One of my favorite photographs of Ayn Rand dates back to 1961. In it, she is the only woman at the President's Advanced Round Table of the
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.
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.
Objectivism is the philosophy of rational individualism founded by Ayn Rand (1905-82). In novels such as The Fountainhead and Atlas
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
People do generous things. They give directions to strangers, contribute to charities, volunteer in hospitals, send food and supplies to ear
On September 12, 2004, the New York Times quoted sentencing-law expert Frank O. Bowman of Indiana University as saying: "There has not been a single case in the history of American criminal law with the immediate impact of this one." Benjamin Wittes, court commentator for the Washington Post, called the case "the single most irresponsible decision in the modern history of the Supreme Court." The case they were writing about is Blakely v. Washington, decided last June. The Supreme Court's decision in Blakely held that portions of Washington state's laws on sentencing were unconstitutional. Why are these commentators, and much of the criminal justice community, up in arms about a decision that invalidates portions of one state's sentencing laws? The answer is: This decision and some of its predecessors gut the entire sentencing-reform movement in the United States. What is still more worrisome, these decisions changed through judicial fiat, without legislation or a constitutional amendment, the rules under which people are sentenced to prison. Worst of all, the Supreme Court has undermined the rule of law by handing down the Blakely decision only a few years after upholding the very same sentencing structure. In fact, it was the subversion of the rule of law by one of the decisions in this line of cases that convinced me to retire from the practice of law after 28 years as a lawyer, with 21 as a prosecutor. In effect, I have gone on strike from the legal system—like the characters in Ayn Rand 's Atlas Shrugged.
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of ...
Just as there is much to celebrate in the life of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), so is there much to loathe in the muckrakers' treatment o
Frank Quattrone, the star investment banker of the dot-com era, was convicted in federal court on two counts of obstructing justice and....
Owen Flanagan (pictured here) is a prominent philosopher of mind who exemplifies the trend in his profession of paying closer attention to..
A Gallup poll taken in May of 2003 found that only 3 percent of Americans believe animals do not need much legal protection. Fully 71 percen
On July 4th, we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. But today, Americans seem more divided than at any time in recent...
What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man...
As Henry Steele Commager noted in The Empire of Reason: "It was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but...
Many of the towering figures of the Industrial Revolution could well be described as "the compleat producer." Richard Arkwright, for example
In 1956, an extraordinary three-year agreement on cooperation was signed by the Department of Economics at the Chicago University and the...
For more than thirty years, promoting the development of higher self-esteem has been a major goal for clinical psychologists and educators..
One of my favorite photographs of Ayn Rand dates back to 1961. In it, she is the only woman at the President's Advanced Round Table of the
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.
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.
Objectivism is the philosophy of rational individualism founded by Ayn Rand (1905-82). In novels such as The Fountainhead and Atlas
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
People do generous things. They give directions to strangers, contribute to charities, volunteer in hospitals, send food and supplies to ear
On September 12, 2004, the New York Times quoted sentencing-law expert Frank O. Bowman of Indiana University as saying: "There has not been a single case in the history of American criminal law with the immediate impact of this one." Benjamin Wittes, court commentator for the Washington Post, called the case "the single most irresponsible decision in the modern history of the Supreme Court." The case they were writing about is Blakely v. Washington, decided last June. The Supreme Court's decision in Blakely held that portions of Washington state's laws on sentencing were unconstitutional. Why are these commentators, and much of the criminal justice community, up in arms about a decision that invalidates portions of one state's sentencing laws? The answer is: This decision and some of its predecessors gut the entire sentencing-reform movement in the United States. What is still more worrisome, these decisions changed through judicial fiat, without legislation or a constitutional amendment, the rules under which people are sentenced to prison. Worst of all, the Supreme Court has undermined the rule of law by handing down the Blakely decision only a few years after upholding the very same sentencing structure. In fact, it was the subversion of the rule of law by one of the decisions in this line of cases that convinced me to retire from the practice of law after 28 years as a lawyer, with 21 as a prosecutor. In effect, I have gone on strike from the legal system—like the characters in Ayn Rand 's Atlas Shrugged.
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of ...
Just as there is much to celebrate in the life of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), so is there much to loathe in the muckrakers' treatment o
Frank Quattrone, the star investment banker of the dot-com era, was convicted in federal court on two counts of obstructing justice and....
Owen Flanagan (pictured here) is a prominent philosopher of mind who exemplifies the trend in his profession of paying closer attention to..
A Gallup poll taken in May of 2003 found that only 3 percent of Americans believe animals do not need much legal protection. Fully 71 percen
On July 4th, we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. But today, Americans seem more divided than at any time in recent...
What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man...
As Henry Steele Commager noted in The Empire of Reason: "It was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but...
Many of the towering figures of the Industrial Revolution could well be described as "the compleat producer." Richard Arkwright, for example
In 1956, an extraordinary three-year agreement on cooperation was signed by the Department of Economics at the Chicago University and the...
For more than thirty years, promoting the development of higher self-esteem has been a major goal for clinical psychologists and educators..