Ayn Rand

• 1. Introduction

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  When Ayn Rand died in New York City on the 6th of March 1982, her funeral included a six-foot floral arrangement shaped like a dollar sign. The tribute suited a woman who had turned self-interest into a moral code. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia, and she wrote under a name she invented for herself. Her books have sold more than 37 million copies. Her ideas have won her devoted followers, furious critics, and a place in American politics. How did a pharmacist's daughter from revolutionary Russia become one of the most widely read and most argued-over writers in the United States? What did she actually believe? And why did some of the people closest to her end up leaving her, and sometimes condemning her?

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• 2. Escape From Petrograd

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  Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, was where Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was born on the 2nd of February 1905. She was the eldest of three daughters in a Jewish bourgeois family. Her father, Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, was a pharmacist. Her mother was Anna Borisovna, born Kaplan.

  At 12, Alisa watched the October Revolution upend her family. The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin nationalized her father's pharmacy. The family fled to Yevpatoria in Crimea, which the White Army initially held during the Russian Civil War. She finished high school there in June 1921. Back in Petrograd, as the city was now called, the family lived in desperate conditions and sometimes came close to starving.

  Petrograd State University had opened its doors to women, and at 16 she was among the first to enroll. She studied history in the department of social pedagogy. Shortly before graduation, she was purged along with many other bourgeois students. Complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists led to many reinstatements, hers among them. In October 1924 she graduated from what was by then Leningrad State University.

  A year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad followed. For one assignment she wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, and it became her first published work. Around this time she chose her writing name. Her surname would be Rand, and her first name would be Ayn.

  In late 1925 she received a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, Illinois. She reached New York City on the 19th of February 1926, determined to stay and become a screenwriter. After a few months with her relatives, learning English, she moved to Hollywood.

  A chance meeting with the director Cecil B. DeMille gave her work as an extra on his film The King of Kings, and then a job as a junior screenwriter. On that same production she met the aspiring actor Frank O'Connor. They married on the 15th of April 1929. She became a permanent American resident that July and a citizen on the 3rd of March 1931.

  Her family in Russia never joined her, because her parents and sisters could not obtain permission to emigrate. Her father died of a heart attack in 1939. Her mother and one of her sisters died during the siege of Leningrad. Within a few years of her citizenship, a sale to Universal Studios would give her first real literary success.

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• 3. Stage, Page And Politics

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  In 1932 Rand sold her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios, though it was never produced. Her courtroom drama Night of January 16th reached the stage in Hollywood in 1934 and reopened on Broadway in 1935. It had an unusual hook. Each night a jury was picked from the audience, and its vote decided which of two endings the cast performed. In December 1934, Rand and O'Connor moved to New York City so she could handle revisions for Broadway.

  We the Living, her first novel, appeared in 1936. It was semi-autobiographical and set in Soviet Russia, and it dramatized the struggle between the individual and the state. Sales were slow, and the American publisher let it go out of print, although European editions kept selling. A stage adaptation closed in less than a week. A revised edition issued in 1959 eventually sold over three million copies.

  In December 1935 she began The Fountainhead, then paused in 1937 to write the novella Anthem. Its dystopian world has embraced collectivism so completely that the word I has been forgotten and replaced by we. The protagonists, Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000, escape and rediscover the lost word. England published it in 1938, since she could not find an American publisher. A revised edition in 1946 sold over 3.5 million copies.

  Wendell Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign drew Rand and her husband in as full-time volunteers. The work introduced her to intellectuals who favored free-market capitalism. The journalist Henry Hazlitt introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Mises once called her "the most courageous man in America", a compliment she prized because he said "man" instead of "woman". She also befriended the libertarian writer Isabel Paterson. Rand questioned Paterson at length about American history and politics, and gave her ideas for The God of the Machine, Paterson's only non-fiction book.

  Twelve publishers turned down The Fountainhead before Bobbs-Merrill accepted it in 1943. The editor Archibald Ogden had threatened to quit if his employer refused. The novel follows Howard Roark, an uncompromising architect who battles the "second-handers". These are people who try to live through others and place others above themselves.

  To finish the book, Rand took Benzedrine, an amphetamine, to fight fatigue. It let her work long hours to meet her deadline, but afterward she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered two weeks of rest. She used the drug for roughly three decades. Some later associates described mood swings and outbursts, which the drug may have contributed to.

  The Fountainhead brought fame and financial security. In 1943 Rand sold the film rights to Warner Bros. and returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay. The producer Hal B. Wallis then hired her as a screenwriter and script-doctor, on films including Love Letters and You Came Along. She also joined the anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and the American Writers Association.

  In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She told the committee that the 1944 film Song of Russia grossly misrepresented Soviet life by making it look far better and happier than it was. She also wanted to attack the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, which she read as a negative portrait of the business world, but she was not allowed. Asked afterward about the investigations, she called the process "futile".

  The film of The Fountainhead finally reached cinemas in 1949, using her screenplay with minimal changes. Rand still said she "disliked the movie from beginning to end", and she complained about its editing and acting among other elements.

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• 4. Atlas And Its Circle

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  Many letters from readers followed The Fountainhead, and some wrote that the book had profoundly changed them. In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City and gathered a group of these admirers at her apartment on weekends to discuss philosophy. The group included Alan Greenspan, a future chair of the Federal Reserve, and a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal, later Nathaniel Branden. It also included his wife Barbara and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff. Rand eventually let them read drafts of her new novel, Atlas Shrugged.

  In 1954 her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden became a romantic affair. They told both of their spouses, who briefly objected. Then Rand, in Barbara Branden's words, "spun out a deductive chain from which you just couldn't escape", and both spouses agreed. The historian Jennifer Burns concludes that O'Connor was likely "the hardest hit" emotionally.

  Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957 and is regarded as Rand's magnum opus. It imagines a dystopian United States where the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists answer a welfare-state government by going on strike. They retreat to a hidden valley and build an independent free economy. Their leader, John Galt, says the strike stops "the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds of those who contribute most to the nation's wealth and achievements. Galt also delivers a lengthy monologue that lays out Objectivism. Rand summed up the book's demonstration as "the morality of rational self-interest".

  The novel became an international bestseller, yet the reaction of intellectuals left Rand discouraged and depressed. It was her last completed work of fiction. Her career as a novelist ended, and her role as a popular philosopher began.

  In 1958 Nathaniel Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, later incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute, to promote her philosophy through public lectures. In 1962 he and Rand co-founded The Objectivist Newsletter, later renamed The Objectivist. Rand was unimpressed by many students at the institute. She held them to strict standards and sometimes reacted coldly or angrily to those who disagreed with her.

  Critics, including some former students and Branden himself, later said the institute's culture demanded intellectual conformity and excessive reverence for Rand. Some called the Objectivist movement a cult or a religion. Rand voiced opinions on subjects ranging from literature and music to sexuality and facial hair. Some followers dressed to match characters in her novels and bought furniture like hers. Some former students believed this was exaggerated and confined to her closest followers in New York.

  In 1964 Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. He and Barbara hid it from Rand. As her relationship with Branden deteriorated, Rand had her husband present for difficult conversations between them. She learned about the Scott relationship in 1968. Her own romantic involvement with Branden was already over, but she ended her relationship with both Brandens, and the institute closed. In The Objectivist she repudiated him for dishonesty and "irrational behavior in his private life". In the following years, several more of her closest associates parted company with her.

  The annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum became a fixture of the 1960s and 1970s. In answers to audience questions, Rand took controversial stances. She supported abortion rights and opposed the Vietnam War and the draft, though she condemned many draft dodgers as "bums". She backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, describing the fight as "civilized men fighting savages". She claimed European colonists had the right to invade and take land inhabited by American Indians. She called homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting" while advocating the repeal of all laws concerning it. In 1964 she most strongly endorsed Barry Goldwater for president.

  In 1973 her younger sister Eleonora Drobisheva visited the United States at Rand's invitation. Eleonora did not accept her sister's lifestyle and views, and she found little literary merit in her works. She returned to the Soviet Union and spent the rest of her life in Leningrad, later Saint Petersburg.

  Rand had surgery for lung cancer in 1974, after decades of heavy smoking. In 1976 she retired from her newsletter. Despite her lifelong objections to government-run programs, she enrolled in Social Security and Medicare, and claimed benefits with the help of a social worker. Her activity in the movement declined, especially after her husband died on the 9th of November 1979. One of her final projects was a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged that was never completed. In her will, she named Leonard Peikoff as her heir.

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• 5. Romantic Realism

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  Rand's own name for her literary method was "romantic realism". She wanted her fiction to show the world "as it could be and should be". Her heroes are heroic individualists, depicted as fit and attractive. Her villains champion duty and collectivist ideals, and she often described them as unattractive. Some carry names that signal their flaws, such as Wesley Mouch in Atlas Shrugged.

  Plot mattered enormously to her. The biographer Anne Heller described the result as "tight, elaborate, fast-paced plotting". Romantic triangles recur throughout. In most of her novels and plays, the main female character is romantically involved with at least two men.

  At school she read Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, and they became her favorites. She ranked them in the "top rank" of Romantic writers for their moral themes and their skill at building plots. Hugo shaped her approach to plotting most. In her introduction to an English edition of his novel Ninety-Three, she called him "the greatest novelist in world literature".

  Rand disliked most Russian literature, yet her heroes show the mark of the Russian Symbolists and other nineteenth-century writers. The clearest source is Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? Scholars of Russian literature see his character Rakhmetov, an "ascetic revolutionist", as the template for her heroes and heroines.

  The Russian Revolution colored her villains. Ellsworth Toohey's ideas and rhetoric in The Fountainhead reflect it, as does the destruction of the economy in Atlas Shrugged. Her years writing film scenarios left a mark on her prose. Her novels contain narrative descriptions that resemble early Hollywood scenarios, often moving from a broad establishing shot to close-up details. Her descriptions of women frequently take a "male gaze" perspective.

  The first reviews she received were for Night of January 16th. Notices for the Broadway production were largely positive, but Rand found even good ones embarrassing, because the producer had made significant changes to her script. She believed We the Living was not widely reviewed. In fact, over 200 publications ran approximately 125 different reviews, and these were more positive than those for her later work.

  The Fountainhead drew far fewer reviews, and opinion was mixed. Lorine Pruette's review in The New York Times called Rand "a writer of great power" who wrote "brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly", and Rand greatly appreciated it. Some negative reviewers found the novel too long, and others found the characters unsympathetic. One called Rand's style "offensively pedestrian".

  Atlas Shrugged was widely reviewed, and many notices were strongly negative. The Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs". Comments included that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote the most notorious review, for the conservative magazine National Review. He accused Rand of backing a godless system that he related to the Soviets, and he claimed that a voice from almost any page commanded readers toward a gas chamber.

  Her first nonfiction book, For the New Intellectual, met a similar tenor. The philosopher Sidney Hook likened her certainty to "the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union". The author Gore Vidal called her viewpoint "nearly perfect in its immorality". These reviews set the pattern for reaction among liberal critics, and her later books received progressively less attention.

  Scholars of literature were slower still. When Gladstein began researching Rand in 1973, she could not find a single scholarly article about the novels, and only three appeared in the rest of that decade. Attention has grown since the 1990s. In 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Lisa Duggan called the fiction popular and influential despite its easy targets, including "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots".

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• 6. Objectivism

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  Rand boiled her philosophy down to "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". She called it Objectivism. She treated it as a system with positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy.

  In metaphysics she backed philosophical realism and opposed anything she regarded as mysticism or supernaturalism, including all forms of religion. She believed in free will as a form of agent causation and rejected determinism. She defined art as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments". In The Romantic Manifesto and The Art of Fiction she argued that Romanticism most accurately reflects human free will.

  In epistemology she held that all knowledge is built up from sense perception, whose validity she considered axiomatic. She described reason as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". She rejected every claim of non-perceptual knowledge, including instinct, intuition, and revelation. Her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology offered a theory of concept formation and rejected the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Hazel Barnes and the psychologist Albert Ellis said Rand was too dismissive of emotion. Nathaniel Branden agreed that her emphasis on reason created unrealistic expectations of how consistently rational people could be.

  In ethics she argued for rational and ethical egoism. The individual, she said, should "exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself". She called egoism "the virtue of selfishness" and gave that title to a book. There she offered a solution to the is-ought problem, grounding morality in the needs of "man's survival qua man". She condemned altruism as incompatible with human life and happiness. She held that initiating force was evil and irrational, and wrote in Atlas Shrugged that "Force and mind are opposites".

  Her politics centered on individual rights, including property rights. She considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral system, because it alone protects those rights. She opposed collectivism and statism, which for her covered communism, fascism, socialism, theocracy, and the welfare state. Her preferred government was a constitutional republic limited to protecting individual rights. She preferred the label "radical for capitalism" to conservative or libertarian. She worked with conservatives but disagreed with them over religion and ethics. She rejected anarchism as a naive theory built on subjectivism, and she denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism.

  The ethics and politics draw the heaviest fire. Robert Nozick and William F. O'Neill wrote two of the earliest academic critiques, and both said she failed to solve the is-ought problem. Critics have called her definitions of egoism and altruism biased and out of step with normal usage. The libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer went further and argued that her egoism and her support for individual rights are inconsistent. Roy Childs said that her opposition to the initiation of force should have led her to anarchism instead of limited government.

  Rand recommended almost no philosophers. The exceptions were Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals, and she remarked that history offered only "three A's": Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, she was asked where her philosophy came from. She answered that it came "Out of my own mind", with a debt only to Aristotle. The political scientist Charles Murray, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, countered that her ideas were derivative of thinkers such as John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche.

  The Nietzsche question has a paper trail. In 1928 she alluded to his idea of the "superman" in notes for an unwritten novel. Its protagonist was inspired by the murderer William Edward Hickman, whom she observed early in his trial. Many of these themes returned later in Night of January 16th. An undated questionnaire response, which she is suspected to have filled out while writing The Fountainhead, names Nietzsche as her favorite philosopher and says that "Thus Spake Zarathustra" was her Bible. Many experts say she turned against his ideas by the time of that novel, and the extent of his early influence is disputed. In a 1964 radio interview she said, "I don't want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect." Russian nihilists such as Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev also promoted egoism, though there is no direct evidence that she read them.

  Immanuel Kant stood at the opposite pole. Rand called him "the most evil man in mankind's history", believing his epistemology undermined reason and his ethics opposed self-interest. The philosophers George Walsh and Fred Seddon have argued that she misinterpreted Kant and exaggerated their differences. Plato was a lesser villain in her telling. She saw his disagreements with Aristotle over metaphysics and epistemology as the primary conflict in the history of philosophy.

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• 7. Academic Exile

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  Rand was not an academic and did not take part in academic discourse. She was dismissive of critics, and she wrote about ideas she disagreed with in a polemical manner, without in-depth analysis. Academic philosophers returned the judgment. They viewed her negatively and dismissed her as an unimportant figure who deserved no serious response.

  In 1967 John Hospers discussed her ethical ideas in the second edition of his textbook An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. The same year, Hazel Barnes included a chapter critiquing Objectivism in An Existentialist Ethics. When the first full-length academic book about Rand's philosophy appeared in 1971, its author called writing about her "a treacherous undertaking" that could bring "guilt by association".

  A few articles on her ideas appeared before her death in 1982, many of them in the journal The Personalist. One was "On the Randian Argument" by Robert Nozick, who attacked her meta-ethical arguments. Other philosophers in the same journal said Nozick had misstated her case. In a 1978 article responding to him, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen defended her positions but described her style as "literary, hyperbolic and emotional".

  Interest rose slowly after her death. The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, a 1984 collection edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen, was the first academic book about her ideas published afterward. In one essay, Jack Wheeler dismissed "the incessant bombast and continuous venting of Randian rage" yet called her ethics "a most immense achievement". The Ayn Rand Society was founded in 1987 as an affiliate of the American Philosophical Association.

  In 1995, Jenny A. Heyl noted a split in how academic fields saw Rand. Her philosophy was regularly omitted from philosophy departments, while throughout literary academia she was considered a philosopher. In the 1998 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chandran Kukathas wrote that most commentators saw her ethical argument as an unconvincing variant of Aristotle's. He called her political theory "of little interest", marred by an effort to reconcile hostility to the state with rejection of anarchism. The peer-reviewed Journal of Ayn Rand Studies launched in 1999.

  In 2009 the historian Jennifer Burns identified "an explosion of scholarship" on Rand since 2000, though few universities offered her as a specialty. From 2002 to 2012, over 60 colleges and universities accepted grants from the charitable foundation of BB&T that required teaching her ideas or works. In some cases the grants were controversial, or even rejected because of that requirement.

  In a 2010 essay for the Cato Institute, Huemer argued that very few people find her ideas convincing, especially her ethics. He credited her attention to her skill as a "compelling writer", especially as a novelist. In 2012 the Pennsylvania State University Press took over the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the University of Pittsburgh Press launched a series based on the Society's proceedings. Yet the Fall 2012 update of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry said "only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously".

  That same year the political scientist Alan Wolfe dismissed Rand as a "nonperson" among academics. In 2018 the philosopher Skye C. Cleary wrote in Aeon that "Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand". Cleary argued that because so many people take Rand seriously, philosophers should offer refutations instead of ignoring her.

  In 2020 the media critic Eric Burns called Rand "surely the most engaging philosopher of my lifetime", though "nobody in the academe pays any attention to her". That year the editor of a collection of critical essays said disapproving academics had long held a "stubborn resolve to ignore or ridicule" her work, but that more were now engaging with it. In 2023, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies ceased publication.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  A 1991 survey for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club asked members to name the most influential book in their lives. Atlas Shrugged came second, behind the Bible. Her influence has been greatest in the United States, but readers elsewhere have taken an interest too.

  Fellow novelists Ira Levin, Kay Nolte Smith, and L. Neil Smith admired her. She influenced later writers including Erika Holzer, Terry Goodkind, and the comic book artist Steve Ditko. Because she gave business a positive portrayal, many executives and entrepreneurs have promoted her work. John Allison of BB&T and Ed Snider of Comcast Spectacor have both funded the promotion of her ideas.

  Television shows, movies, songs, and video games have referred to Rand and her works. Kay Nolte Smith, Mary Gaitskill, Matt Ruff, and Tobias Wolff have written novels in which she or characters based on her figure prominently. Albert Ellis and John W. Robbins of the Trinity Foundation wrote book-length critiques. Nick Gillespie, a former editor-in-chief of Reason, remarked: "Rand's is a tortured immortality, one in which she's as likely to be a punch line as a protagonist."

  A 1997 documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Passion of Ayn Rand, a 1999 television adaptation of the book of the same name, won several awards. That year her image also appeared on a U.S. postage stamp illustrated by Nick Gaetano.

  Schools sometimes assign Anthem or The Fountainhead. Since 2002, the Ayn Rand Institute has given free copies of her novels to teachers who promise to include them in their curriculum. By the end of 2020 it had distributed 4.5 million copies in the U.S. and Canada. In 2017 she was added to the required reading list for the A Level Politics exam in the United Kingdom.

  Rand rejected the labels conservative and libertarian, yet she has shaped both camps. David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, said that "without Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist". The journalist Brian Doherty called her the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century to the public at large. Jennifer Burns called her "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right".

  The conservative camp has been less warm. William F. Buckley Jr. and other contributors to National Review opposed her intensely. Even so, a 1987 article in The New York Times called her the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate". She has influenced conservative politicians abroad, including Sajid Javid in the United Kingdom, Siv Jensen in Norway, and Ayelet Shaked in Israel.

  The 2008 financial crisis renewed interest in her work, especially Atlas Shrugged, which some saw as foreshadowing the crisis. Signs mentioning Rand and John Galt appeared at Tea Party protests. Critics also blamed the Great Recession on her support of selfishness and free markets, particularly through her influence on Alan Greenspan. In 2015, Adam Weiner said that through Greenspan she had tossed a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy. In 2021, Cass Sunstein saw her ideas in the tax and regulatory policies of the Trump administration.

  The Objectivist movement outlived the Nathaniel Branden Institute. In the 1970s Peikoff began delivering courses on Objectivism. Peter Schwartz started The Intellectual Activist in 1979, which Rand endorsed. She also endorsed The Objectivist Forum, a bimonthly magazine founded by Harry Binswanger that ran from 1980 to 1987.

  In 1985 Peikoff worked with the businessman Ed Snider to establish the Ayn Rand Institute. After an ideological disagreement with Peikoff in 1990, David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society. In 2001 the historian John P. McCaskey organized the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, which gives grants for scholarly work on Objectivism in academia.

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