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Ayn Rand (/ˈaɪn ˈrænd/, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – 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 1935-1936. She first achieved fame with The Fountainhead (1943), and her best-known work – the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged – was published in 1957.

Rand's 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.

Early years

Childhood and education

Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (Template:Lang-ru) 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, 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. In biographical reminiscences recorded by Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, Ayn Rand named N. O. Lossky as her primary philosophy teacher at the University of Petrograd or University of St. Petersburg until he was removed from his teaching post by the Soviet regime. It was during this period that she was introduced to the writings of Aristotle and Plato who would form two of the greatest influences and counter-influences respectively on Rand's thought. She also read Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, Friedrich Schiller, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, admiring his depiction of the hero in Thus Spoke 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. 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. Taking various jobs during the 1930s to support her writing, for a time Rand worked as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios.

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 first produced in Hollywood in 1934, and then successfully reopened on Broadway in 1935.

Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living was published in 1936 by Macmillan. Set in Communist Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state. The novel 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 was published in England in 1938, and in America seven years later, and it presents 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. Although it contains ideas distinctive to Rand, the novella has stylistic echoes of Zarathustra. It follows a similar premise as another famous Russian novel, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, but there is little evidence that Rand was influenced by or even read the latter work.

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 who threatened to quit if his employer did not publish it.

On May 16, 1943, The New York Times review of The Fountainhead called Rand "a writer of great power" who writes "brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly," and it stated that she had "written a hymn in praise of the individual... you will not be able to read this masterful book without thinking through some of the basic concepts of our time."

The Fountainhead eventually became a worldwide success, bringing Rand fame and financial security. As of April 2003, it had sold over six million copies, and continued to sell about 100,000 copies per year.

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.

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 sells almost 200,000 copies annually. (See Popular interest and influence, below.) Rand's last major work of fiction, it marked the turning point in her life, ending her career as novelist and beginning her tenure as popular philosopher.

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 concept of human achievement. 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 "minds" that Rand saw as contributing the most to the nation's productivity and creativity. With their strike, they aim to demonstrate that, without efforts of the rational and productive, 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, a lengthy monologue delivered by the strike's leader, John Galt.

Early activism and professional success

During the 1940s, Rand became involved in political activism. Both she and her husband worked full time in volunteer positions for the 1940 Presidential campaign of Wendell Wilkie, and this work led to Rand's first public speaking experiences, including fielding the sometimes hostile questions from the audience "following pro-Wilkie newsreels at a Union square movie theater" in New York City, an experience she greatly enjoyed. This activity also brought her into contact with other intellectuals sympathetic to free-market capitalism. The New York Times journalist Henry Hazlitt and his wife had been friends of Rand and her husband even before her success with The Fountainhead, and in the 1940s Hazlitt introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Both men expressed an admiration for Rand, and, despite her philosophical differences with them, Rand strongly endorsed the writings of both men throughout her career.

In 1943, Rand returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for the film version of The Fountainhead for Warner Brothers, and the following year she and her husband purchased a home designed by modernist Richard Neutra and an adjoining ranch. There, Rand entertained figures such as Hazlitt, Morrie Ryskind, Janet Gaynor, Gilbert Adrian and Leonard Read. Finishing her work on that screenplay, she was hired by producer Hal Wallis as a screenwriter and script-doctor, and her work for Wallis included the Oscar-nominated Love Letters and You Came Along, along with research for a screenplay based on the development of the Atom Bomb. This role gave Rand time to work on other projects, including the publication of her first work of non-fiction, an essay titled "Individualism: the Only Path to Tomorrow", in the January 1944 edition of Reader's Digest magazine.

At the invitation of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rand and her husband visited his famous school of architecture, Taliesin East. Rand had long admired Wright's work, and after initially rebuffing her efforts to interview him, the architect became an admirer of the The Fountainhead shortly after its publication. However, Rand found the school to be an oppressive creative environment, calling it "a feudal establishment." Wright later designed a home for Rand which was never built.

The most important relationship Rand developed during this period, however, was with libertarian writer Isabel Paterson. The two women became friends and philosophical sparring-partners, and Rand is reported to have questioned the well-informed Paterson about American history and politics long into the night during their numerous meetings. Later, the two women had a falling out after what Rand saw as Paterson's bitter and insensitive comments during one of her Hollywood parties. Paterson's influence on Rand's later political theories has been a matter of ongoing debate, but Paterson biographer Stephen Cox credits Rand's public advocacy with keeping her old friend's political work The God of the Machine in print for many years, despite their previous break.

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 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:

If we had good reason, if that is what you believe, all right, then why not tell the truth? Say it is a dictatorship, but we want to be associated with it. Say it is worthwhile being associated with the devil, as Churchill said, in order to defeat another evil which is Hitler. There might be some good argument made for that. But why pretend that Russia was not what it was?"

When asked about her feelings on the effectiveness of the investigations after the hearings, Rand described the process as "futile".

Later years

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.

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, following its publication, promoting Rand's philosophy through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), established by him for that purpose. Collective members gave lectures at the NBI and in cities across the United States and 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 1968. In 1964, Branden (having separated from his wife) 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 the 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, including Murray Rothbard (who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism), Jeff Walker, and Michael Shermer (libertarian and founder of the The Skeptics Society), 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. Objectivists counter that even if some of Rand's followers have acted like cultists, this was not intended by Rand, who explicitly condemned "blind followers."

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.

On July 16, 1969, as invited "VIPs," Rand and her husband attended the launch of Apollo 11, the space mission which first landed men on the surface of the moon, and this event inspired her essays "Apollo 11" and, along with the Woodstock music festival, "Apollo and Dionysus." Rand also became a friend of astronaut Michael Collins. Other friends of Rand during this period include writer Mickey Spillane and music critic Deems Taylor.

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.

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.

In her will, Rand named Leonard Peikoff the heir to her estate, and she had previously recognized his work as being the best exposition of her philosophy.

Philosophy

Rand saw her views as constituting an integrated philosophical system, which she called "Objectivism". The essence of Objectivism, according to Rand, 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."

Rejecting faith as antithetical to reason, Rand opposed any form of mysticism or supernaturalism, including organized religion, and she embraced philosophical realism. Rand also argued for rational egoism, or rational self-interest, as the only proper guiding moral principle. The individual "must exist for his own sake", she wrote in 1962, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself".

Rand was an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, holding that the sole function of government ought to be the protection of individual rights, including property rights. 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. Her politics have been described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second.

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 his claim that reason is unable to know reality "as it is in itself." Addressing the graduating class United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974, in a speech followed by a standing ovation from the cadets, she said that, "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:

Today's mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy. A philosophy out to destroy man's mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man's life, and for every human value. Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century.

Metaphysical and epistemological views

Rand's philosophy is based on three axioms: the Axiom of Existence, the Law of Identity, and the Axiom of Consciousness. Rand defined an axiom as "a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it". As Leonard Peikoff noted, Rand's argumentation "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are axioms, that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable."

Objectivism states that "Existence exists" (the Axiom of Existence) and "Existence is Identity." To be is to be "an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes." That which has no attributes does not and cannot exist. Hence, the Law of Identity: a thing is what it is. Whereas "existence exists" pertains to existence itself (whether something exists or not), the law of identity pertains to the nature of an object as being necessarily distinct from other objects (whether something exists as this or that). As Rand wrote, "A leaf cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A."

Rand held that when one is able to perceive something, then one's "Consciousness exists" (the Axiom of Consciousness), consciousness "being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Objectivism maintains that what exists does not exist because one thinks it exists; it simply exists, regardless of anyone's awareness, knowledge or opinion. For Rand, consciousness is an inherently relational phenomenon, as she puts it, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something," so that an objective reality independent of consciousness must exist first for consciousness to become possible, and there is no possibility of a consciousness that is conscious of nothing outside itself. Thus consciousness cannot be the only thing that exists. "It cannot be aware only of itself — there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something." Objectivism holds that the mind cannot create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality.

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."

Rand held that there is no "causeless knowledge," and on this basis argued against any form of mysticism, which she defined as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and reason." She continues, "Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'" According to Rand, to reach "knowledge" beyond what is given in sense-perception requires both volitional effort and adherence to a specific methodology of observation, concept-formation, and both inductive and deductive logic. A belief in "dragons" or "elves," however sincere, does not oblige reality to contain "dragons" or "elves," and a process of "proof" establishing the basis in reality of any claimed item of knowledge (if it cannot be directly observed) is a prerequisite to establising its truth.

On similar grounds, Rand rejected the arguments traditionally made by epistemological skeptics who argue against the possibility of knowledge "undistorted" by the form or the means of perception. According to Rand, like anything else, consciousness—any consciousness—possesses a specific identity and operates by a specific method. Rather than disqualifying an item of knowledge, awareness of its causal antecedents and a discrimination of the form from the object of awareness actually identifies its relationship to reality. Such an argument, according to Rand, amounts to saying: "man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others; therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind because he has eyes––deaf because he has ears––deluded because he has a mind––and the things he perceives do not exist because he perceives them."

For Rand, consciousness, like anything that exists, must possess identity, and its operation requires a causal means of adhering to reality, such as logic. Unlike logic, mystical revelation, Tarot Cards, or any other equivalent of a Ouija board, simply bypass the requirement of demonstrating how it connects its results to reality, and such "methods," according to Rand are not a "short cut" to knowledge at all, but a "short-circuit" destroying knowledge. By the same token, that consciousness has an identity, far from disqualifying its product, only grounds it in reality, and the skeptics' claim would invalidate the operation of any consciousness, whatever the means and form it utilized.

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." The validity of the senses, she held, is axiomatic; sensations, being physiologically determined, cannot make "mistakes" or err when transmitting the facts of reality. Apparent errors, such as in "optical illusions", she regarded as errors in the conceptual identification of what is seen, not in the seeing itself. Sense data is still valid even though it may be misinterpreted by the one experiencing it. However, sensations are not the basis of man's knowledge. Sensations are integrated as perceptions, and it is only at the level of perceptions that the foundation of epistemology lies. Perception, she argued, is the automatic result of a causal process, infallible, and provide the basis 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. "...The true problem of Universals began with the rejection of Platonic Realism. Admitting with the Aristotelians that genera and especies are products of the mind, the question was then raised as to what was the nature of those intellectual conceptions and their relations to the individual beings." 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 fundamental links between concepts and mathematics, her theory of concepts uses such mathematical terms as "unit," "measurement," and "common denominator"; she defined "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 three axioms used in Aristotelian logic: "A is A," "Non-Contradiction," and "Either/Or", three Laws of Thought known to the Ancient Greeks. The first is the law of identity, the second is the law of non-contradiction and the third is the law of excluded middle. 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. In addition, he has discussed at length "the fallacy of the stolen concept", identified for the first time by Rand.

Ethics

Rand's ethical egoism, her advocacy of "rational selfishness," is her most well-known position. 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. Beginning by asking "What are values?" and "Why does man need them?", she argues that the concept of "value" implies an answer to the questions, "Of value to whom and for what?" Thus, the existence of values depends upon the existence of an alternative in the face of which a being must act. "Where no alternatives exist, no goals and no values are possible."

According to Rand, there is only one type of being which acts in the face of an alternative: living organisms. She writes: "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..." Objectivism defines life as the process of self-generated self-sustaining activity. All living organisms, Rand held, act to gain values—i.e., the items their survival requires––and every living organism has specific requirements for its survival determined by its very nature, factually determined values. The survival of the organism is the ultimate value to which all of the organism's activities are aimed, the end served by all of its lesser values, and the objective standard by which its well-being may be determined. It is the nature of the organism itself which determines what is "good for" it or "bad for it." In Rand's terms: "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible.", and, "he fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do."

Integrating with this is Rand's 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." According to Rand, therefore, possessing free will, human beings must choose their values: one does not automatically hold his own life as his ultimate value. Whether in fact a person's actions promote and fulfill his own life or not is a question of fact, as it is with all other organisms, but whether a person will act in order to promote his well-being 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."

As with any other organism, human survival cannot be achieved randomly. The requirements of man's life first must be discovered and then consciously adhered to by means of principles. This is why human beings require a science of ethics. The purpose of a moral code, Rand held, is to provide the principles by reference to which man can achieve the values his survival requires. Since reason is man's means of knowledge, it is also his greatest value, and its exercise his greatest virtue. "Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive he must act and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch––or build a cyclotron––without a knowledge of his aim and the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think." For Rand, all of the principal virtues are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival: rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics."

Rand summarizes: "Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his will must be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered or produced by him––by his own choice; by his own effort; by his own mind." She states 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, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Hubert Humphrey, and Joseph McCarthy's methods.

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.

Rand's defense of individual liberty almost summarizes her entire philosophy. Since reason is the competent but sole means of human knowledge, it is therefore humanity's most fundamental means of survival. Also, thus, the effort of thinking and the scrupulous use of reason are the most basic virtue of an ethics governed by the requirements of human life. The threat of coercion, however, neutralizes the practical effect of an individual's reason, and whether the force originates from the state or from a criminal, the coerced person must act as required, or, at least, direct his thought to escape. According to Rand, "man's mind will not function at the point of a gun." To put this conversely: freedom "works" because it liberates human reason. Just as freedom of expression is a prerequisite for a vibrant culture, and the development of science and art, so a free market generates new and ever better products and services, as the range of consumer goods and technological innovations in capitalist societies demonstrates, according to Rand. Thus, she argued for the "separation of state and economics in the same way and for the same reasons" as she argued for "the separation of state and church."

Since reason is "man's basic tool of survival," Rand held that an individual has a natural moral right to act as the judgment of his or her own mind directs and to keep the product of this effort. In Rand's view, this requires that the initiation of physical force and the acquisition of property by fraud be banned. She agreed with America's Founding Fathers that the sole legitimate function of government is the protection of individual rights, including property rights. The purpose of objective criminal and civil law is to protect the individual from the coercion of others, while the purpose of a constitution and Bill of Rights is to protect the individual from the coercion of the state (historically the greatest violator of individual rights in Rand's estimation). Government may use force, that is its essence, but to do so legitimately it must never act as the aggressor––it may use force only in response to an initiation of force, e.g. theft, murder, foreign aggression. Rand did not believe that a free society, one in which all interaction was thus rendered voluntary, would make anyone rational––rationality cannot be compelled and is an exclusive capacity of the individual––but freedom does allow those who are rational and productive to achieve at their highest capacity.

Reason being a capacity of the individual, creative innovation, by its nature, requires the individual to have the freedom to do things differently, to disagree, to buck the trend or consensus, if necessary. According to Rand, therefore, the only type of organized human behavior consistent with the operation of reason is one of voluntary cooperation. Persuasion is the method of reason, a faculty which demands reality be the ultimate arbiter of disputes among men. By its nature, the overtly irrational cannot rely on the use of persuasion, cannot permit the facts to decide differences, and must ultimately resort to force in order to prevail as means of coordinating human behavior. Thus, Rand saw reason and freedom as correlates––just as she saw mysticism and force as correlates.

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 justified in response to an attack, as in World War II, or threatened attack. 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."

However, Rand also believed that a free country, such as the United States, possesses the "moral right"––though not the "duty"––even to invade a foreign dictatorship, such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, arguing that a "dictatorship––a country that violates the rights of its own citizens––is an outlaw and can claim no rights."

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, such as Martin Anderson, 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 may not have been acquainted with his work. In 1966, Rand published a collection of essays which had originally appeared in her periodicals on politics and economics titled Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. This work includes essays by noted economist Alan Greenspan and later Hoover Institution historian Robert Hessen and argues that the free market–despite its historical success where it has been partially practiced and though it takes the blame for problems generated by state action–has yet to be fully implemented and remains "an unknown ideal."

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. According to her biographers, Rand practiced various forms of charity herself, and, despite her atheism, celebrated Christmas, endorsing its message of "good will toward men–a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property... of the Christian religion."

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 ... 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."

Gender and sex

Rand's views on gender role are controversial.

In the Alvin Toffler interview of Ayn Rand appearing in the March 1964 issue of Playboy magazine, in answer to the question: "Do you believe that women as well as men should organize their lives around work - and if so, what kind of work?." Ayn Rand responded, "...Of course. I believe women are human beings. What is proper for a man is proper for a woman. The basic principles are the same. I would not attempt to prescribe what kind of work a man should do, and I would not attempt it in regard to women There is no particular work which is specifically feminine. Women can choose their work according to their own purpose and premises in the same manner as men do." Rand is also noted for her depiction of independent female heroines, such as Dagny Taggart who, in effect, runs a transcontinental railroad in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Rand recommended Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in her newsletter, but she strongly opposed the modern feminist movement.

While her books champion men and women as intellectual equals and argue that women need careers just as men do, Rand also 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. Rand said that "...by the nature of her duties and daily activities," a female president "...would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch." For comments such as these, 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 ... 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.", but 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.

Homosexuality

Rand did not speak at length on the topic of homosexuality, nor publish her views on it in her lifetime. However, in a 1971 speech at the Ford Hall Forum, Rand declared her belief that homosexuality was immoral, saying that "there is a psychological immorality at the root of homosexuality" because "it involves psychological flaws, corruptions, errors, or unfortunate premises", and that in her sincere opinion it was "disgusting". She followed these assertions by saying the government had no right to prohibit homosexual behavior, and called for all such laws to be repealed. Harry Binswanger reports asking Rand her opinion privately around 1980 and receiving the reply that not enough was known about the development of homosexuality in an individual's psychology to judge that it necessarily involved immorality. Her position has been a subject of controversy within the Objectivist movement.

In her published writings, Rand argued that a person's emotions are outside of his or her direct volitional control and, therefore, not appropriately subject to moral evaluation, and Leonard Peikoff has stated that Rand's opinions on matters of psychology (including homosexuality and feminine sexual reaction) do not constitute a "part of Objectivism," anymore than her "love of skyscrapers" does, being applications of ideas outside of the field of philosophy, as Rand herself defined it.

Criticism

Rand has remained controversial. Left-wing linguist and analytic philosopher Noam Chomsky declared Rand to be "ne of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history." 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, while noting that he was still in general agreement with her ideas, criticized Rand for her "scientific conservatism" and alleged 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." In contrast, another associate of Rand, Harry Binswanger has argued in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts that natural selection exemplifies Rand's understanding of biological activity. Branden has also stated his belief that Rand was "closed minded" to subjects such as ESP. Her insistence that Objectivism was an "integrated whole," the departure from which necessarily lead one into logical error, led Branden to conclude that her philosophy was "for all practical purposes" a "dogmatic religion". Since the publication of Rand's private journal entries regarding Branden, however, it has been shown that Rand had warned Branden himself against treating her as a "goddess."

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 alleged that Rand never read The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Seddon argued that Kant was not the "mystic" that Rand portrays him as, and presents David Kelley's The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception complimentarily but critically as "...the book on epistemology that Rand promised but never wrote." Kelley responded to Seddon criticizing him in turn for having missed not only the essential point of his book but also that of the Objectivist epistemology, while Edward Younkins and others have defended Rand's interpretation of Kant's ideas.

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. In her Literary Encyclopedia entry written in 2001, John Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation".

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.

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 according to the Ayn Rand Institute. Following Rand's death, continued conflict within the Objectivist movement led to establishment of independent organizations.

Institutes

In 1985, Leonard Peikoff, an original member of "The Collective", 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 grants 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 continued to sell in large numbers in the 21st century. 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. Sales have grown significantly since the events of the economic crisis caused by the 2007 credit crunch seemed to be similar to those in the book. On April 2, 2009, the book's ranking peaked at 15, surpassing other, more recent best-sellers such as Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, after reaching and maintaining the number 1 position in the category of "Fiction & Literature - United States" for several weeks consecutively.

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 Edwin A. Locke, historians such as Robert Hessen, and political writers such as Charles Murray. Magician and comedian Penn Jillette, United States 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. Although not an Objectivist, radio personality Rush Limbaugh makes frequent positive reference to Rand's work on his program, and former United States President Ronald Reagan described himself as an "admirer" of Rand in private correspondence in the 1960s.

Rand's philosophy of Objectivism has had a significant influence on comic book artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of the Spiderman character. Ditko created several comic book characters based on his Objectivist beliefs, including Mr. A, and the DC Comics character the Question. The later comic book Watchmen by Alan Moore (adapted as a film in 2008) embodies a critique of Randian ideas in the character of Rorschach, which Moore credits to Ditko's influence.

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. 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.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.

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 commented, "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 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. 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."

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.

Since 2006 The Objective Standard – Craig Biddle, editor – has been published quarterly as scholarly forum for the discussion of Rand's work as it applies to "politics and culture." An online publication, Capitalism Magazine (or "CapMag.com") , posts articles on a variety of political and economic topics, and a student newspaper which networks colleges around the United States is also published, The Undercurrent .

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.

See also

• Objectivism and Libertarianism

Bibliography

Fiction

• Night of January 16th (1934) ISBN 0-452-26486-3
• We the Living (1936) ISBN 0-451-18784-9
• Anthem (1938) ISBN 0-451-19113-7
• The Fountainhead (1943) ISBN 0-451-19115-3
• Atlas Shrugged (1957) ISBN 0-451-19114-5

Nonfiction

• For the New Intellectual (1961) ISBN 0-451-16308-7
• The Virtue of Selfishness (with Nathaniel Branden) (1964) ISBN 0-451-16393-1
• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (with Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen) (1966) ISBN 0-451-14795-2
• Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967) ISBN 0-452-01030-6 (expanded second edition)
• The Romantic Manifesto (1969) ISBN 0-451-14916-5
• The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971) ISBN 0-452-01184-1
• Philosophy: Who Needs It posthumously edited by Leonard Peikoff (1982) ISBN 0-451-13893-7. The title essay was originally an address to the 1974 graduating class of the United States Military Academy.

Posthumous works

• The Early Ayn Rand (edited and with commentary by Leonard Peikoff) (1984)
• The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (edited by Leonard Peikoff; additional essays by Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz) (1989)
• Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology second edition (edited by Harry Binswanger; additional material by Leonard Peikoff) (1990)
• Letters of Ayn Rand (edited by Michael S. Berliner) (1995)
• Journals of Ayn Rand (edited by David Harriman) (1997)
• Ayn Rand's Marginalia: Her Critical Comments on the Writings of over Twenty Authors (edited by Robert Mayhew) (1998)
• The Ayn Rand Column: Written for the Los Angeles Times (edited by Peter Schwartz) (1998)
• Russian Writings on Hollywood (edited by Michael S. Berliner) (1999)
• Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (expanded edition of The New Left; edited and with additional essays by Peter Schwartz) (1999)
• The Art of Fiction (edited by Tore Boeckmann) (2000)
• The Art of Nonfiction (edited by Robert Mayhew) (2001)
• The Objectivism Research CD-ROM (collection of most of Rand's works in CD-ROM format) (2001)
• Three Plays (2005)
• Ayn Rand Answers (edited by Robert Mayhew) (2005)

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 Feature.

Notes

1. ^ Hicks, Stephen R. C. "Ayn Rand (1905-1982)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
2. ^ Lewis, John (October 20, 2001). "Ayn Rand". Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
3. The following sources identify Rand as a philosopher:
   • Saxon, Wolfgang (March 7, 1982). "Ayn Rand, 'Fountainhead' Author, Dies". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved March 18, 2009. Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher of objectivism who espoused rational selfishness and capitalism unbound, died yesterday morning at her home on East 34th Street.
   • Rasmussen, Douglas B.; Den Uyl, Douglas J. (1984). "Preface". In Rasmussen, Douglas B.; Den Uyl, Douglas J. (ed.). The Philosophic thought of Ayn Rand. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. x. ISBN 0-252-01033-7. ...this book is devoted to an assessment of Ayn Rand the philosopher. All the contributers to this volume agree that she is a philosopher and not a mere popularizer. Moreover, all agree that many of her insights on philosophy and her own philosophic ideas deserve critical attention by professional philosophers, whatever the final merit of those inquiries and theories. It is appropriate, therefore, that all our contributors are themselves professional philosophers. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
   • Machan, Tibor R. (1999). Ayn Rand. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. p. 163. ISBN 0-8204-4144-9.
   • Smith, Tara (2007). Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 328. ISBN 0-521-70546-0.
   • Sciabarra, Chris Matthew, Ph.D. (1995). Ayn Rand: the Russian radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-271-01441-5. Ayn Rand is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
4. Beetz, Kirk (1996). Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Osprey: Beacham Pub. p. 1516. ISBN 0933833415.
5. Rand, Ayn (1944). "The Only Path to Tomorrow". Reader’s Digest: 8. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good.' {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
6. Rand, Ayn (1964). "Racism". The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Penguin. p. 149. ISBN 0451163931. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group … and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.
7. Rand, Ayn (1967). ""Extremism," or The Art of Smearing". Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Signet. p. 180. ISBN 0-451-14795-2. OCLC 24916193. It is too easy, to demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favour of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political "right," but of the "left"—that the basic issue is not "rich versus poor," but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means, capitalism versus socialism.
8. "A Sense of Life". Retrieved 2006-03-22. website of the documentary film about Rand's life.
9. ""Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical—Published Reviews."". Retrieved 2006-03-23.
10. ^ Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, "The Rand Transcript", The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies vol. 1, iss. 1 (1999): 1-26]
11. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (Dutton, 1991) "Epilogue: The Duel Between Plato and Aristotle," pp. 451-460. ISBN 0-452-01101-9
12. Britting, Jeff, Ayn Rand, p.17-18, 22-24.
13. Possibly the contraction of the last three letters of her surname in handwritten Cyrillic which strongly resemble the three Roman letters a.y.n. ARI Biographical researcher Drs. Gotthelf and Berliner note that while still in Russia, Anna used the name "Rand", which is a Cyrillic contraction of Rosenbaum. They also note a hypothesis about a Finnish origin of Ayn.
14. "A Brief Biography of Ayn Rand". Ayn Rand Institute. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
15. ^ Leiendecker, Harold. ""Atlas Shrugged."". Retrieved 2006-03-30.
16. ^ Turner, Jenny (March 24, 2006). ""As Astonishing as Elvis"". Review of Jeff Briting's biography, Ayn Rand.
17. For more on We the Living, see Robert Mayhew, edit., Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, Lexington, 2004.
18. Milgram, Shosana (2005). "Anthem in the Context of Related Literary Works". In Robert Mayhew (ed.). Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem. Lexington: Lexington Books. pp. 136–141. ISBN 0739110314.
19. Chris Sciabarra opened up many new avenues of Randian scholarship with the publication of his study Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical in 1995. Specifically, he argued that Rand's thought was not a-historical (as many of her followers, and Rand herself, have seemed to claim) but that it was instead deeply affected by the philosophy and culture of the Silver Age in Russia. Though Sciabarra adduced textual evidence for his claims and situated Rand within the context of Silver Age thinking generally, he traced a direct line of influence to Rand from only one Russian thinker: the philosopher N.O. Lossky. Yet it is quite possible that further influences are waiting to be discovered in the culture Rand was immersed in during her formative years. In this essay I argue that one such influence was quite likely the writer and theorist Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937)Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 285-304.
20. ^ ""The Fountainhead"". Cato Institute. Retrieved 2006-03-30.
21. L. Pruett, The New York Times May 16, 1943, Book Review; for more on The Fountainhead, see Robert Mayhew, edit., Essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Lexington, 2006.
22. Rand, Ayn (1997). David Harriman (ed.). Journals of Ayn Rand. Dutton. p. 704. ISBN 0525943706. Atlas Shrugged was the climax and completion of the goal I had set for myself at the age of nine. It expressed everything that I wanted of fiction writing
23. Younkins, Edward (2007). "Preface". Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Aldershot: Ashgate. p. 1. ISBN 0754655490. Atlas Shrugged … is the demarcation work and turning point that culminated career as a novelist and propelled her into a career as a popular philosopher.
24. Gladstein, Mimi (1999). The New Ayn Rand Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press. p. 42. ISBN 0313303215.
25. For more on Atlas Shrugged, see Robert Mayhew, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Lexington, 2009.
26. Jeff Britting, Ayn Rand (Overlook, 2004), p. 57
27. Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1984), pp. 188-189, cf. James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (Durban House, 2005), p. 399, n38.
28. Jeff Britting, Ayn Rand (Overlook, 2004), pp. 68-80; Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1984), pp. 183-198, cf. James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (Durban House, 2005), pp. 66-70.
29. "The Only Path to Tomorrow," reprinted in The Ayn Rand Column (Second Renaissance, 1991, P. Schwartz, ed.), pp. 105-108 .
30. Michael Berliner, Letters of Ayn Rand, (Dutton, 1995) pp. 108-119; Michael Paxton, Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life, (Peregrine Smith, 1998) p. 113, p. 134; Jeff Britting, Ayn Rand, (Overlook, 2004) pp. 68-69; Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, (Doubleday, 1984) pp. 189-191, cf. James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, (Durban House, 2005) pp. 53-54; Wright, House for Ayn Rand .
31. Cox, Stephen, The Woman and the Dynamo (Transaction, 2004), pp. 218-222, 287-289, 302-314 and 357-359; in contrast, see, Valliant, James, "Two Women, One Dynamo"
32. Robert Mayhew Ayn Rand and Song of Russia, pp. 91-3, Scarecrow Press, 2005 ISBN 978-0810852761
33. ^ Rand's HUAC testimony, cited at "The Objectivism Reference Center". Retrieved 2006-04-07.
34. ^ Daligga, Catherine. ""Ayn Rand" Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library". Retrieved 2006-03-24.
35. ""Ayn Rand Biographical FAQ: Did Rand have an affair with Nathaniel Branden?"". Retrieved 2008-04-28.
36. Branden, Barbara (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand. Doubleday. pp. 257–254, 331–343.
37. Valliant, James (2005). The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics. Durban House. pp. 229–237.
38. Nathaniel Branden My Years With Ayn Rand, p. 354, Jossey-Bass, 1999 ISBN 978-0787945138
39. Rand, Ayn (1968). "To whom it may concern". The Objectivist. 7 (5). New York: 1–8.
40. Rothbard, Murray. "The sociology of the Ayn Rand cult". Retrieved 2006-03-31.
41. Walker, Jeff (1999). The Ayn Rand Cult. Chicago: Open Court.
42. Shermer, Michael (1993). "The Unlikeliest Cult in History". Skeptic. Vol. 2, no. 2. pp. 74–81.
43. Rand, Ayn (1997). "Letter dated December 10, 1961". Letters of Ayn Rand. New York: Plume Books. p. 592. ISBN 0-452-27404-4., as cited in ""Ayn Rand Biographical FAQ: Did Rand organize a cult?"". Retrieved 2006-06-25.
44. Reisel, Mimi (1999). The New Ayn Rand. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 14. ISBN 978-0313303210.
45. ^ "Timeline of Ayn Rand's Life and Career". ARI. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
46. Ayn Rand, "Apollo 11," The Objectivist, Sept. 1969; "Apollo and Dionysus," The Objectivist, Dec. 1969 and Jan. 1970, reprinted in Return of the Primitive, P. Schwartz, ed. (Meridian, 1999), pp. 99-118
47. Michael Berliner, ed., The Letters of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1995), letter to M. Collins, p. 648.
48. Michael Berliner, ed., The Letters of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1995), letter to M. Spillane, pp. 589-590, letter to M. Spillane, pp. 600-601; Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1984), p. 308.
49. Gladstein, Mimi (1984). The Ayn Rand Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press. p. 16. ISBN 0313220794.
50. ^ ""Ayn Rand's Sister: Eleanora Drobyshev 1910-1999"". Retrieved 2008-12-29.
51. Rand, Ayn (1997). David Harriman (ed.). Journals of Ayn Rand. Dutton. p. 697.
52. Saxon, Wolfgang (March 7, 1982). "Ayn Rand, 'Fountainhead' Author, Dies". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved March 18, 2009. Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher of objectivism who espoused rational selfishness and capitalism unbound, died yesterday morning at her home on East 34th Street.
53. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Dutton, 1991, "Preface," pp. xiii-xv.
54. Rand, Ayn (1957). "Appendix". Atlas Shrugged. New York City: Random House. ISBN 0394415760.
55. George H. Smith, Atheism: the Case Against God, Prometheus, 1989, first pub. 1979, essentially explicates the Objectivist position.
56. Rand, Ayn. The Voice of Reason. Dutton Plume (1989). "Introducing Objectivism" p. 3. This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on June 17, 1962.
57. ""Ayn Rand's Q&A on Libertarians."". Retrieved 2006-03-22. at the Ayn Rand Institute. Rand stated in 1980, "I've read nothing by a Libertarian… that wasn't my ideas badly mishandled—i.e., had the teeth pulled out of them—with no credit given."
58. Rand, Ayn (2005). Ayn Rand Answers, the Best of Her Q&A. New York: New American Library. p. 166. ISBN 0-451-21665-2. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
59. Philosophy: Who Needs It (Speech). United States Military Academy, West Point. March 6, 1974. Retrieved January 9, 2009. {{cite speech}}: Text "Rand, Ayn" ignored (help)
60. ^ Rand, Ayn (1996). Atlas Shrugged (35th Anniv edition). Signet Book. ISBN 0451191145.
61. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Dutton, 1991, p. 11.
62. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Dutton, 1991, p. 5.
63. Gotthelf, Allan (2000). On Ayn Rand. Wadsworth.
64. Rand, Ayn (1990). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Meridian. ISBN 0-452-01030-6.
65. Chris M. Sciabarra Ayn Rand, p. 166, Penn State Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0271014418
66. "Faith and Force: the Destroyers of the Modern World," Philosophy Who Needs It, Bobbs-Merrill, 1982, p.75.
67. Rand, For the New Intellectual, Random House, 1961, p. 31.
68. Rand, For the New Intellectual, Random House, 1961, p. 223; Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Dutton, 1991, pp. 182-185.
69. Chris M. Sciabarra Ayn Rand, pp. 160-4, Penn State Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0271014418 ; on Rand's theory of sense-perception see also David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses (Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
70. Crescas on the Problem of Divine Attributes p. 1
71. Chris M. Sciabarra Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical, p. 169 & p. 173, Penn State Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0271014418; on Rand's theory of concepts see also David Kelley, "A Theory of Abstraction" and "The Psychology of Abstraction," Cognition & Brain Theory vol. vii, no. 3 and 4 (Summer/Fall 1984).
72. Edward W. Younkins Philosophers of Capitalism, p. 87, Lexington Books, 2005 ISBN 978-0739110775 ; see also Douglas Rasmussen, “Quine and Aristotelian Essentialism,” The New Scholasticism 58 (Summer, 1984)
73. Robert Mayhew Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem, p. 258 and p. 280, Lexington Books, 2005 ISBN 978-0739110317
74. Peter A. Angeles Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 167, Harper Collins, 1992 ISBN 0-06-461026-8
75. Leonard Peikoff Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, pp. 73-109 and pp. 136-7, A Dutton Book, 1991 ISBN 0-525-93380-8
76. ^ "The Objectivist Ethics," in The Virtue of Selfishness.
77. Chris M. Sciabarra Ayn Rand: the Russian radical, p. 236, Penn State Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0271014418.
78. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964, New American Library, p. 18. ISBN 0-451-16393-1; on Rand's metaethics see Harry Binswanger, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, The Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1990, and Tara Smith, Viable Values, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
79. The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 21, and see Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Nash, 1969, chapter 4; Tara Smith, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, p.64.
80. Atlas Shrugged, p. 931.
81. Leonard Peikoff, "Why Should One Act on Principle?" The Intellectual Activist, Feb. 27, 1989, vol. 4, no. 20.
82. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, "This is John Galt Speaking."
83. On Rand's normative ethics see also Tara Smith, The Virtuous Egoist: Ayn Rands Normative Ethics Cambridge University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-0521860505 ; Mimi Gladstein/Chris Sciabarra Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, p. 5, Penn State Press, 1999 ISBN 978-0271018317 .
84. "The Objectivist Ethics," p. 23.
85. Atlas Shrugged, p. 939.
86. Maureen Dowd (September 13, 1982). "Where 'Atlas Shrugged' Is Still Read - Forthrightly". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-03-03. Miss Rand was vehemently anti-Reagan when he challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, and her disciples never saw much sign that she softened toward him over the years. She wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1976, 'I am profoundly opposed to Ronald Reagan. Since he denies the right to abortion, he cannot be a defender of any rights.'
87. Kelley, Beverly M. (2004). Reelpolitik II. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 86–7. ISBN 978-0742530416.
88. ""Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement"". Retrieved 2008-01-17.; Rand's understanding of the nature of individual rights is defended in Tara Smith, Moral Rights and Political Freedom, Open Court 1997; see also D. Rasmussen and D. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature, Open Court, 1991.
89. Rand, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, "Let Us Alone!", p. 141.
90. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics," p.37; see also, Andrew Bernstein, Objectivisim in One Lesson, Hamilton Books, 2009.
91. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, New American Library, 1964, chapter 12, "Man's Rights", and chapter 14, "The Nature of Government."
92. Rand, "Faith and Force: the Destroyers of the Modern World," lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960, reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It, as chapter 7, Bobbs-Merrill, 1982, pp. 58-76 .
93. Rand, "The Roots of War," The Objectivist, June, 1966, reprinted in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, New American Library, 1966.
94. Rand, Ayn (1997). David Harriman (ed.). Journals of Ayn Rand. Dutton. p. 315.
95. Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus," The Objectivist, April, 1967, reprinted in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, New American Library, 1966.
96. "Ayn Rand," The Playboy Interview Vol. II, edit., G. Barry Golson, Perigee, 1983, p. 23.
97. Sciabarra, Chris (1995). Ayn Rand: the Russian radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 432. ISBN 0271014415.
98. Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974, text published on the website of The Ayn Rand Institute
99. Ayn Rand on Israel (Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974)
100. Long, Roderick T. ""Ayn Rand's Contributions to the Cause of Freedom."". Retrieved 2006-03-26.
101. "Jean-Baptiste Say's Law of Markets and Francisco D'Anconia's Money Speech in Atlas Shrugged".
102. Ayn Rand, editor (New American LIbrary, 1966); see also Andrew Bernstein, The Capitalist Manifesto, University Press of America, 2005, and George Reisman, Capitalism: a Treatise on Economics, Jameson Books, 1996.
103. The Ayn Rand Institute: FAQ
104. Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1984), pp. 153, 169, 197; cf. James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (Durban House, 2005), pp. 26-27; Rand, "The Secular Meaning of Christmas," The Ayn Rand Column, P. Schwartz, edit., Second Renaissance Books, 1990, p.111, reprinted from The Objectivist Calendar, December, 1976.
105. Rand, Ayn (1999). "Racism". Return of the primitive: the anti-industrial revolution. Australia: Meridian. p. 179. ISBN 0-452-01184-1.
106. Peter Smagorinsky The Discourse of Character Education, p. 99, Routledge, 2005 ISBN 978-0805851267
107. Rand, Ayn (1999). "Racism". Return of the primitive: the anti-industrial revolution. Australia: Meridian. p. 182. ISBN 0-452-01184-1.
108. See also, Anne Wortham, The Other Side of Racism, Ohio State University Press, 1981.
109. Ayn Rand Playboy Interview Playboy magazine, March 1964
110. The Objectivist Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 7, July, 1963
111. Rand, Ayn (1993). The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: Plume. pp. 173, 175. ISBN 0-452-01125-6.
112. Rand, Ayn; Mayhew, Robert J. (2005). Ayn Rand answers: the best of her Q & A. New York: New American Library. p. 139. ISBN 0-451-21665-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
113. ^ Rand, Ayn (1968). "An Answer to Readers (about a Woman President)". The Objectivist. 7 (12). {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
114. Ayn Rand The Voice of Reason, p. 269, Meridian, 1990 ASIN B000OMNQWS; Pume, 1990 ISBN 978-0452010468
115. McLemee, Scott. ""The Heirs of Ayn Rand."". Retrieved 2006-04-03. originally in Lingua Franca, September 1999.
116. Branden, Barbara (1986). The passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday. p. 134. ISBN 0-385-19171-5.
117. "Notes, The Ayn Rand Biographical FAQ". Retrieved 2006-03-24.
118. ^ Ford Hall forum remarks, cited in ""Ayn Rand Biographical FAQ: Ayn Rand and Homosexuality"". Retrieved 2006-03-24.
119. Varnell, Paul (December 3, 2003). "Ayn Rand and Homosexuality". Chicago Free Press. Retrieved 2007-10-06.
120. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation, (Leap Publishing, 2003), surveys attitudes among Objectivists.
121. Ayn Rand, "The Psychology of Psychologizing," The Objectivist, March, 1971, reprinted in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, L. Peikoff, edit. (New American Library, 1988) pp. 23-31; Leonard Peikoff, "Understanding Objectivism" (audio lectures) (Second Renaissance, 1983), especially lectures 7-10.
122. Simon Blackburn "Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy" pp 63 characterizes Chomsky as an " American linguist, philosopher and political activist"
123. "Question Period: Noam Chomsky on being censored, CHRC censorship, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and libertarianism". The Shotgun Blog. Western Standard. December 08, 2008. Retrieved 23 December 2008. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
124. Gekko, Gord (April 1997). "What Conservatives Owe Ayn Rand". Enter Stage Right. Retrieved 2008-12-29. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
125. Harry Binswanger, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, the Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1990, pp. 89-173; this is based on Binswanger's PhD dissertation at Columbia Univ. which he wrote when he was associated with Rand herself.
126. Branden, Nathaniel (1984). "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand". Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 24 (4): 39–64. doi:10.1177/0022167884244004.
127. Valliant, James S., The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (Durban House, 2005), pp. 297-338, 359-361.
128. Tisdale, Sara Dabney (August 13), "A Celebration of Self", U.S. News & World Report, p. 72 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
129. Nyquist, Greg S. (2001). Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. p. 407. ISBN 0595196330.; however, Nyquist does not deal with the growing body of secondary literature on Objectivism.
130. Vallicella, William (June 9, 2004). "Rand's Misunderstanding of Kant". Maverick Philosopher. Retrieved February 13, 2009.Vallicella, William (May 28, 2004). "Is Ayn Rand a Good Philosopher?". Maverick Philosopher. Retrieved February 13, 2009.
131. Nozick, Robert (1997). "On the Randian Argument". Socratic Puzzles. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. pp. 282-304. ISBN 0-674-81654-4. {{cite book}}: |page= has extra text (help)
132. Eaves-Johnson, James (January 31, 2002). "Celebrating the life of a friend of liberty". University Wire.
133. Doherty, Brian (March 25, 2007). "What's not to like about Libertarianism?". Los Angeles Times.
134. Ayn Rand and the Is-Ought Problem p. 10 and p. 17
135. Douglas J. Den Uyl The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, p. 85, University of Illinois Press, 1987 ISBN 978-0252014079
136. Tara Smith Viable Values, pp. 72-6 and p. 82, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 ISBN 978-0847697618
137. "Den Uyl and Rasmussen, "Nozick on the Randian Argument," The Personalist, Spring, 1978, reprinted in Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State and Utopia, J. Paul, ed. (1981) Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 206-269.
138. Kant on Faith by Fred Seddon, Ph. D p. 3
139. Seddon, Frederick (2003). Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the history of philosophy. Washington, D.C: University Press of America. pp. (ch 4–5). ISBN 0-7618-2308-5.
140. On Kelley on Kant
141. Kelley Response to Seddon
142. Edward W. Younkins "Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy" (retrieved 3/29/09); see also, Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (Stein & Day, 1981) pp. 118-139 and 300-348.
143. Chapman, Steve"The evolution of Ayn Rand". Retrieved 2006-04-09. The Washington Times, February 2, 2005.
144. Berliner, Michael S., Letters of Ayn Rand (New York: Plume, 1995), pp. 74.
145. Pruett, Lorine (May, 16, 1943). The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
146. ^ Chambers, Whittaker (December 8, 1957), "Big Sister is Watching You", National Review: 594–596{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
147. Tracinski, Robert (2005-01-06). "A Half-Century-Old Attack on Ayn Rand Reminds Us of the Dark Side of Conservatism". Capitalism Magazine. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
148. Gladstein, Mimi R. (1999). Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 140. ISBN 0-271-01831-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
149. See also, William Thomas, edit., The Literary Art of Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Center, 2005. ISBN 1-57724-070-7, and Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, What Art Is: the Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, Open Court, 2000.
150. "Sales of Ayn Rand Books Reach 25 million Copies". Ayn Rand Institute. Retrieved 2008-04-20.
151. The Ayn Rand Institute
152. "Anthem Foundation Renews Gift for Ayn Rand Research on 50th Anniversary of "Atlas Shrugged"". University of Texas at Austin. October 1, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2009. On the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Atlas Shrugged," the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship renewed a $300,000 fellowship for research on Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin
153. ^ Cohen, David (December 7, 2001). "A growing concern". The Guardian.
154. Boaz, David (2005-02-02). "Ayn Rand at 100". CATO Institute. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
155. Amazon.com. "Atlas Shrugged (Paperback)". Retrieved 2008-02-01.
156. "Sales of Atlas Shrugged at All-Time Record". ARC. 2008-03-10. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
157. Atlas felt a sense of déjà vu, The Economist, February 26th 2009 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
158. "Amazon.com" 3/15/09. Retrieved April 2 2009
159. Fein, Esther B (1991-11-20). "Book Notes". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
160. "100 Best". The Modern Library. Random House. Retrieved 2008-12-29. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)
161. "Literature and Millennial Lists". enotes.com. Retrieved 2008-12-29. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)
162. "Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand read by 8.1%". Freestar Media / Zogby. 2007-10-17. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
163. Yaron Brook, "Is Rand Relevant?" Wall Street Journal March 15, 2009
164. Skinner, Anderson and Anderson, Reagan: a Life in Letters (2003) New York: Free Press, pp.281-282.
165. "The Amazing Steve Ditko" by Douglas Wolk, Salon.com, June 3, 2005, p. 2
166. Ditko Shrugged. A four part essay on Rand's influence on Ditko: Part 1: Ayn Rand’s Influence on Steve Ditko’s Craft, Commerce, and Creeper, Part 2: Apollonian and Dionysian Conflicts in The Hawk and the Dove and Beware the Creeper, Part 3: Did Neal Adams Work on Beware the Creeper #5? and Part 4: After Ditko, the Drought, Silver Bullet Comic Books, September 11–22, 2007
167. "The Amazing Steve Ditko" by Douglas Wolk, Salon.com, June 3, 2005, p. 2
168. Who is Mr A by Steve Ditko "The ideas that Graine puts forth are influenced by those of Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy, and especially those put forth in her book Atlas Shrugged. Mr. A differs from the Question in several ways. For one, whereas the Question maybe let some people get drowned in a sewer, Mr. A most definitely allows a criminal to fall to his death from the side of a building to teach another character (and the readers) a lesson about making decisions that benefit the self over altruism toward others".
170. Toasting Absent Heroes
     Alan Moore discusses the Charlton-Watchmen Connection
     CBA: Do you recall The Question?
     Alan: Yes, I do. That was another very interesting character, and it was almost a pure Steve Ditko character, in that it was odd-looking. "The Question" didn't look like any other super-hero on the market, and it also seemed to be a kind of mainstream comics version of Steve Ditko's far more radical "Mr. A," from witzend. I remember at the time—this would've been when I was just starting to get involved in British comics fandom—there was a British fanzine that was published over here by a gentleman called Stan Nichols (who has since gone to write a number of fantasy books). In Stan's fanzine, Stardock, there was an article called "Propaganda, or Why the Blue Beetle Voted for George Wallace." This was the late-'60s, and British comics fandom had quite a strong hippie element. Despite the fact that Steve Ditko was obviously a hero to the hippies with his psychedelic "Dr. Strange" work and for the teen angst of Spider-Man, Ditko's politics were obviously very different from those fans. His views were apparent through his portrayals of Mr. A and the protesters or beatniks that occasionally surfaced in his other work. I think this article was the first to actually point out that, yes, Steve Ditko did have a very right-wing agenda (which of course, he's completely entitled to), but at the time, it was quite interesting, and that probably led to me portraying Rorschach as an extremely right-wing character. CBA: When you read some of Ditko's diatribes in "The Question" and in some issues of Blue Beetle, did you read it with bemusement or disgust? Alan: Well...
     CBA: A mix of both?
     Alan: Well, no. I can look at Salvador Dali's work and marvel at it, despite the fact that I believe that Dali was probably a completely disgusting human being and borderline fascist, but that doesn't detract from the genius of his artwork. With Steve Ditko, I at least felt that though Steve Ditko's political agenda was very different to mine, Steve Ditko had a political agenda, and that in some ways set him above most of his contemporaries. During the '60s, I learned pretty quickly about the sources of Steve Ditko's ideas, and I realized very early on that he was very fond of the writing of Ayn Rand.
     CBA: Did you explore her philosophy?
     Alan: I had to look at The Fountainhead. I have to say I found Ayn Rand's philosophy laughable. It was a "white supremacist dreams of the master race," burnt in an early-20th century form. Her ideas didn't really appeal to me, but they seemed to be the kind of ideas that people would espouse, people who might secretly believe themselves to be part of the elite, and not part of the excluded majority. I would basically disagree with all of Ditko's ideas, but he has to be given credit for expressing these political ideas. I believe some feminists regard Dave Sim in much the same light; they might disagree with everything he says, but at least there is some sort of sexual-political debate going on there. So I've got respect for Ditko.
171. "2112" and Ayn Rand RushAccessed 16 March 2006
172. Video: All Hail Rush's 'Anthem' Accessed March 21, 2009
173. Anthem song: video and lyrics Accessed March 21, 2009
174. William F. Buckley, Jr, Getting it Right, Regnery Publishing, 2003
175. Gillen, Kieron (2008-08-23). "First-Person Shooter BioShock Owes More to Ayn Rand Than Doom". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-18. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
176. Ayn Rand postage stamp USPS.com. Retrieved on: January 18, 2008; appropriate because Rand was herself a stamp-collector, see Rand, "Why I Like Stamp Collecting," The Ayn Rand Column, P. Schwartz, edit., Second Renaissance Books, 1991, pp. 119-126, article reprinted from The Minkus Stamp Journal, 1971.
177. Edward W. Younkins Philosophers of Capitalism, p. 194, Lexington Books, 2005 ISBN 978-0739110775
178. Ayn Rand in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
179. Sharlet, Jeff. ""Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars"". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2006-03-28.
180. Scott Ryan Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality, pp. 1-381, iUniverse, 2003 ISBN 978-0595267330
181. Vallicella, William (May 28, 2004). "Is Ayn Rand a Good Philosopher?". Maverick Philosopher. Blogspot.
182. Vallicella, William (June 09, 2004). "Rand's Misunderstanding of Kant". Maverick Philosopher. Blogspot. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
183. Nozick, Robert (1971). "On the Randian Argument". The Personalist: an International Review of Philosophy (52): 299. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
184. Chris M. Sciabarra Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, pp. 9-14, Penn State Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0271014418
185. "It is not so much that academic philosophers are hostile to Objectivist ideas (though they very definitely are) as that they just don't think in that way." Merrill, Ronald, The Ideas of Ayn Rand, Full Court, 1998, p. 154
186. Sciabarra, Chris. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. The Pennsylvania State University Press (1995). p. 1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |middle= ignored (help)
187. ^ Merrill, Ronald (1998). The Ideas of Ayn Rand. p. 154. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |publication= ignored (help)
188. Leiter, Brian. "The Philosophical Gourmet Report 2006-2008: Overall Rankings". The Philosophical Gourmet Report. Retrieved February 13, 2009.
189. "New fellowship for study of objectivism established at The University of Texas at Austin". October 16, 2001. Retrieved 2006-04-14.
190. Harvey, Benjamin (May 15, 2005 accessdate=February 17, 2009). "Ayn Rand at 100: An 'ism' struts its stuff". Columbia News Service. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Missing pipe in: |date= (help)
191. "Journal of Ayn Rand Studies". Retrieved 2006-03-28.
192. "Ayn Rand Society". Retrieved 2007-10-03.
193. "The Fountainhead (1949), at the IMDB". Retrieved 2008-01-17.
194. Branden, Barbara (1986). The passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday. pp. 208–209. ISBN 0-385-19171-5.
195. "Atlas Shrugged Moves Forward". Retrieved 2008-04-13.
196. "Vadim Perelman to direct 'Atlas'". Retrieved 2007-10-02.
197. Jolie Fears She's Missed Out On Atlas Film With Pitt, Imdb.com
198. "The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999), at the IMDB". Retrieved 2008-01-17.
199. Robert Bidinotto wrote in an online post to Barbara Branden: "... I am no fan of the Showtime film drawn from your book's title. I say 'title' because, quite unlike your book, I found it to be a cheap tabloid treatment of The Affair alone, not remotely of the Ayn Rand presented in your biography. The film offered nothing of Ayn Rand's background, nothing of the nature of her struggle and the scale of her triumph, nothing that indicated the scope of her intellectual discoveries and literary achievements, nothing that persuasively conveyed her personal brilliance and intellectual stature (the reasons so many were drawn into her circle), and -- even regarding the affair itself -- nothing that revealed its complexities and conflicts of motives. It was a cheap, sensationalized People magazine -- or National Enquirer -- treatment of only the worst aspect of Rand's life (and yours, and Nathaniel's, and Frank O'Connor's), not redeemed by a single insight..." (retrieved March 30, 2009); and Valliant, after listing what he sees as factual errors in the film, writes: "Needless to say, Ms. Branden loved the movie," James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, Durban House, 2005, p.174.
200. "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life - Cast, Crew, Director and Awards". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved March 23, 2009.

Further reading

• Baker, James T. (1987). Ayn Rand. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7497-1.
• Bernstein, Andrew (2009). Objectivism in One Lesson. Lanham, Maryland: Hamilton Books. ISBN 0-7618-4359-0.
• Branden, Barbara (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-19171-5.
• Branden, Nathaniel (1998). My Years with Ayn Rand. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. ISBN 0-7879-4513-7.
• Branden, Nathaniel (1962). Who Is Ayn Rand?. New York: Random House. OCLC 313377536. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Britting, Jeff (2005). Ayn Rand. New York: Overlook Duckworth. ISBN 1-58567-406-0.
• Gladstein, Mimi Reisel (1999). The New Ayn Rand Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30321-5.
• Gladstein, Mimi Reisel (1999). Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-534-57625-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Gotthelf, Allan (2000). On Ayn Rand. Wadsworth Publishing Co. ISBN 0-271-01830-5.
• Hicks, Stephen (2003). "Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics". Journal of Accounting, Ethics, and Public Policy. 3 (1): 1–26.
• Holzer, Erika (2005). Ayn Rand, My Fiction Writing Teacher. Madison Press. ISBN 0-6151-3041-0.
• Paxton, Michael (1998). Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (The Companion Book). Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith. ISBN 0-87905-845-5.
• Peikoff, Leonard (1987). "My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir". The Objectivist Forum. 8 (3): 1–16.
• Peikoff, Leonard (1991). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-452-01101-9.
• Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (1995). Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01440-7.
• Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (1999). "The Rand Transcript". The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 1 (1): 1–26.
• Sures, Mary Ann (2001). Facets of Ayn Rand. Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press. ISBN 0-9625336-5-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Thomas, William (editor) (2005). The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. Poughkeepsie, New York: The Objectivist Center. ISBN 1-57724-070-7. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• Valliant, James S. (2005). The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics. Dallas: Durban House. ISBN 1930754671.

External links

1. Part 1
4. Part 4

• Ayn Rand FAQ
• Frequently Asked Questions on Ayn Rand
• Ayn Rand Lexicon
• "Ayn Rand". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Ayn Rand in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Ayn Rand at Project Gutenberg
• Rand's papers at The Library of Congress
• Ayn Rand at IMDb
• Ayn Rand at Find a Grave
• Ayn Rand Phil Donahue Interview (Part 1 - 5)
• Ayn Rand interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1959: Part 1 Part 2
• Ayn Rand Society, a professional society affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division

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