Honoring Ayn Rand: Centenary Tributes for the Philosopher and Novelist

by Congressman Ed Royce

Ayn Rand began her writing career as an anti-socialist, and, perhaps to some, a seemingly anti-social, original thinker who taught that achievement is the aim of life, and that men are responsible for the ideas that they choose to accept.

Like H. L. Mencken, she had no fear of smashing venerated, established ideas. Her audacity in portraying uncompromising characters with a reverence for creative freedom and a wrecking ball's approach to one's obstacles inspired many young innovators to achieve great careers through path-breaking work. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is the one student of Ayn Rand's influence in the public sector who comes to mind; appropriately, there are an infinite number in the private sector. With twenty million of her books in circulation, there will be more.

Unlike Mencken, her severe discipline led her away from an early cynicism and instead drove her to later examine every aspect of philosophy and political economy, adjusting her understanding of life and of human motivation as she set a rational case for individual rights.

She integrated and presented a full case for the philosophy of capitalism and was the first to relentlessly popularize the free-market theories of Ludwig von Mises in the United States, bringing him to the attention of a new generation of economists. She championed the individual against the collective, reason over mysticism, self-assertiveness over guilt, and the United States over her native Soviet Union.

Shaping one's character was a core issue for Rand, and, leaning on Aristotelian logic, she argued that a commitment to convictions and reason was essential for a moral life and self-esteem. Free will—conscious choice—a code for rational values, and a dialogue on creating one's self through one's own effort were potent ideals; for a time, the pull of her views began to muffle neo-Marxism in the din of campus coffee-house conversation.

Ayn Rand believed in the capacity to know and argued against every attempt to evade the responsibility of thinking. Her point, born of an adolescence in the U.S.S.R., that no man exists for the sake of another man became her anthem. She worked toward and accurately predicted the Soviet collapse. It came nine years after Alice Rosenbaum's passing, but given the long struggle for mankind's freedom, Soviet ideas and Ayn Rand's ideals are destined to battle on, and the field of strife will be closer to home.

Edward R. Royce is a Congressman from Orange County, California, and a Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee.

by Robert W. Poole Jr.

Ayn Rand's ideas inspired many people; one of them was me. I had no idea when I began reading Atlas Shrugged in the summer of 1964 that doing so would change not only my understanding of the world but also my choice of career.

Rand's powerful vision of rationality and liberty hit me at an opportune time. Previously inspired by Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented The Conscience of a Conservative, I was in the thick of the student "Goldwater for President" movement. And thanks to MIT's required courses in modern Western ideas and values, I'd been introduced to Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Mill (along with many others), and on my own had discovered Friedman, Hayek, and Mises. I was ready for an integrated worldview that explained why I'd never been comfortable being labeled a conservative.

But more than that, after reading Atlas I burned with desire to change the world to be more like Galt's Gulch. Or at least to write about the flaws of statism and the potential of liberty. But I was being channeled into aerospace engineering by an educational system that had been mobilized by Sputnik to win the cold war via science and engineering.

While ensconced in my first aerospace job, I decided to try my hand at advocacy journalism, researching and writing a long article on why government should get out of the business of regulating airlines. Not knowing where else to submit it, I sent it to a fledgling libertarian monthly called Reason, published in mimeograph(!) by student Objectivist Lanny Friedlander in Boston. It became the cover story of the first typeset and offset-printed issue of Reason. And when it was reprinted in the much larger magazine The Freeman, generating a dozen letters from serious people, I had one of those life-changing moments. Somehow, I was going to move into the ideas business.

It took more than eight years to get to the point of being able to make a living as an advocate of liberty. The first step was joining forces with Objectivist scholar Tibor Machan to buy Reason from Friedlander and run it as a glorified hobby business from my house. I switched from aerospace engineering to policy analysis at a non-ideological think tank, learning how such organizations operate. Finally, in the summer of 1978, we opened the doors of the Reason Foundation, with me as president and editor-in-chief of the magazine. Within a few years I'd expanded the foundation's scope to include policy studies on privatization and deregulation.

Many factors led to the creation of the Reason Foundation, but the single most important one was the influence of Ayn Rand.

Robert W. Poole Jr. launched the Reason Foundation in 1978 and served as its president until 2001.

by Barbara Lehman

I was thirteen when I was first introduced to Ayn Rand. I was blessed with an English teacher who saw in me the core of an emerging philosophical mind.

"Write a two-page essay on your philosophy of life," Miss Price said.

I responded: "My philosophy of life is that everyone has the right to their own happiness, as long as their happiness doesn't interfere with my own," and I went on for a page and a half, expanding on that premise, then turned the paper in the next day.

To my surprise, Miss Price used the essay as an example of clear writing that had an understanding of the assignment, and she posted it on the bulletin board. On it, she had written: "'The high minded man (or woman) cares more for truth than for what people think.' Aristotle. See me in my office."

When I arrived, she turned to me without greeting and asked, "Have you ever read anything by Ayn Rand?" And with that she handed me The Fountainhead. She explained that my essay suggested a potential interest in Objectivism and that I should explore how Rand's philosophy resonated with my own.

From that moment, I couldn't get enough. Further, I couldn't find anyone but my teacher to discuss what I was discovering through Rand's books. Isolated in my room, reading constantly, I remained aloof from the turmoil of my sixties generation and also detached from my family and their values. Rand's characters, her morality, her lengthy and intense monologues showed me a view of a world to which I wanted to belong.

In the sixties, Objectivism started as a movement with leaders and heroes and a venue for exchanging ideas. In the seventies, whatever momentum there had been became stunted and insular, and the movement discouraged dissent. It is refreshing to see, at last, that Rand's essential philosophy endures and that people are learning again, questioning again, and understanding that to integrate a philosophy of reason one must think for oneself.

Over the years, as I read and re-read Rand's books dozens of times, I came to realize that it isn't enough just to appreciate the "ideal" of that world; one must also expend effort to help create it. Forty-four years after it came to my attention, Objectivism has permeated my personal and professional life—and informed not just what and how I think, but who I am.

Barbara Lehman is chief marketing strategist for HMI, in Tempe, Arizona, with a focus on developing integrated communication strategies for the beauty, health, and medical industries.

by Madeleine Pelner Cosman

Dagny Taggart shoots guns and flies airplanes. These rational survival skills exhilarate all the heroes in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Because I learned to shoot and to fly as a Jewish child during World War II, I confirm that flying and shooting teach the power of mind to surpass the body's limitations as earth-bound and as vulnerable to vicious thugs. Both flying and shooting require mental and physical discipline, preparation, practice, and bravura technique. A good gun with ammunition extends the reach of the hands of a rational, honest, just, independent person of integrity and initiative who takes pride in living life in liberty. A good aircraft flown with adequate fuel, a map, and clear visibility in open airspace reminds an Objectivist that distance can be vanquished with speed, and that plane perspective from the cockpit depicts that what is, is, that the horrific can be controlled, and that the ordinary can be magnificent.

Dagny flies a sleek single-engine airplane when she chases after the young scientist rebuilding John Galt's miracle motor. Dagny climbs aboard, touches the starter, and, as the propeller "vanishes in a fragile sparkle of whirling air that cuts the space ahead," accelerates for a forward thrust. The straight line run "gathers power by spending it on a harder and harder and ever-accelerating effort, the straight line to a purpose—to the moment, unnoticed, when the earth drops off and the line, unbroken, goes on into space in the simple, natural act of rising." That is Bernoulli's Law. Dagny later crash-lands that monoplane, confident she will survive, on the hidden mountain runway of Galt's Gulch.

Other heroes fly their own airplanes: Rearden flies his aircraft to Colorado to check the progress of the John Galt Line trains. John Galt flies his silver craft to pick up each entrepreneurial Atlas who shrugs. At the finale, Francisco's airplane, hidden in the brush, takes off after he, Dagny, Rearden, and Danneskjöld rescue imprisoned John Galt. Their ability to compress time and space depends on their skill in piloting a vehicle kept airborne by a whirring motor propelled by fuel and the genius of the minds that made the planes.

The muzzle of a gun is the only substitute for men who abandon money. Francisco's famous praise of money condemns looters by law and criminals by right who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed men. Dagny handles a gun with familiar expertise, shooting and killing a recalcitrant guard watching tortured John Galt: "Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness." Just as armed civilians carrying muskets protect the John Galt Line, likewise at the conclusion Reardon's courage and Danneskjold's heroically wielded pistol unshackle John Galt. Defensive shooting, like flying, liberates the ethical shooter from fear and vulnerability and enhances self-esteem by using ingenious tools to soar beyond the body.

Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a medical lawyer based in San Diego, California, is a director of the California Rifle and Pistol Association and writes a monthly column for The Firing Line called "Madeleine's Guns and Medicine." She initiated the Rancho Santa Fe Lady Shooters. She is a volunteer with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department and a federal Community Emergency Response Team member. She lectures worldwide and has published fifteen books on medical law and on medieval culture.

by Michelle Marder Kamhi

I was introduced to Ayn Rand's work in 1984 by Lou Torres, who had founded Aristos, an arts journal informed by her philosophy of art, two years before. Until then, I had known of Rand only vaguely—and not favorably—as the controversial author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Politically, I was decidedly left of center. Business was suspect in my view. Government, I believed, was the solution for the world's economic and social problems.

Fifteen years earlier, I had earned a master's degree in art history but couldn't reconcile my passion for the Italian Renaissance with what was passing for art in the postmodernist art world. So I had turned instead to freelance journalism and local activism on issues related to nutrition, maternal and infant health, and education.

At Lou's urging, I began to read Rand, and found her ideas compelling. When I tested them against my own experience, I realized that the classical liberal values she championed—individualism, personal responsibility, and productive work—were, in fact, the core values that I lived by. Moreover, I began to see the manifold ways those values (and the personal and social goods they generate) are undermined by the role for government I had advocated.

Rand's ideas on art have, of course, had a particularly transforming effect on my life. Reading the first four essays of The Romantic Manifesto was like a thunderbolt, convincing me that I was right to feel alienated from the contemporary art world and inspiring me to renew my engagement with art. With a heightened sense of their value, I began to write about the arts professionally and eventually resolved, with Lou, to give Rand's theory of art the in-depth critical attention it merits, outside as well as within Objectivist circles.

Perhaps most valuable, however, Rand has taught me to think more clearly and deeply. From her I learned how to look beneath the surface of arguments to discern mistaken premises; to trace ideas to their basis in the reality of experience; and to be more aware of the ways in which emotion can color one's judgment. That said, I have also learned an important negative lesson from her. For much as I admire and am grateful for her intellectual legacy, I strive at every turn not to emulate her often bitter and abrasive style—which, I firmly believe, has kept many reasonable people from appreciating her ideas.

With her husband, Louis Torres, Michelle Marder Kamhi edits and writes for Aristos and is co-author of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Open Court, 2000). Articles by her have also appeared in Arts Education Policy Review, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and Navigator, among other publications.

by Don Hauptman

I first encountered Ayn Rand's ideas in 1964. But it was five years later, after graduating from college, that I really immersed myself in her novels and philosophy.

This was the Vietnam War period, and conscription had not yet ended. I wound up in the U.S. Navy for the next four years. Wherever I was stationed, I searched for fellow Objectivists. They weren't always easy to find. I often experienced a sense of intellectual isolation. I identified with Eric Hoffer, who read Nietzsche and Montaigne while toiling as a longshoreman and migrant field worker.

I was assigned, not to a ship, but to a U.S. Air Force base in Bremerhaven, Germany. The accommodations were modest but comfortable, resembling a college dorm. But there was no laundry room. For that amenity, we had to traipse to another building.

Shortly after my arrival, I made a pilgrimage to this remote facility. Here, I discovered another annoyance: no chair upon which to await the spin cycle. In search of seating, I opened an unmarked, unlocked door. The room, I suddenly realized, was someone's living quarters. Before I could beat a furtive retreat, I glanced at the bookshelves. In this environment, that sight was in itself a rarity. But as I scanned the titles, my jaw dropped. This guy's library looked just like mine! Rand's books. Branden's books. Neatly stacked or bound issues of the Objectivist Newsletter and the Objectivist. And still more volumes by the usual suspects: Mises, Hazlitt, Paterson, et al.

Of course, I subsequently met the occupant, an airman, who introduced me to others with more than a casual interest in Rand. One, a fellow sailor who was the commanding officer's assistant, had an infant daughter named Kira. He directed an amateur production of Night of January 16th, which I attended.

This literate group served as a welcome oasis in an intellectual desert. And all the result of a chance event. What were the odds?

After eighteen months, I was transferred to a school in Indiana for military journalists. One day while in the—you guessed it!—laundry room, I spotted a paperback of Atlas Shrugged. Its owner, a serviceman from Pennsylvania, shared my passion for this particular author. Once again, I had a friend with interests other than drinking, bowling, and porn.

In 1974, I was discharged. Seven years later, after achieving some professional success, I moved to a snazzy new apartment and hired a housekeeper. For the past twenty-three years, I've been fortunate enough not to have to do my own laundry. No regrets, though. I've found other ways to meet Objectivists.

Don Hauptman lives in New York City, where he writes advertising and puns.

by Tibor R. Machan

Ayn Rand was no academic, and people sometimes point to that fact for the lack of scholarly consideration given to her work. To be sure, some ethics anthologies now use Rand's work, and some ethics texts refer to her version of egoism, although they usually misunderstand it by confusing it with a kind of Hobbesian version. (The late James Rachels, for example, thought it was a case of Hobbesian egoism for Howard Roark to blow up the housing complex built in defiance of his design.) But in the many other branches of philosophy, beyond the field of morality, Rand receives hardly any attention, even though several contemporary philosophers now tread paths Rand earlier pointed out. Her meta-ethics, for example, is similar to those of Martha Nussbaum (The Therapy of Desire) and Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness), both developed later. Rand's non-reductionist naturalism, though it goes uncited, is also much in vogue, as shown by Mary Midgley's work. Hilary Putnam and Martha Nussbaum, in their discussions of universals and Aristotelian essentialism, engage epistemology in Randian ways. (See Putnam's Words & Life.)

Admittedly, some of Rand's students and epigone do not help matters by claiming that nothing in contemporary philosophy is worthwhile, which is simply untrue. People working along lines Rand would have had to value include: Edward Pols in metaphysics and epistemology (Mind Regained, Radical Realism), as well as on the nature of causality and the debate over free will and determinism (The Acts of Our Being); John Searle in the philosophy of mind (Rationality in Action); and Amartya Sen in the philosophy of economics (Rationality and Freedom). David L. Norton's ethical writings were much in the same tradition as Rand's; see his Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism.

But Objectivist tirades cannot justify the academy's shunning of Rand. Other philosophers have worked outside the academy and even disdained it. Indeed, most Enlightenment-style thinkers—John Locke among them—set themselves against the entrenched Scholasticism of the schools as bitterly as ever Rand set herself against logical positivism and linguistic analysis. And in any case, Rand's writings deserve scholarly attention when taken on their merits (which is supposed to be what concerns scholars). She did excellent work on the nature of conceptual consciousness. She made original contributions in her treatment of the relationship between ethics and epistemology; in her naturalist conception of the freedom of the will; and, of course, in her "new concept" of ethical egoism.

But her most powerful contribution was her insistence on the close connection between morality and the right to private property, and her conclusion that capitalism as a political economic system is just. Her systematic rejection of coercion as a valid form of human interaction has been invaluable both for the progress of contemporary classical liberalism—libertarianism—and for the actual advances of human liberty. Ironically, despite Rand's profound contribution to classical liberal thought, even some "friends of liberty" in the academy disdain her.

I am convinced that this denial of Rand's contribution to the history of ideas and to philosophy in particular cannot last much longer. She may have been more of an architect than a mortar worker, but why is that a fault? In our time, mortar workers abound. What is rare is a philosopher with an inspiring and inordinately sensible vision.

Tibor Machan is the R.C. Hoiles Professor of Business Ethics & Free Enterprise in the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California.

by Eric Mack

Ayn Rand was an advocate of both egoism and rights. As an advocate of egoism, she held that the individual ought not to impose upon himself sacrifices of his well-being, even if those sacrifices would promote the well-being of others. She held that the appropriate ultimate end for each individual is his achievement of his own well-being. As an advocate of rights, she held that each individual must eschew imposing sacrifices upon others; likewise, each individual may demand of others that they not impose sacrifices upon him. Individuals must not treat others as means to their own ends.

What precisely is the relationship between Rand's claim that the ultimate end for each individual is the achievement of his well-being and her claim that no individual is a means to the well-being of any other individual (or group)? This is a difficult question. It was wonder about the precise relationship between Rand's advocacy of egoism and her advocacy of rights that led me to devote a large part of my academic life to more general questions about the relationship between end-promoting reasons and means-precluding reasons.

One common view about the relationship between Rand's claims about ultimate ends and her claims about precluded means is that precluded means are simply those means that do not effectively promote ultimate ends. Wesley's enslaving of Hank is a precluded means because (and only because) it will not really effectively promote Wesley's ultimate ends. With this understanding, what is wrong about Wesley's enslavement of Hank is that it is harmful to Wesley. (Hank has his own reasons to resist this enslavement. But if Hank has rights against that enslavement, Wesley must have reason to eschew the enslavement and, in the view at hand, those reasons must be a matter of the enslavement being contrary to Wesley's ends.)

I want to plead for a different view of Rand's advocacy of egoism and rights—a view which sees Rand's egoism and her endorsement of rights as two equal facets of the root idea that each individual is a moral end-in-himself. To be a moral end-in-oneself is necessarily connected with having an ultimate end of one's own—an ultimate condition to go for in life. To recognize oneself as a being with an ultimate end of one's own is to recognize that one has reason to promote that end and not the ends of others. To apprehend others as ends-in-themselves is to apprehend each other person as having an ultimate end of his own and, hence, to apprehend each other person as not merely an object available as an instrument of one's own ends. Others' existence as beings with ultimate ends of their own gives one reason, not to serve their ends, but to treat them as beings who are not at one's own disposal—as beings who uniquely are at their own disposal. It is because and only because Hank is a moral end-in-himself that, when he asserts his rights against Wesley, he is not merely appealing to Wesley's self-interest.

Eric Mack is professor of philosophy at Tulane University where he is also a member of the faculty of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy.

by Michelle Fram Cohen

Rand acknowledged Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she was indebted, the father of logic who defined "the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of man's consciousness." Rand agreed with Aristotle that man's life should be guided by reason and that the purpose of man's life is happiness. She agreed that happiness depended on objective, external conditions rather than on a subjective, internal disposition. Rand's definition of happiness as "non-contradictory joy," the joy of achieving one's values by following reason, corresponds to Aristotle's definition of happiness (or eudæmonia in ancient Greek): "The life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest."

Nevertheless, Rand contributed two major manifestations of happiness to Aristotle's conception of eudæmonia: productive work and romantic love. Whereas Aristotle upheld the attainment of knowledge as an end in itself, and philosophical reasoning as the noblest activity possible to man, Rand upheld the application of knowledge to science, technology, and business as the goal of acquiring knowledge, with productive activity as the noblest activity possible to man. According to Aristotle, "the activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities," which means that "the philosopher will more than any other be happy." Rand could shed the Platonic vestige of Aristotle's view of knowledge because she witnessed the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and observed that an innovative motor represented "the power of an incomparable mind given shape in a net of wires." Rand identified the spiritual source of material production, elevating industry and technology to a moral ideal.

Second to productive work among the manifestations of happiness, according to Rand, is romantic love, man's "response to his own highest values in the person of another—an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire." Romantic love is absent in Aristotle's discussion of eudæmonia, leaving friendship as the highest form of interpersonal happiness, possible between "men who are good, and alike in virtue." The reason can be attributed to Aristotle's historical context as well. Women in ancient Greece were not educated and could not provide the type of intellectual companionship that was the foundation of friendship. Rand not only witnessed the emancipation of women, legally and psychologically, but was herself an example of this emancipation: a woman of outstanding intellect. Rand identified the intellectual equality of men and women, which made interpersonal happiness possible between the sexes. Furthermore, she upheld the role of sex as the complement of love, describing love as "the profound, exalted, life-long passion that unites [one's] mind and body in the sexual act."

By adding material production and romantic love as ingredients of happiness, Rand anchored Aristotle's concept of eudæmonia in the physical world, uniting mind and body and shedding Aristotle's Platonic vestiges. Michelle Fram Cohen, a native of Israel, has lived in the United States since 1981. She holds an M.A. in comparative literature and works as a computer programmer and a freelance translator and writer. Her writings have been published in Navigator, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and Full Context.

by Marian L. Tupy

Outside the concentration camps, which all collectivists felt necessary to establish in order to physically exterminate the last vestiges of freedom, the color of communism was not "red." It was "gray." My childhood memories of communist Czechoslovakia are filled with gray skies, gray streets, gray houses, and gray masses of joyless people. My family, like most families in the Soviet bloc, had its share of "problems" with the communist authorities. My great uncle, because of his alleged anti-communist activities, was sent to mine uranium for Soviet nuclear weapons.

Like so many others, I understood early on that communism was both murderous and a gargantuan economic failure. But recognition of communist failings does not automatically translate into love for capitalism. Millions of people around the world continue to see capitalism as a prerequisite for wealth creation, yet abhor its moral premises. They tolerate capitalism as a necessary evil. Such half-hearted commitment to capitalism is dangerous. On an ethical level, it legitimizes envy and theft. On a practical level, it makes capitalism less effective in producing economic growth.

I first understood the importance of a moral defense of capitalism when, as a university student in Great Britain, I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In that book, Rand identifies the entrepreneur as the creator of value and the rightful owner of the risks and rewards of his economic activities. Others, who do not share the risks that the entrepreneur takes, should not expect to be rewarded. As Francisco d'Anconia says to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged: "All your life you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements…. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter."

Similar insights greatly contributed to Austrian economic theory. For example, F. A. Hayek and Israel Kirzner identified the entrepreneur as the creator of value, thus challenging the morality of government redistribution of income. Unfortunately, university undergraduates are seldom exposed to either Austrian economics or Rand's writings. That is both a pity and a call to action. In the long run, the public's failure to understand the morality of capitalism makes a future return of collectivism more likely.

Marian L. Tupy is assistant director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the Cato Institute.

by Chris Matthew Sciabarra

There is much to celebrate on the occasion of the Ayn Rand centenary. Books on Rand and Rand citations in the scholarly literature have multiplied exponentially in the past decade; there's even a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, of which I am a founding co-editor. In addition, we have witnessed Rand's cultural ascendancy as an iconic figure, as references to her proliferate on television, in movies, plays, novels, and music, and even in cartoons and comic books.

But for those of us who work in the area of social theory, it is Rand's radical legacy that must be preserved and extended. In seeking to understand and change that which she characterized as the "New Fascism," Rand traced the relationships among such seemingly disparate factors as political economy and sex, education and art, metaphysics and psychology, money and moral values. By examining such elements on different levels of generality and from different perspectives, by grasping their place within a larger system and their development across time, Rand illustrated the power of a profoundly radical method of social inquiry.

Indeed, Rand's radicalism, though political in its implications, was more about the methodology of thinking. Rand sought to go to the root of social problems, while stressing the interconnectedness of social phenomena within a broader context. Those of us who are inspired by Rand's model have learned to question the fundamentals at work in virtually every social problem we analyze. And it is because of thinkers like Rand that we can appreciate the nature of freedom as a comprehensive achievement, one that has psychological, philosophical, and cultural preconditions and effects.

Chris Matthew Sciabarra is a visiting scholar in the department of politics at New York University. He is the author of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, and of two monographs: Ayn Rand: Her Life and Thought and Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation. He is the coeditor with Mimi Reisel Gladstein of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, and also a founding coeditor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

by Stephen Cox

A few years ago, a colleague whose intelligence I respect invited me to attend a lecture he was going to give. "This will not be one of those careful academic talks," he warned me. "This will cause some controversy. I'm going to tell the would-be authorities exactly where they went wrong. They won't like it, either!"

"Sounds interesting," I said, and went to the lecture anticipating a vigorous clash of ideas. Once the program started, however, I found that my friend's idea of controversy was very different from my own. His dissent from prevailing views consisted of a few slight shifts in nuance and some ironies so mild that even his putative opponents chuckled comfortably about them. The question period was devoted to controversies of a largely bibliographic nature.

I was left to wonder what would have happened if my colleague had actually told the "authorities"—boldly, clearly, and specifically—just where their faulty assumptions lay. Perhaps he would have changed their perspective, altered his scholarly field. Or perhaps he would have been scorned by the people whom Ibsen called the "compact majority," while giving a minority of independent thinkers the chance to judge between two sets of clearly defined ideas.

Either outcome would have been good. In a way, both of them were achieved by Ayn Rand.

Rand dissented in the boldest, clearest, and most specific way possible from prevailing intellectual notions; as a result, her ideas were scorned by the great majority of established thinkers. Yet her rebellion stimulated a minority of independent minds—a minority that, I'm happy to say, included me. This group consisted largely of restless young people, bored by the complacently modulated tones of academic and political authorities who always seemed to be suggesting that the problems of modern liberalism could be solved by further applications of modern liberalism. There were a lot of us, and Rand gave us something new to think about. And by doing so, she did succeed in changing the intellectual landscape.

Henceforth, no one could glibly contrast "personal rights" with "property rights," assert the duty of economic self-sacrifice, condemn individualism, or assume the need for increased state power without considering that someone who knew better might suddenly rise up in the audience, like Ralph Ellison's "little man at Chehaw Station," and demand full discussion of the speaker's evidence and logic.

That was Rand's gift to American political discourse—a valuable gift indeed. It was a change in the idea of what was possible to think and say.

Nor was her influence wholly political, philosophical, and argumentative. It was also psychological, personal, and inspirational. In her stories and in her life, she showed what it meant to live in a world of ideas, not simply to use ideas for professional purposes. Also, (and I don't think this is noticed frequently enough) she was a radical thinker who didn't just discard the traditions of Western thought and culture, as too many intellectuals of her time tried to do, but demonstrated how interesting they could be when viewed from a fresh perspective. The excitement of reading her work was like the excitement of watching some daring feat of gymnastics or military strategy, performed for the first time, but with the self-conscious discipline of an ancient art—a feat that, she insisted, the reader could also perform, because the skill was attainable by reason and reflection.

It's hard to imagine a more challenging experience, or a more exciting one. Thirty years later, I find the excitement returning whenever I reread her work.

Stephen Cox is a professor of literature and director of the Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego. His new book is The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Transaction Publishers, 2004).

by Anne Wortham

Consider the following situation. It is 1963. You are a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Tuskegee University, rooming in Washington, D.C., waiting to be notified of your selection as a Peace Corps volunteer. You are preparing to leave the city to visit your family before reporting to Syracuse University for training and then on to a two-year tour in Tanzania.

As you pack your bags, more than 200,000 people are participating in the March on Washington. You are not among the marchers, because your conscience won't allow it. There are many things about the civil rights movement that trouble you, among them its demand for antidiscrimination legislation that unjustly assumes the collective guilt of whites. But you don't know how to analyze your bewildered indignation, or even how to arrive at principled arguments questioning the movement's message. Instead, your objections form a pre-conceptual notion wrapped in a web of churning emotions.

I was that troubled twenty-one-year-old. Little did I know that joining the Peace Corps would start me on my own march to intellectual and emotional liberation.

The fateful day came in 1964, midway into the first year of my Peace Corps tour. A fellow volunteer had read Rand's interview in Playboy and recommended that I read it because, he said, my "weird" ideas sounded a lot like hers. Some months later, while on vacation in Kampala, Uganda, we found a used paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged at a rummage shop. Still later, the British manager of a tea plantation gave me his unread paperback of The Fountainhead.

I identified immediately with the protagonist in The Fountainhead and was so impressed by Rand's characterization of his individualism that I wrote to the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) in New York for copies of the NBI lectures that were advertised on the cover of the book. The NBI manager replied that the lecture series was not available in print and sent brochures describing the institute's offerings, including books that could be purchased from NBI's book service. He also wrote: "I am somewhat startled by your interest in the Peace Corps and in Objectivism. If you have understood Miss Rand's books, I am sure you will understand the contradiction." I did understand, and I attempted to resign from the Peace Corps but was told that if I left before the end of my tour I would have to finance my return to the United States. I had no choice but to stay.

Despite the manager's chastisement, I ordered pamphlets by Rand, hardbacks of her four novels, For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, NBI's Objectivist Newsletter, Ludwig von Mises's Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, John Herman Randall's Aristotle, Brand Blanshard's Reason & Analysis, and others. With these works, I began an adventure of intellectual expansion that continues to this day, and I experienced the joy of such expansion as I read Rand's essays "Collectivized Rights," "Racism," and "Man's Rights." Her natural-law defense of individual rights confirmed my misgivings about the civil rights movement and gave me the language of freedom and justice with which to formulate my doubts about civil rights policy.

But the influence of Rand's ideas on my life went further still and helped me to understand human liberation in a deeper-than-political sense. Here I must mention the impact of Nathaniel Branden's extension of Objectivism into psychology. Rand taught me how to think and how to arrive at empirical and moral judgments. Nathaniel Branden taught me how to be myself. Branden's exposition in The Psychology of Self-Esteem showed me that I could not know myself as a unique personality and character until I understood the cognitive, emotional, moral, and behavioral dimensions of the human self. His meticulous analysis of the need for psychological visibility and its impact on human relationships inspired sessions of deep introspection and self-assessment. In time, I achieved a level of autonomous self-awareness (warts and all) that was truly, personally liberating.

Thank you, Ayn Rand. Thank you, Nathaniel Branden.

Anne Wortham is an associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University.

by Theodore Kinni

One of my favorite photographs of Ayn Rand dates to 1961. In it, she is the only woman at the President's Advanced Round Table of the American Management Association, surrounded by executives who are dressed in what still passes for casual business attire.

It is an improbable image. What is this popular novelist and self-professed philosopher doing at such a meeting, and what could she possibly have to say about building profitable businesses and successful careers? Lots, as it turns out.

Rand's "philosophy for living" was, and is, a philosophy for working, too. Although she surely would have scoffed at the notion that there was any difference between living and working, Objectivism does offer a sound foundation on which to build careers and businesses.

Some businesspeople have done exactly that. John Allison, CEO and chairman of BB&T, a financial holding company with over $97.9 billion in assets, declares that his company's philosophy is to "encourage our employees to have a strong sense of purpose, a high level of self-esteem, and the capacity to think clearly and logically." Not coincidentally, these three qualities are Objectivist values. High-tech entrepreneurs T.J. Rogers of Cypress Semiconductor and Larry Ellison of Oracle have credited Rand for influencing their approach to business (even though they may not agree with all of the precepts of Objectivism).

Many other businesspeople espouse ideas that clearly connect back to Rand, without crediting her directly. "In short, we're in a new business environment," claim former head of Honeywell Larry Bossidy and management consultant Ram Charan in their new book, Confronting Reality. "The tools, practices, and behaviors that will distinguish success from failure can be summed up in one phrase: relentless realism." New business environment or old, Rand was teaching that same lesson fifty years ago.

In fact, the biggest difference between the metaphysics of the business environment of today and that of fifty years ago may be this: Then, Rand focused her efforts on saving businesspeople from Big Government and other external forces. Today, in the wake of the dishonesty that led to the collapse of companies such as Enron and Parmalat, and the irrationality that created the Internet bubble, she might well be more focused on saving businesspeople from themselves.

Is Rand, on the centennial of her birth, relevant in today's business world? Now as much as ever; and as long as rationality, productiveness, pride, independence, integrity, honesty, and justice continue to be the driving forces behind corporate and career success, so shall she be.

Theodore Kinni is co-author (with Donna Greiner) of Ayn Rand and Business (Texere, 2001). He can be reached at bizbooks@gte.net or 757-258-4746.

by Alan Charles Kors

It is Ayn Rand's awareness of rightful justice and liberty that goes to the core of things. I disagree with her psychology, her analysis of the corporation, and her assessment of the etiology and nature of ethical judgment. I disagree with her conclusion that the ethics of the family and of smaller, intimate circles should be the same as the ethics of the extended order—I suspect that Hayek was correct, in the end, that much of human tragedy lies in the dissonance between our evolutionary hard-wiring for intimate life and the essential, life-enhancing rules of an impersonal world of voluntary markets. Disagreement with the particulars (or with the fact itself) of Rand's vaster philosophical project, however, does not diminish her stunning clarity and force on the issues that define the very possibility of human dignity in our age. No one articulated more compellingly than she the justice of self-ownership, writ large, and of property, writ large, acquired by voluntary exchange. No one articulated more compellingly the perverse injustice of the theft and violence of involuntary redistribution, of the initiation of force, and of the obscene nominal substitution of one's "men in Washington" for one's criminal thugs and enforcers. She understood that the "givers" were, in fact, the productive, the creative, the risk-takers, and the self-sufficient, and that the "takers," however loud their cries of victimhood from the fact of unequal outcomes, were free-riders upon the minds, risk, capital, work, and success of others. Her statement of it was unparalleled: The value of labor was one iron bar after days and days of work; that was what the blacksmith brought to it. The tons of rail for a day's efforts, and all the rewards attached to that, were a gift of the Hank Reardens. Indeed.

Rand also understood, before almost anyone, the nature and stakes of the catastrophe befalling higher education in America. In 1957, she presciently decried "those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior." How will the unjust, the parasites, and the thieves seek to bring about their world? "Walk into any college classroom," she wrote, "and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing…that he's incapable of knowing an objective reality." She understood that pseudo-philosophies of the social construction of reality were, at their essence, self-serving denials of reality itself that sought to provide a rationale for the theft and expropriation of the property, talent, and work of others. We are there now, unmistakably. What Rand described as the "intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors" now run the subsidized centers of education. When students read her, they should recognize truths about both the extended order and the cultural world that is closest to them. In the current age, from the perspective of the betrayed academy, there is no more transgressive author than she.

Alan Charles Kors is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

by Charles Murray

A few years ago, I was sitting at a sushi bar in downtown Washington, D.C., reading a battered paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged while I munched on a California roll. The man next to me saw the cover and said, "Ah yes, Ayn Rand. Something everyone reads when they're young." He was infinitely condescending. "And sometimes even when they're older," I replied, but left it there.

And yet he was right. My sister got me to read The Fountainhead when I was barely a teenager. I have a clear memory of reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time while sitting beside a stream near Boulder, Colorado, which dates it to the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school. You hear it again and again: people read Ayn Rand in high school, and it changed their lives.

When rereading her in later years, I am always aware of why she so appeals to teenagers—the simplicity of good and evil, the contempt for shades of gray, the evocation of the heroic. Many times I come across a passage that now makes me mutter, as I did not when I was a teenager, "C'mon Ayn, that's not real." So why was I sitting there, a man in his fifties, rereading Atlas Shrugged? Why am I so confident that people will still be reading Ayn Rand a few hundred years from now?

The answer goes to the old Greek fable about the hedgehog and the fox—the fox knowing many things, the hedgehog knowing one big thing. Rand saw herself as a knower of many things, the creator of a complete philosophical system. I don't know enough about the details of Objectivism to judge whether she succeeded. What I do believe is that Rand knew a couple of Big Things about the nature of human life that were luminously True and at the same time vaultingly optimistic. That's a combination that can reverberate in human minds for a long time if the means of expression are as vivid as the truths are powerful. To me, that was Ayn Rand's genius. She was able to paint a few great truths in primary colors.

Charles Murray is a W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.