What is your favorite Ayn Rand work?

Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

August 2, 2023

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min read

Question: What is your favorite Ayn Rand work?

Answer: I'm going to cheat and have two favorites. The Fountainhead is my first favorite as it's the one I read first, and it had a huge intellectual and emotional impact on me. I think it also works perfectly as a novel with its breadth of theme and length of development, so well-integrated. And I always still feel like an 18-year old kid when I reread it.

But as a philosopher, that kind of narrower but still important part of myself, Atlas Shrugged is my favorite. The enormous range of philosophical issues that she works on, their depth of development, and the integration of all of it into an overall philosophical system; as a philosopher, I find that astonishing and thrilling.

About the author:

Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Stephen R. C. Hicks is a Professor of Philosophy and a Senior Scholar for The Atlas Society.

He is author of The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy, 2004), Nietzsche and the Nazis (Ockham’s Razor, 2010), Entrepreneurial Living (CEEF, 2016), Liberalism Pro and Con (Connor Court, 2020), Art: Modern, Postmodern, and Beyond (with Michael Newberry, 2021), Eight Philosophies of Education (2022), and Lectures on the Philosophy of Politics (Spanish translation, Publicaciones del Orden Espontáneo, 2026). He has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Review of Metaphysics, and The Wall Street Journal. His writings have been translated into 20 languages.

He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland, Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College of Oxford University, England, and Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University, Poland.

His B.A. and M.A. degrees are from the University of Guelph, Canada. His Ph.D. in Philosophy is from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

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