of striving to be the best we can be: Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.
As she puts it: Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Animals of many species risk their own lives for the sake of reproduction, or for protecting their young or even their group.
But even if survival were the ultimate goal of other species, it need not be ours. Even if our own survival needs were the source of all our values, it would not follow that survival must be the ultimate psychological and moral goal to which all our other values are merely necessary means.
The genesis of x does not logically determine the ultimate goal of x. This assumption that philosophy must be essentially deductive is one of the major problems that mainstream academics have in understanding Objectivism.
So it is no surprise that he thinks the conclusions are unsupported. No rebuttals to my comments? No retractions of obvious misrepresentations? No reworkings to take into account strong criticism? I have the impression that the state of Rand interpretation was hardly even close to this bad during the time she was writing her newsletters and giving addresses, and was a well-known contemporary commentator.
A few mediocre book-length critiques appeared in the decade following the Branden Break. The stale academic mainstream is going to have a problem on its hands, then.
You might also consider just how truly mean-spirited and politically-motivated is the prominent blogger who directed traffic to your, um, flawed analysis. I am preparing a response to several of the criticisms levied above.
Please be patient; I have other responsibilities, including a small child, a dissertation, and undergraduate teaching. I will attempt to respond as best I can in the comment section. You also take me to task on my characterization of her ethics by going back to the text of her novels, and I will also have something to say here. With some luck, my answers will be complete by this evening.
After that, I cannot promise any further contribution; life is short, and, cognizant as I am of the total intellectual production of the species to this point, I really wish to move on to other things. Incidentally, I should make it clear I do not think Rand is stupid—she seems, in effect, rather smart and clever, and certainly productive. The problem is that she—and her followers—insist on comparing her work to that of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and so on, and if that is the comparison class, I am afraid she falls short.
As we all do. There are some interesting bits of her philosophy that might be salvaged. There are people I respect working on this e. However, Rand and Peikoff stressed the cognitive-methodological need to work back and forth between inductive and deductive modes to, shall we say, keep a check on both processes. I do not have much time to spend on this, so I will write off-the-cuff, perhaps to your benefit readers may take away that I am incapable of responding and take your view more seriously.
I am not going to read this vast and sophisticated secondary literature on Rand you cite. Now you may argue that I have no business writing 8, word opinion pieces without having done so; and you are within your rights to accordingly lower your evaluation of my intellectual seriousness or sincerity.
Nothing said so far has convinced me that it would be profitable to read Sciabarra or Smith or Machan. These are hours I could spend on non-classical logic or formal semantics. Or any of a dozen thinkers and subjects. Or to have such specific public policy recommendations that can be made sub specie aeternitatis: Rand cites no empirical research, conducts no study, gathers no data, merely asserts that she knows what monetary policy to follow.
This is no way to go about the study of economics or political science. Again, nothing has been said about this argument because nothing can be said. If I fundamentally reject the idea that minimum wage laws can be evaluated from the armchair, then Rand is an intellectual curiosity at best and a useful obfuscation at worst.
This is the stuff of gurus and cults. There is literally no serious figure in modern intellectual history that even comes close to these kinds of grandiose claims. If you want to find someone like Dr. Brooks over at the ARI, then go to scientologists and see what they say about L. Yes, some serious philosophers have grappled with her and perhaps produced interesting, useful little bits of actual philosophy.
This is an inevitable by-product of the undeserved propagation and emphasis of her ideas. A philosophy department can attract a lot of outside money by being friendly to Rand. Only in America. Again, I hope the undecided and uncommitted think through this and reach their own conclusions. From my vantage point, it is pretty clear Rand was a smart figure who got in her own way. She might have made a decent thinker if she had any humility whatsoever. A damned waste, really. What is the nature of the Randian argument?
And further asserted that such armchair analysis cannot be expected to produce any reliable truths about the political, economical, and moral topics Rand discusses. In particular, I focused on the law of identity as exemplar of what is wrong-headed about the approach. Rand is explicit in her opposition to certain public policy. She advocates a minimalist state, implying a host of negative theses do not enforce minimum wage laws, do not enforce child labour laws, and so on.
Her words nevertheless have the virtue of being clear and succinct, and there is no question that she meant exactly what she said—even if it was compressed or simplified for a wide audience. But whatever was simplified in the background does not change the meaning of the words—a thesis that can be found again and again in her writings—that her conclusions are true, necessary, and logically demonstrable. Do her conclusions follow necessarily from her premises? Point final.
Not a single one, not about health care, not about working conditions, not about safety regulations. And if you think there are, then you are quite mad. This is not rhetoric, either.
I mean it. If you think that public policy is an armchair pursuit, only ideological capture could explain that fact. The kind of ideological spell that prevents useful information about the world to come in and interfere with the sinkhole of true belief. Identity could be the most sophisticated and complex congerie of neo-Aristotelian realism mixed with whatever epistemic requirements you want to build in: it is not going to work.
If it is, as some commenters would have it, a sophisticated inductive argument, where are the experiments? What studies have objectivists conducted? What data do they cite? Not until you do the hard, boring work of, you know, science.
Done, gone, out the window. For all any of us know moving towards the completely minimal state recommended could inflict untold harm to millions. The method is not knowledge-producing and I stand by that. You could have the correct metaphysics of identity. There is only one morally coherent government!
In any event, there is plenty of textual support that identity is treated a purely logical tautology sometimes and as an epistemic concept some other times, and a metaphysical truth some other times. No doubt much heavy lifting has been done to reconcile all this. Now, these putative axioms are top-heavy and ill-considered in any event.
In other words: yes, I can reject the axioms. This is typical of her thought. Her theory of reference is equally primitive: a concept is simply its referent, leaving us with no means to deal with e. She wants her conclusions to be inescapable, and dresses herself in the armature of logic and necessity, but when pressed avails herself of conceptual content that is, when not at least controversial, then obviously false.
Given the prevailing political uses to which Rand is put—and what social classes suffer from it—I cannot take seriously your exegetical work here. Maybe in some alternate universe Rand opens up grand new vistas of voluntary charity and concern for the poor. On the issue of the pursuit of money. The arc of the story is very old. If Rand had made the bold literary choice of having Roark cut stone the remainder of his days, a testament to his moral fibre, that would be one thing.
But the hero does not remain in the underworld forever: instead, he finishes on top of his gleaming skyscraper thus moral integrity is meaningless without the chance to act on it and build something. Was I guilty of lazy writing in the paragraph you mention about McGill? Maybe a little. Rand is not the Ferengi in Star Trek and I will cop to that charge.
It was vulgar. Reflection on context is the morality, and not merely the truism that every particular moral judgement is made in some context or other.
With this, I am done with this thread. The new semester starts in a week and I will begin moderating comments more heavily—and likely not reply to any further discussion. Thank you, everyone, for reading. EDIT: Random, reading your blog I see a strong emphasis on separating out your interpretation of Rand—a very idealistic one, with much to admire in ethics and outlook—from the political uses to which she has been put. To the extent that I am criticizing the latter, I apologize if anything above was offensive.
I stand by my metaphysical criticisms and methodological criticisms, however. And then I am going to attack her entire philosophy based on that! Why do I need to have done any other reading in order to discredit her philosophy? So I simply pass off that work to others and simply quote them! Are you kidding me?! First hand knowledge of that which I condemn?
Who needs that?! Like what SHE said actually matters here!! You have left her views unidentified and unrefuted. The politics consistent with the ethics I outline is still unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, because government robbery is not benevolence, and does not support good will among men.
Bookmark the permalink. Go read them again… you still disagree? Brilliantly dishonest and inconsistent argument. McGinnis I beg you, pretty please, publish your essay so I can buy a hard copy of this brilliant and complete disembowelment of this pseudo-philosophy and thank you!
Her own summary may be appropriated: I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality which has so far been believed impossible, namely a morality not based on faith, not on arbitrary whim, not on emotion, not on arbitrary edict, mystical or social, but on reason; a morality that can be proved by means of logic which can be demonstrated to be true and necessary.
Rationality at work. Well-meaning readers are taken in by her grandiose, if somewhat turgid, presentation 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 Atlas Shrugged.
To deny this is to deny that A is A. He recalls writing, in all seriousness, that Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.
Soldiers marching in Petrograd, Rand was twelve. In the National Review, Whittaker Chambers wrote, in Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.
Chambers rightly saw in Rand a dangerous radical, one who glosses over complexity in her desire to derive political prescription from first principles, an anti-conservative writer par excellence advocating a radically different society: [Atlas Shrugged] is essentially a political book. As the GOP, Wall Street, the intellectual plutocracy of think tanks and foundations, and Silicon Valley grow in coming years, expect to see the influence of this group and its ideas grow and stretch.
Despite numerous parallels with Scientology, Objectivism is not just sitting still, getting weirder while remaining confined to a few thousand worshippers. We have not yet reached Peak Libertarian. So where do these goofy ideas come from, and what effect might they have?
A partial answer — both rigorously told and incomplete — comes from a recent book, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World , by Wellesley College comp-lit professor Adam Weiner. Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject. Weiner shrewdly anticipates the first: how could a man of the extreme left — who helped inspire the terrorists who coalesced around the Russian Revolution — simultaneously provide the intellectual foundation for the godmother of the market-worshipping right?
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