I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Tibor R. Machan 219
about a book the priest had given me, Thomas Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. The theme is
that the human effort to know is an insult to God—a sign of pride and lack of proper
humility. I told the priest how frustrated I was by this message. After all, my every effort
was to know, to learn, to educate myself . . . yet this was to be spurned as sinful and a
betrayal of the Most High? How could I accept this? Needless to say, my frocked friend
had no cogent answer to these quandaries. But Rand stated that she was “deeply impressed
with the letter you wrote to the priest. If The Fountainhead has helped you to find a way
out of such a terrible and tragic conflict, I am very happy to know it.”
However, not long after this promising start, there was a silly tiff between Rand and
me (mostly my own fault), and I was deemed persona non grata with Rand and her inner
circle. I would one day be on friendly terms with Branden but only after his split with Rand
in 1968 paved the way. In retrospect, I am glad that I was blackballed. I might have become
as dependent as so many others did. And I am glad, also, that being cut off wasn’t so devastating
a blow that I renounced the good ideas I found in Objectivism. In the years since,
I have become one of the most prolific neo-Objectivist thinkers, probably giving more
scholarly exposition to Rand’s ideas than anyone else (with the exception, perhaps, of Doug
Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl). Indeed, a book I wrote in 2003 for Ashgate in the UK is
titled Objectivity, Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life.
It is too bad that the folks in the inner circle have not done better at promoting
Objectivism themselves. When Peikoff finally came out with his long-awaited book, The
Ominous Parallels—the joke was that just as parallel lines never meet, so this book would
never get published—I wanted it reviewed in Reason. I no longer had much say in those
matters, however, and could only get a very brief review scheduled. I asked several people
with good qualifications to do the job but no one would take it on without planning to
pan it. Finally I wrote the brief review myself, chiding Peikoff for missing an opportunity
to produce a truly scholarly project that took alternative explanations, compared them with
his own, and thus showed the superiority of his own thesis. I was disappointed—we had
all hoped that this book would help to show the philosophical community that there is real
substance to Objectivism. Rand’s essays, even her Objectivist Epistemology, had been too
polemical to qualify as scholarship. Yet she herself kept urging all those who found her
views sound to get out there and become the “new intellectuals.”
But there is no value to “new intellectuals” who cannot talk to the old intellectuals.
And there surely are some who could have been reached, had the effort only been made.
Instead, Peikoff and the rest of them—except for David Kelley, who in the end also got
kicked out of the official movement—kept aping Rand’s style and thereby making short
shrift of her substance.
I had a final word with Ayn Rand on July 4, 1976. I called her to express to her my
thanks for being the most crucial contemporary thinker to stand behind and strengthen
the meaning of the Bicentennial. Frank answered. I asked for Miss Rand and she came on
the line. Here is our conversation verbatim, as best I can remember it:
“This is Ayn Rand. Who am I speaking to?”
“Miss Rand, I am a long-time admirer and wish to simply thank you on this day for
what you have done to keep the idea of the American revolution alive.”