Ayn Rand was a major intellectual of the twentieth century.

Born in Russia in 1905 and educated

there, she immigrated to the United States after graduating from university, where she studied
history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Rand had always found capitalism and the
individualism of the United States a welcome alternative to the corrupt and negative socialism of
Russia. Upon becoming proficient in English and establishing herself as a writer in the U.S., she
became a passionate advocate of her philosophy, Objectivism.
Rand’s philosophy is in the Aristotelian tradition, with that tradition’s emphasis upon
metaphysical naturalism, empirical reason in epistemology, and self-realization in ethics.
Objectivism is rational self-interest and self-responsibility – the idea that no man is any other
man’s slave. The virtues of her philosophy are principled policies based on rational assessment:
rationality, productiveness, honesty (in order to rationally make the best decisions we must be
privy to the facts), integrity, independence, justice, and pride.

Her political philosophy is in the classical liberal tradition, with that tradition’s emphasis upon
individualism, the constitutional protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and
limited government.
She wrote both technical and popular works of philosophy, and she presented her philosophy in
both fictional and non-fictional forms, the most philosophically complete and popular of which
are Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. Her philosophy has influenced several generations of
academics and public intellectuals, as well as having had widespread popular appeal.
1. Life
Ayn Rand's life was often as colorful as those of her heroes in her best-selling novels The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand first made her name as a novelist, publishing We the
Living in 1936, The Fountainhead in 1943, and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in 1957. These
philosophical novels embodied themes she then developed in non-fiction form in a series of
essays and books written in the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, Rand was raised in a middle-class family.
As a child, she loved story-telling, and she decided at age nine to become a writer. In school
showed academic promise, particularly in mathematics. Her family was devastated by the
communist revolution of 1917, both by the social upheavals that the revolution and the ensuing
civil war brought and by her father's pharmacy's being confiscated by the Soviets. The family
moved to the Crimea to recover financially and to escape the harshness of life the revolution
brought to St. Petersburg. They later returned to Petrograd (the new name given to St. Petersburg
by the Soviets), where Rand was to attend university.
At the University of Petrograd, Rand concentrated her studies on history, with secondary focuses
on philosophy and literature. At university, she was repelled by the dominance of communist
ideas and strong-arm tactics that suppressed free inquiry and discussion. As a youth, she had
been repelled by the communists' political program, and now an adult, she was also more fully
aware of the destructive effects that the revolution had had on Russian society more broadly.
Having studied American history and politics in university, and having long been an admirer of
Western plays, music, and movies, she became an admirer of America's individualism, its vigor,
and its optimism, seeing it as the opposite of Russian collectivism, decay, and gloom. Not
believing, however, that she would be free under the Soviet system to write the kinds of books
she wanted to write, she resolved to leave Russia and go to America.
Rand graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924. She then enrolled at the State Institute
for Cinema Arts in order to study screen writing. In 1925, she finally received permission from
the Soviet authorities to leave the country in order to visit relatives in the United States.
Officially, her visit was to be brief; Rand, however, had already decided not to return to the
Soviet Union.
After several stops in western European cities, Rand arrived in New York City in February 1926.
From New York, she traveled on to Chicago, Illinois, where she spent the next six months living
with relatives, learning English, and developing ideas for stories and movies. She had decided to
become a screenwriter, and, having received an extension to her visa, she left for Hollywood,
California.
On Rand's second day in Hollywood, an event occurred that was worthy of her dramatic fiction
and one that had a major impact on her future. She was spotted by Cecil B. DeMille, one of
Hollywood's leading directors, while she was standing at the gate of his studio. She had
recognized him as he was passing by in his car, and he had noticed her staring at him. He stopped
to ask why she was staring, and Rand explained that she had recently arrived from Russia, that
she had long been passionate about Hollywood movies, and that she dreamed of being a screen
writer. DeMille was then working on "The King of Kings," and gave her a ride to his movie set
and signed her on as an extra. Then, during her second week at DeMille's studio, another
significant event occurred: Rand met Frank O'Connor, a young actor also working as an extra.
Rand and O'Connor were married in 1929, and they remained married for fifty years until his
death in 1979.
Rand also worked for DeMille as a reader of scripts, and struggled financially while working on
her own writing. She also held a variety of non-writing jobs until in 1932 she was able to sell her
first screenplay, "Red Pawn," to Universal Studios. Also in 1932 her first stage play, "Night of
January 16th," was produced in Hollywood and later on Broadway.
Rand had been working for years on her first significant novel, We the Living, and finished it in
1933. However, for several years it was rejected by various publishers, until in 1936 it was
published by Macmillan in the U.S. and Cassell in England. Rand described We the Living as the
most autobiographical of her novels, its theme being the brutality of life under communist rule in
Russia. We the Living did not receive a positive reaction from American reviewers and
intellectuals. It was published in the 1930s, a decade sometimes called the "Red Decade," during
which American intellectuals were often pro-Communist and respectful and admiring of the
Soviet experiment.
Rand's next major project was The Fountainhead, which she had begun to work on in 1935.
While the theme of We the Living was political, the theme of The Fountainhead was ethical,
focusing on individualist themes of independence and integrity. The novel's hero, the architect
Howard Roark, is Rand's first embodiment of her ideal man, the man who lives on a principled
and heroic scale of achievement.
As with We the Living, Rand had difficulties getting The Fountainhead published. Twelve
publishers rejected it before being published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1943. Again not well received
by reviewers and intellectuals, the novel nonetheless became a best-seller, primarily through
word-of-mouth recommendation. The Fountainhead made Rand famous as an exponent of
individualist ideas, and its continuing to sell well brought her financial security. Warner Brothers
produced a movie version of the novel in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, for
which Rand wrote the screenplay.
In 1946, Rand began work on her most ambitious novel, Atlas Shrugged. At the time she was
working part-time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis. In 1951 she and her husband moved
to New York City, where she began to work full-time on Atlas. Published by Random House in
1957, Atlas Shrugged is her most complete expression of her literary and philosophical vision.
Dramatized in the form of a mystery story about a man who stopped the motor of the world, the
plot and characters embody the political and ethical themes first developed in We the Living and
The Fountainhead, and integrates them into a comprehensive philosophy including metaphysics,
epistemology, economics, and the psychology of love and sex.
Atlas Shrugged was an immediate best-seller and Rand's last work of fiction. Her novels had
expressed philosophical themes, although Rand considered herself primarily a novelist and only
secondarily a philosopher. The creation of plots and characters and the dramatization of
achievements and conflicts were her central purposes in writing fiction, rather than presenting an
abstracted and didactic set of philosophical theses.
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, however, had attracted to Rand many readers who were
strongly interested in the philosophical ideas the novels embodied and in pursuing them further.
Among the earliest of those with whom Rand became associated and who later became
prominent were psychologist Nathaniel Branden and economist Alan Greenspan, later Chairman
of the Federal Reserve. Her interactions with these and several other key individuals were partly
responsible for Rand's turning from fiction to non-fiction writing in order to develop her
philosophy more systematically.
From 1962 until 1976, Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy, now named "Objectivism."
Her essays were during this period were mostly published in a series of periodicals, The
Objectivist Newsletter, published from 1962 to 1965, the larger periodical The Objectivist,
published from 1966 to 1971, and then The Ayn Rand Letter, published from 1971 to 1976. The
essays written for these periodicals form the core material for a series of nine non-fiction books
published during Rand's lifetime. Those books develop Rand's philosophy in all its major
categories and apply it to cultural issues. Perhaps the most significant of the books are The Virtue
of Selfishness, which develops her ethical theory, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, devoted to
political and economic theory, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a systematic
presentation of her theory of concepts, and The Romantic Manifesto, a theory of aesthetics.
During the 1960s Rand's most significant professional relationship was with Nathaniel Branden.
Branden, author of The Psychology of Self-Esteem and later known as a leader in the self-esteem
movement in psychology, wrote many essays on philosophical and psychological topics that
were published in Rand's books and periodicals. He was the founder and head of the Nathaniel
Branden Institute, the leading Objectivist institution of the 1960s. Based in New York City,
N.B.I. published with Rand's sanction numerous Objectivist periodicals and pamphlets, and gave
many series of lectures live in New York which were then distributed on tape around the United
States and the rest of the world. The rapid growth of N.B.I. and the Objectivist movement came
to a halt in 1968 when, for both professional and personal reasons, Rand and Branden parted
ways.
Rand continued to write and lecture consistently until she stopped publishing The Ayn Rand
Letter in 1976. Thereafter she wrote and lectured less as her husband's health declined, leading to
his death in 1979, and as her own health began to decline. Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her
New York City apartment.

2. Rand’s Ethical Theory: The Virtue of Selfishness

The provocative title of Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness matches an equally provocative
thesis about ethics. Traditional ethics has always been suspicious of self interest, praising acts
that are selfless in intent and calling amoral or immoral acts that are motivated by self interest. A
self-interested person, on the traditional view, will not consider the interests of others and so will
slight or harm those interests in the pursuit of his own.
Rand's view is that the exact opposite is true: self-interest, properly understood, is the standard of
morality and selflessness is the deepest immorality.
Self interest rightly understood, according to Rand, is to see oneself as an end in oneself. That is
to say that one's own life and happiness are one's highest values, and that one does not exist as a
servant or slave to the interests of others. Nor do others exist as servants or slaves to one's own
interests. Each person's own life and happiness is his ultimate end. Self interest rightly
understood also entails self-responsibility: one's life is one's own, and so is the responsibility for
sustaining and enhancing it. It is up to each of us to determine what values our lives require, how
best to achieve those values, and to act to achieve those values.
Rand's ethic of self interest is integral to her advocacy of classical liberalism. Classical
liberalism, more often called "libertarianism" in the 20th century, is the view that individuals
should be free to pursue their own interests. This implies, politically, that governments should be
limited to protecting each individual's freedom to do so. In other words, the moral legitimacy of
self interest implies that individuals have rights to their lives, their liberties, their property, and
the pursuit of their own happiness, and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.
Economically, leaving individuals free to pursue their own interests implies in turn that only a
capitalist or free market economic system is moral: free individuals will use their time, money,
and other property as they see fit, and will interact and trade voluntarily with others to mutual
advantage.

a. Reason and Ethics

Fundamentally, the means by which we live our lives as humans is reason. Our capacity for
reason is what enables us to survive and flourish. We are not born knowing what is good for us;
that is learned. Nor are we born knowing how to achieve what is good for us; that too is learned.
It is by reason that we learn what is food and what is poison, what animals are useful or
dangerous to us, how to make tools, what forms of social organization are fruitful, and so on.
Thus Rand advocates rational self interest: one's interests are not whatever one happens to feel
like; rather it is by reason that one identifies what is to one's interest and what isn't. By the use of
reason one takes into account all of the factors one can identify, projects the consequences of
potential courses of action, and adopts principled policies of action.
The principled policies a person should adopt are called virtues. A virtue is an acquired character
trait; it results from identifying a policy as good and committing to acting consistently in terms
of that policy.
One such virtue is rationality: having identified the use of reason as fundamentally good, being
committed to acting in accordance with reason is the virtue of rationality. Another virtue is
productiveness: given that the values one needs to survive must be produced, being committed to
producing those values is the virtue of productiveness. Another is honesty: given that facts are
facts and that one's life depends on knowing and acting in accordance with the facts, being
committed to awareness of the facts is the virtue of honesty.
Independence and integrity are also core virtues for Rand's account of self interest. Given that
one must think and act by one's own efforts, being committed to the policy of independent action
is a virtue. And given that one must both identify what is to one's interests and act to achieve
them, a policy of being committed to acting on the basis of one's beliefs is the virtue of integrity.
The opposite policy of believing one thing and doing another is of course the vice of hypocrisy;
hypocrisy is a policy of self-destruction, on Rand's view.
Justice is another core self-interested virtue: justice, on Rand's account, means a policy of
judging people, including oneself, according to their value and acting accordingly. The opposite
policy of giving to people more or less than they deserve is injustice. The final virtue on Rand's
list of core virtues is pride, the policy of "moral ambitiousness," in Rand's words. This means a
policy of being committed to making oneself be the best one can be, of shaping one's character to
the highest level possible.
The moral person, in summary, on Rand's account, is someone who acts and is committed to
acting in his best self-interest. It is by living the morality of self interest that one survives,
flourishes, and achieves happiness.
This account of self interest is currently a minority position. The contrasting view typically pits
self interest against morality, holding that one is moral only to the extent that one sacrifices one's
self interest for the sake of others or, more moderately, to the extent one acts primarily with
regard to the interests of others. For example, standard versions of morality will hold that one is
moral to the extent one sets aside one's own interests in order to serve God, or the weak and the
poor, or society as a whole. On these accounts, the interests of God, the poor, or society as a
whole are held to be of greater moral significance that one's own, and so accordingly one's
interests should be sacrificed when necessary. These ethics of selflessness thus believe that one
should see oneself fundamentally as a servant, as existing to serve the interests of others, not
one's own. "Selfless service to others" or "selfless sacrifice" are stock phrases indicating these
accounts' view of appropriate motivation and action.
The core difference between Rand's self interest view and the selfless view can be seen in the
reason why most advocates of selflessness think self interest is dangerous: conflicts of interest.

b. Conflicts of Interest
Traditional ethics takes conflicts of interest to be fundamental to the human condition, and takes
ethics to be the solution: basic ethical principles are to tell us whose interests should be sacrificed
in order to resolve the conflicts. If there is, for example, a fundamental conflict between what
God wants and what humans naturally want, then religious ethics will make fundamental the
principle that human wants should be sacrificed for God's. If there's a fundamental conflict
between what society needs and what individuals want, then some versions of secular ethics will
make fundamental the principle that the individual's wants should be sacrificed for society's.
Taking conflicts of interest to be fundamental almost always stems from one of two beliefs: that
human nature is fundamentally destructive or that economic resources are scarce. If human
nature is fundamentally destructive, then humans are naturally in conflict with each other. Many
ethical philosophies start from this premise - for example, Plato's myth of Gyges, Jewish and
Christian accounts of Original Sin, or Freud's account of the id. If what individuals naturally
want to do to each other is rape, steal, and kill, then in order to have society these individual
desires need to be sacrificed. Consequently, a basic principle of ethics will be to urge individuals
to suppress their natural desires so that society can exist. In other words, self interest is the
enemy, and must be sacrificed for others.
If economic resources are scarce, then there is not enough to go around. This scarcity then puts
human beings in fundamental conflict with each other: for one individual's need to be satisfied,
another's must be sacrificed. Many ethical philosophies begin with this premise. For example,
followers of Thomas Malthus's theory that population growth outstrips growth in the food supply
fall into this category. Karl Marx's account of capitalist society is that brutal competition leads to
the exploitation of some by others. Garret Hardin's famous use of the lifeboat analogy asks us to
imagine that society is like a lifeboat with more people that its resources can support. And so in
order to solve the destructive competition the lack of resources leads us to, a basic principle of
ethics will be to urge individuals to sacrifice their interests in obtaining more (or even some) so
that others may obtain more (or some) and society can exist peacefully. In others words, in a
situation of scarcity self interest is the enemy and must be sacrificed for others.
Rand rejects both the scarce resources and destructive human nature premises. Human beings are
not born in sin or with destructive desires; nor do they necessarily acquire them in the course of
growing to maturity. Instead one is born tabula rasa ("blank slate"), and through one's choices
and actions one acquires one's character traits and habits. As Rand phrased it, "Man is a being of
self-made soul." Having chronic desires to steal, rape, or kill others are the result of mistaken
development and the acquisition of bad habits, just as are chronic laziness or the habit of eating
too much junk food. And just as one is not born lazy but can by one's choices develop oneself
into a person of vigor or sloth, one is not born anti-social but can by one's choices develop
oneself into a person of cooperativeness or conflict.
Nor are resources scarce in any fundamental way, according to Rand. By the use of reason,
humans can discover new resources and how to use existing resources more efficiently, including
recycling where appropriate and making productive processes more efficient. Humans have for
example continually discovered and developed new energy resources, from animals to wood to
coal to oil to nuclear to solar; and there is no end in sight to this process. At any given moment,
the available resources are a fixed amount, but over time the stock of resources are and have
been constantly expanding.
Because humans are rational they can produce an ever-expanding number of goods, and so
human interests do not fundamentally conflict with each other. Instead Rand holds that the exact
opposite is true: since humans can and should be productive, human interests are deeply in
harmony with each other. For example, my producing more corn is in harmony with your
producing more peas, for by our both being productive and trading with each other we are both
better off. It is to your interest that I be successful in producing more corn, just as it is to my
interest that you be successful in producing more peas.
Conflicts of interest do exist within a narrower scope of focus. For example, in the immediate
present available resources are more fixed, and so competition for those resources results, and
competition produces winners and losers. Economic competition, however, is a broader form of
cooperation, a way socially to allocate resources without resorting to physical force and violence.
By competition, resources are allocated efficiently and peacefully, and in the long run more
resources are produced. Thus, a competitive economic system is in the self interest of all of us.
Accordingly, Rand argues that her ethic of self interest is the basis for personal happiness and
free and prosperous societies.
3. Rand's Influence
The impact of Rand's ideas is difficult to measure, but it has been great. All of the books she
published during her lifetime are still in print, have sold more than twenty million copies, and
continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year. A survey jointly conducted by the
Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club early in the 1990s asked readers to name
the book that had most influenced their lives: Atlas Shrugged was second only to the Bible.
Excerpts from Rand's works are regularly reprinted in college textbooks and anthologies, and
several volumes have been published posthumously containing her early writings, journals, and
letters. Those inspired by her ideas have published books in many academic fields and founded
several institutes. Noteworthy among these are the Cato Institute, based in Washington, D.C., the
leading libertarian think tank in the world. Rand, along with Nobel Prize-winners Friedrich
Hayek and Milton Friedman, was highly instrumental in attracting generations of individuals to
the libertarian movement. Also noteworthy are the Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985 by
philosopher Leonard Peikoff and based in California, and The Objectivist Center, founded in
1990 by philosopher David Kelley and based in New York.