capitalism

Rand, Ayn (1905–1982) 413
have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives,
the so-called ‘hippies of the right.’” These “libertarians,”
she emphasized in Philosophy: Who Needs It,
“subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for
capitalism.” They undermine individual rights by attacking
the government’s legitimate monopoly on the retaliatory use
of force and by failing to recognize the dependence of politics
on broader philosophical foundations. The realization of
human freedom requires, in Rand’s view, a simultaneous
commitment to reason, egoism, and individualism. Absent
any of these prerequisites, freedom cannot long survive.
Despite her antipathy to this anarchic brand of libertarianism,
however, Rand profoundly inspired a generation of
individuals to pursue the goal of a libertarian society. Some
of her closest followers have occupied positions in government,
among them Martin Anderson, who served in the
Reagan administration, and Alan Greenspan, who served as
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Others have challenged
contemporary politics from without, forming such
organizations as the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation,
and the Libertarian Party. Various aspects of the position
she put forward have found their way into the works of
libertarian-minded academic philosophers, among them
Douglas Den Uyl, John Hospers, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack,
Douglas Rasmussen, David Kelley, and Tara Smith. She
also has played a crucial role in shaping the views of psychologist
Nathaniel Branden.
Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg
during the Russian Silver Age, Rand was inspired by the
heroic ideals embodied in the philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche and the Romantic fiction and drama of such writers
as Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich
Schiller. Educated under the Soviets, she embraced the
Russian dialectical tendency toward transcending the
dualisms of mind and body, theory and practice, morality
and prudence. Yet she adamantly rejected that culture’s
altruist religious and moral traditions and statist politics. An
avowed atheist, she maintained that the communists had
merely substituted subordination of the individual to the
collective and the state for subordination of the individual
to God. Her profoundly negative personal experience with
communism had long-term effects; she immigrated to
America in 1926, determined to inform the world of the
barbarity of totalitarian dictatorship. Her first novel, We the
Living, published in 1936, focused on the conflict between
the individual and the state, and it attempted to show how
totalitarianism created an “airtight” environment that destroyed
society’s best men and women.
Around this time, Rand began corresponding with several
leading American proponents of individualism. In the
early 1930s, she wrote to H. L. Mencken, whom she
regarded “as the foremost champion of individualism” in
America, and she quickly identified herself as “a young and
very humble brother-in-arms” of Mencken’s libertarian
cause. Rand hoped to translate the remarkable success of her
next novel, The Fountainhead, into a broad antistatist political
movement of the leading conservatives and libertarians
of the day with whom she had become acquainted, including
Rose Wilder Lane, Albert Jay Nock, and Isabel Paterson.
The coalition never materialized, however, owing to the ideological
disparity of its prospective members, many of
whom Rand regarded as traditionalists and religionists.
Her relationship with Paterson—whose God of the
Machine was published in 1943, the same year as both
The Fountainhead and Lane’s Discovery of Freedom—
probably had the deepest impact on Rand’s growing individualist
sensibility. Paterson had introduced Rand to many
key libertarian works in economics, history, philosophy, and
politics. She also publicized Rand’s writings in her New
York Herald Tribune column. Both women were headstrong,
however, and their differences—primarily their disparate
views of religion—eventually undermined their friendship.
Nonetheless, Rand characterized God of the Machine as
among the most “brilliant,” “extraordinary,” “invaluable,”
“sparkling,” “heroic,” and “illustrious” political tracts of its
time—a virtual antidote to Marx’s Das Kapital, and “the
greatest defense of capitalism” she had “ever read.”
Rand also had dealings with other libertarian writers,
such as Leonard Read and Henry Hazlitt. Hazlitt introduced
her to Ludwig von Mises, the leading economist of the
Austrian School. Although Rand objected to certain aspects
of Mises’s “praxeological” approach to the human sciences
and to his views of morality, she respected his economic
defense of free markets, and, in later years, she championed
his writings in her various publications. Mises, in turn, is
said to have greatly respected Rand’s ideological courage.
By contrast, Rand did not take well to the writings of
F. A. Hayek. Hayek, a student and associate of Mises and an
eventual Nobel laureate in economics, had published The
Road to Serfdom in 1944. In her Marginalia, Rand
expressed the conviction that Hayek’s work was “real poison”
because it compromised the case for freedom with various
“collectivist” and “altruist” justifications. For Rand,
such compromises made Hayek a “pernicious enemy” of the
individualist movement; nothing less than a full, moral
defense of unadulterated laissez-faire capitalism would do.
In the 1940s, while laboring on her next novel, Atlas
Shrugged, Rand worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
During those years, she became a vocal critic of communist
propaganda in film—a conviction she shared with conservative
members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, such as Gary Cooper,
Walt Disney, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and John
Wayne. For the alliance, Rand authored a “Screen Guide
for Americans,” and she also testified as a friendly witness
before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
By the time Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, Rand
had achieved worldwide fame for offering a controversial,