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Ayn Rand (February 2 1905–March 6 1982; first name pronounced (IPA) /aɪn/ (rhymes with 'mine')), born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was best known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize, above all, her concepts of individualism, rational egoism ("rational self-interest"), and capitalism. Believing government has a legitimate but relatively minimal role in a free society, she was not an anarchist, but a minarchist (though she did not use the term "minarchist"). Her novels were based upon the archetype of the Randian hero, a man whose ability and independence causes conflict with the masses, but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand viewed this hero as the ideal and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase such heroes. She believed:

1. That man must choose his values and actions by reason;
2. That the individual has a right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and
3. That no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force, or impose ideas on others by physical force.

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Biography

Early life

Rand was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and was the eldest of three daughters of a Jewish family. Her parents were agnostic and largely non-observant. From an early age, she displayed a strong interest in literature and films. She started writing screenplays and novels from the age of seven. Her mother undertook to teach her French and subscribed to a magazine featuring stories for boys, where Rand found her first childhood hero: Cyrus Paltons, an Indian army officer in a Rudyard Kipling-style story called "The Mysterious Valley". Throughout her youth, she read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and other Romantic writers, and expressed a passionate enthusiasm toward the Romantic movement as a whole. She discovered Victor Hugo at the age of thirteen, and fell deeply in love with his novels. Later, she would cite him as her favourite novelist and the greatest novelist of world literature. She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd. Her major literary discoveries in university were the works of Edmond Rostand, Friedrich Schiller and Fyodor Dostoevsky. She admired Rostand for his richly romantic imagination and Schiller for his grand, heroic scale. She admired Dostoevsky for his sense of drama and his intense moral judgments, but was deeply against his philosophy and his sense of life. She continued to write short stories and screenplays and wrote sporadically in her diary, which contained intensely anti-Soviet ideas. She also encountered the philosophical ideas of Nietzsche, and loved his exaltation of the heroic and independent individual in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; nevertheless she was strongly critical of his philosophy, going so far as to attack it in the introductions of her novels. Her greatest influence by far is Aristotle, especially his work Organon (Logic). She considered him the greatest philosopher ever. She then entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting; in late 1925, however, she was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She arrived in the United States in February 1926, at the age of twenty-one. After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union, and set out for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. She then changed her name to "Ayn Rand". There is a story told that she named herself after the Remington Rand typewriter, but recent evidence has proved that this is not the case. She stated that her first name, 'Ayn', was an adaptation of the name of a Finnish writer. This may have been the Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas. Others have suggested that her name is derived from the South African rand, but the rand was not used until 1961.

Major works

Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. While working as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, she intentionally bumped into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, who caught her eye. The two were married in 1929. In 1931, Rand became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios. Rand then wrote the play The Night of January 16th in 1934, which was highly successful, and published two novels, We the Living (1936), and Anthem (1938). The two novels failed to gain any significant financial/critical success. She was up against The Red Decade in America, and Anthem did not even find a publisher in the United States; it was first published in England. Besides that, Rand had still not perfected her literary style and the novels cannot be considered to be fully representative.

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. The films were nearly censored by the Italian government under Benito Mussolini, but they were allowed to be featured because the novel they were based upon was ostensibly anti-Soviet. The films were successful and the public easily realised that it was as much against Fascism as it was against Communism, and the government banned it quickly thereafter. These films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.

Rand's first major professional success came with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead (1943). She took seven years to write it. The novel was rejected by twelve publishers, who thought it was too intellectual and opposed to the mainstream of American thought, and that there would be no public for it. It was finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house, thanks mainly to a member of the editorial board, Archibald Ogden, who praised the book in the highest terms and finally prevailed. Despite these initial struggles The Fountainhead was a worldwide success, bringing Rand fame and financial security.

The theme of The Fountainhead is "individualism and collectivism in man's soul". It features the lives of five main characters. The hero, Howard Roark, is Rand's ideal, a noble soul par excellence, an architect who is firmly and serenely devoted to his own ideals and believes that no man should copy the style of another in any field, and especially in architecture. All the other characters in the novel demand the renunciation of his values with varying degrees of intensity, but Roark maintains his integrity. A most interesting feature of Roark is that he does this unlike traditional heroes who launch into long and passionate monologues about their integrity and the unfairness of the world; Roark, by contrast, does it with a disdainful, almost contemptous taciturnity and laconicism.

Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957, becoming an international bestseller. Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most complete statement of the Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of fiction. In its appendix, she offered this summary:

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

The theme of Atlas Shrugged is "The role of man's mind in society". Rand upheld the industrialist as one of the most admirable members of any society and fiercely opposed the popular resentment accorded to industrialists. This led her to envision a novel wherein the industrialists of America go on strike and retreat to a mountainous hideaway. The American economy and its society in general slowly start to collapse. The government responds by increasing the already stifling controls on industrial concerns. The novel, despite having a political theme at its centre, deals with issues as complex and divergent as sex, music, medicine, and human ability.

Along with Nathaniel Branden, his wife Barbara, and others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff, (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.

The Objectivist movement

Main article: The Objectivist movement

In 1950 Rand moved to New York City, where in 1951 she met the young psychology student Nathaniel Branden , who had read her book, The Fountainhead, at the age of 14. Branden, then 19, enjoyed discussing Rand's emerging Objectivist philosophy with her. Together, Branden and some of his other friends formed a group that they dubbed the Ayn Rand Collective, which included some participation by future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. After several years, Rand and Branden's friendly relationship blossomed into a romantic affair, despite the fact that both were married at the time. This affair was accepted by their spouses but led to the separation and then divorce of Nathaniel Branden from his wife.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction and non-fiction works, and by giving talks at several east-coast universities, largely through the Nathaniel Branden Institute ("the NBI") which Branden had established to promote her philosophy.

After a convoluted series of separations, Rand abruptly ended her relationship with both Nathaniel Branden and his wife, Barbara Branden, in 1968 when she learned of Nathaniel Branden's affair with Patrecia Scott (this later affair did not overlap chronologically with the earlier Branden/Rand affair). Rand refused to have any further dealings with the NBI. She then published a letter in "The Objectivist" announcing her repudiation of Branden for various reasons, including dishonesty, but did not mention their affair or her role in the schism. The two never reconciled, and Branden remained a persona non grata in the Objectivist movement.

Barbara Branden presented an account of the breakup of the affair in her book, The Passion of Ayn Rand. She describes the encounter between Nathaniel and Rand, saying that Rand slapped him numerous times, and denounced him in these words: "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health — you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you'll know it's a sign of still worse moral degradation!"

Conflicts continued in the wake of the break with Branden and the subsequent collapse of the NBI. Many of her closest "Collective" friends began to part ways, and during the late 70's, her activities within the formal Objectivist movement began to decline, a situation which increased after the death of her husband in 1979. One of her final projects was work on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982 in New York City, years after having successfully battled cancer, and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.

Philosophical influences

Rand rejected virtually all other philosophical schools. She acknowledged a shared intellectual lineage with Aristotle and John Locke, and more generally with the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Reason. She occasionally remarked with approval on specific philosophical positions of, e.g., Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. She seems also to have respected the American rationalist Brand Blanshard. However, she regarded most philosophers as at best incompetent and at worst positively evil. She singled out Immanuel Kant as the most influential of the latter sort.

Nonetheless, there are connections between Rand's views and those of other philosophers. She acknowledged that she had been influenced at an early age by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Though she later repudiated his thought, and reprinted her first novel, We The Living, with some wording changes in 1959, her own thought grew out of critical interaction with it. Generally, her political thought is in the tradition of classical liberalism. She expressed qualified enthusiasm for the economic thought of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. 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 was likely not acquainted with his work.

Politics and House Committee on Un-American Activities testimony

Rand's political views were radically pro-capitalist, anti-statist, and anti-communist. Her writings praised above all the human individual and the creative genius of which one is capable. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of egoism and individualism. Rand also had a strong dislike for mysticism, religion, and compulsory charity (forced extraction), all of which she believed helped foster a crippling culture of resentment towards individual human happiness and success.

In 1947, during the infamous Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. . Rand's testimony involved analysis of the 1943 film Song of Russia. While many believe that Ayn Rand disclosed the names of members of the Communist Party in the U.S., thus exposing them to blacklisting, her testimony consisted entirely of comments regarding the disparity between her experiences in the Soviet Union and the fanciful portrayal of it in the film.

Rand argued that the movie grossly misrepresented the socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union. She told the committee that the film presented life in the USSR as being much better than it actually was. Apparently this 1943 film was intentional wartime propaganda by U.S. patriots, trying to put their Soviet allies in World War II under the best possible light. After the HUAC hearings, when Ayn Rand was asked about her feelings on the effectiveness of their investigations, she described the process as "futile."

Legacy

Rand's funeral was attended by some of her prominent followers, including Alan Greenspan. A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed on her casket.

In 1985, Leonard Peikoff, a surviving member of "The Collective" and Ayn Rand's designated heir, established "The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism". The Institute has since registered the name Ayn Rand as a trademark, despite Rand's desire that her name never be used to promote the philosophy she developed. Rand expressed her wish to keep her name and the philosophy of Objectivism separate to ensure the survival of her ideas.

Another schism in the movement occurred in 1989, when Objectivist David Kelley wrote an article called "A Question of Sanction," in which he defended his choice to speak to non-Objectivist libertarian groups. Kelley wrote that Objectivism was not a "closed system" and should engage with other philosophies. Peikoff, in an article for The Intellectual Activist called "Fact and Value" , argued that Objectivism is, indeed, a closed system, and that truth and moral goodness are intrinsically related. Peikoff expelled Kelley from his movement, whereupon Kelley founded The Institute for Objectivist Studies (now known as "The Objectivist Center").

Rand and Objectivism are less well known outside North America, though there are pockets of interest in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and her novels are reported to be very popular in India (). Her work has had little effect on academic philosophy, for her followers are mostly (with some notable exceptions) drawn from the non-academic world.

Controversy

Rand's views are controversial. Religious and socially conservative thinkers have criticized her atheism. Many adherants and practicioners of continental philosophy would criticize her celebration of rationality and self-interest. Her classical liberal and pro-capitalism political views have not been positively received within the American academy, which leans to the political left. Within the dominant philosophical movement or school in the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy, Rand's work has been mostly ignored. No leading research university in this tradition considers Rand or Objectivism to be an important philosophical specialty or research area, as is documented by Brian Leiter's report at . Some academics, however, are trying to bring Rand's work into the mainstream. For instance, there is an Ayn Rand Society , founded in 1987, affiliated with the American Philosophical Association.

A notable exception to the general lack of attention paid to Rand in the analytic community is the essay "On the Randian Argument" by Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick, which appears in his collection Socratic Puzzles. Nozick's own libertarian political conclusions are similar to Rand's, but his essay is critical of her foundational argument in ethics, which is supposed to show that one's own life is, for each individual, the only coherent ultimate value. By implication, Nozick argues that Rand's solution to David Hume's famous is-ought problem is unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, Nozick did respect Rand as an author and noted that he found her books enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Rand has sometimes been viewed with suspicion for her practice of presenting her philosophy in fiction and non-fiction books aimed at a general audience rather than publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Rand's defenders note that she is part of a long tradition of authors who wrote philosophically rich fiction — including Dante, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Albert Camus, and that other philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre presented their philosophies in both fictional and non-fictional forms.

Other critics argue that Rand’s idealistic philosophy and her Romantic literary style are not applicable to the inhabited world. In particular, these critics claim that Rand's novels are made up of unrealistic and one-dimensional characters. They criticize the portrayal of the Objectivist heroes as incredibly intelligent, unencumbered by doubt, wealthy, and free of flaws, in contrast to the frequent portrayal of the antagonists as weak, pathetic, full of uncertainty, and lacking in imagination and talent. Defenders of Rand point out counterexamples to these criticisms: neither Eddie Willers nor Cherryl Taggart (both positive characters) is especially gifted or intelligent, but both are characters of dignity and respect; Leo Kovalensky suffers enormously due to his inability to cope with the brutality and banality of communism; Andrei Taganov dies after realizing his philosophical errors; Dominique Francon is initially bitterly unhappy because she believes evil is powerful; and Dagny Taggart thinks that she is capable of saving the world alone. Two of her main protagonists, Howard Roark and John Galt, did not begin life as rich. Though Rand believed that, under capitalism, valuable contributions will routinely be rewarded by wealth, she certainly did not think that wealth made a person virtuous. In fact, she presents various vicious apparatchiks and plutocrats who use statism to enrich themselves. Moreover, Hank Rearden is exploited because of his social naïveté. As for the purportedly weak and pathetic villains, Rand's defenders point out that Ellsworth Toohey is represented as being a great strategist and communicator from an early age, and Dr. Robert Stadler is a brilliant scientist.

Rand herself replied to these literary criticisms (and in advance of much of them) with her essay "The Goal of My Writing" (1963). There, and in other essays collected in her book The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (2nd rev. ed. 1975), Rand makes it clear that her goal is to project her vision of an ideal man: not man as he is, but man as he might and ought to be.

Rand's strengths, to Rand's supporters, are her weaknesses, to her detractors. To individuals enmeshed in lives made difficult by an undecidable combination of business and government, Rand, unlike a "professional" philosopher, provides a life-changing new narrative which has been especially empowering for some women. Arguably, Rand fulfilled a demand made much later by the academic philosopher Martha Nussbaum who asked why we ask philosophy to improve our existence and flourishing, and why we instinctively find analytic philosophies so deficient on this basis. Unlike most philosophers, even philosophers of society, Rand presents to her supporters a vivid picture of lives and societies damaged almost beyond repair by a soulless and Philistine socialism which Rand encountered first hand in Russia; her mother, Rand recounted, was attacked for reading a book on a train by some enthusiastic proles who accused Rand's mother of bourgeois tendencies.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Night of January 16th (1934)
• We The Living (1936)
• Anthem (1938)
• The Fountainhead (1943)
• Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Posthumous fiction

• Three Plays (2005)

Nonfiction

• For the New Intellectual (1961)
• The Virtue of Selfishness (with Nathaniel Branden) (1964)
• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (with Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen) (1966)
• Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967)
• The Romantic Manifesto (1969)
• The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)
• Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

Posthumous nonfiction

• 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)
• Ayn Rand Answers (2005)

References

In addition to Rand's own works (listed above), the following references discuss Rand's life and/or literary work. References that discuss her philosophy can be found in the bibliography of work on Objectivism.

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External links

General information

• Ayn Rand FAQ
• Ayn Rand FAQ-notes
• Frequently Asked Questions on Ayn Rand
• "Ayn Rand" entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Rand's biography
• Objectivism Reference Center

Organizations promoting Ayn Rand's philosophy

• The Ayn Rand Institute
• The Objectivist Center
• The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

Articles

• Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars by Jeff Sharlet
• The Heirs of Ayn Rand by Scott McLemee An article published in Lingua Franca which covers the arc of her publishing career, while alive and posthomous, as well as the continuing scholarship.
• As Astonishing as Elvis by Jenny Turner Essay review of Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting

Articles critical of Ayn Rand

• The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult by Murray Rothbard Written in 1972, this was the first piece of Rand revisionism from the libertarian standpoint.
• The Unlikeliest Cult in History by Michael Shermer
• "Extensive list of critical essays that Objectivists must answer"
• "The works of numerous philosophers that are critical of Rand's Objectivism are included at this internal link #11"

Rand's associates

• Leonard Peikoff's website
• Barbara Branden's website
• Nathaniel Branden's website

Online groups and blogs

• TIA Daily — Daily news and commentary from the Objectivist perspective by e-mail
• Dr. Michael J. Hurd, psychologist — The Daily Dose of Reason: psychology, life coaching and comments on cultural/political topics from an Objectivist perspective — also, The Living Resources Newsletter and Dr. Hurd's publications
• Ayn Rand Admirers — The Atlasphere: Member directory, dating service, columns, and news for admirers of Rand's novels
• ObjectivismOnline.Net — Contains forums, blogs, essays, chat room, and a wiki on Objectivism
• Sense Of Life Objectivists — Online columns and discussion, by and for Objectivists
• The Forum for Ayn Rand Fans
• Objectivist Blogs — A list of Rand-influenced bloggers
• Harry Binswanger List — E-mail-based discussion group
• Randex — Index of online media references to Ayn Rand and Objectivism
• Objectivism.net — Ayn Rand on CD-ROM, and good links
• The Objectivism Wiki
• The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies — Contains abstracts of articles, author bios, links to several articles, and submission guidelines.
• Ayn Rand 100 Tribute — includes reference to a tribute album, "Concerto of Deliverance", inspired by Rand's words describing such music.

Rand's writing and speeches

• Anthem — The complete text of the novel, which has fallen into the public domain
• Atlas Shrugged — Book outline
• The Fountainhead — Book outline
• We The Living — Book outline
• "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" — Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York - March 6, 1974
• Rand's HUAC testimony — Transcript
• We the Living — Video outline
• Rand featured on C-Span's "American Writers" — RealVideo discussions on Rand's writing
• Works by Ayn Rand at Project Gutenberg

• 1905 births
• 1982 deaths
• 20th century philosophers
• American novelists
• American philosophers
• Jewish Americans
• Naturalized citizens of the United States
• Objectivists
• Russian-Americans