I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

280 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
midnight, usually at Rothbard’s apartment, and frequently met on weekends. We informally
called ourselves “The Circle Bastiat,” after the leading nineteenth-century French advocate
of capitalism, Frédéric Bastiat.
At one of our gatherings, in the summer of 1954, over three years before the publication
of Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard brought up the name Ayn Rand, whom I had not previously
heard of. He described her as an extremely interesting person and, when he observed
the curiosity of our whole group, asked if we would be interested in meeting her. Everyone
in the group was very much interested. He then proceeded to arrange a meeting for the
second Saturday night in July, at her apartment in midtown Manhattan.
That meeting, and the next one a week later, had an unforgettable effect on me. In the
year or more before I entered Ayn Rand’s apartment, I held three explicitly formulated
leading intellectual values: liberalism (in the sense in which Mises used the term, and which
actually meant capitalism); utilitarianism, which was my philosophy of ethics and which
I had learned largely from Mises (though not entirely, inasmuch as I had already come to
the conclusion on my own that everything a person does is selfish insofar as it seeks to
achieve his ends, a conclusion that I now consider to be mistaken, because it attaches no
objective meaning to the concept of self); and “McCarthyism,” which I was enthusiastically
for, because I believed that the country was heavily infested with communists and socialists,
whom I detested, and to whom Senator McCarthy was causing a major amount of upset.
By the time I left Ayn Rand’s apartment, even after the first meeting, I was seriously shaken
in my attachment to utilitarianism.
Both meetings began at about 8:30 in the evening and lasted until about 5:00 the
following morning. When I was introduced to her, I had no real idea of her intellectual
caliber. I quickly began to learn her estimate of herself, however, when I offered her two
tickets to an upcoming dinner in honor of Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s chief aide, at
which Senator McCarthy would be present. (I was scheduled to make a brief speech at the
event, and when I mentioned to one of the event’s organizers that I was going to meet Ayn
Rand, she asked me to extend the invitation.) Miss Rand declined the invitation on the
grounds that to get involved as she would need to get involved, she would have to drop her
present project (which was the writing of Atlas Shrugged) and do for McCarthy what Zola
had done for Dreyfus. I had seen the Paul Muni movie Zola, and so had a good idea of
Zola’s stature. I don’t quite remember how I experienced the comparison, but it was probably
something comparable to the expression of a silent whistle. (After I came to appreciate
the nature of Ayn Rand’s accomplishments, a comparison to Zola would seem several orders
of magnitude too modest.)
At both meetings, most of the time was taken up with my arguing with Ayn Rand
about whether values were subjective or objective, while Rothbard, as he himself later
described it, looked on with amusement, watching me raise all the same questions and
objections he had raised on some previous occasion, equally to no avail.
I had a sense of amazement at both meetings. I was amazed that I was involved in an
argument that in the beginning seemed absolutely open and shut to me, and yet that I could
not win. I was amazed that my opponent was expressing views that I found both utterly
naïve and at the same time was incapable of answering without being driven to support