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Ayn Rand

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File:Ayn Rand1.jpg
Novelist and philosopher, best known for her philosophy of Objectivism

Ayn Rand (February 2 1905–March 6 1982; first name pronounced (IPA) /aɪn/ (rhymes with 'mine')), born Alissa "Alice" Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was best known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize, above all, her concepts of individualism, rational egoism ("rational self-interest"), and capitalism. Believing government has a legitimate but relatively minimal role in a free society, she was not an anarchist, but a minarchist. Her novels were based upon the archetype of the Randian hero, a man whose ability and independence causes conflict with the masses, but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand viewed this hero as the ideal and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase such heroes. She believed:

  1. That man must choose his values and actions by reason;
  2. That the individual has a right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and
  3. That no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force, or impose ideas on others by physical force.

Biography

Early life

Rand was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and was the eldest of three daughters of a Jewish family. She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd. She then entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting; in late 1925, however, she was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She arrived in the United States in February 1926, at the age of twenty-one. After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union, and set out for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. She then changed her name to "Ayn Rand", partly to avoid Soviet retaliation against her family for her political views (she assumed her name would appear in the credits of films with an anti-Communist message, attracting the attention of Soviet officials). There is a story told that she named herself after the Remington Rand typewriter, but recent evidence has proved that this is not the case. She stated that her first name, 'Ayn' was an adaptation of the name of a Finnish writer. This may have been the Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas.

Major works

Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. While working as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, she intentionally bumped into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, who caught her eye. The two were married in 1929. In 1931, Rand became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios. Rand then wrote the play The Night of January 16th in 1934 and published two novels, We the Living (1936), and Anthem (1938).

Without Rand's permission, We The Living was made into a pair of films, Noi vivi and Addio, Kira in 1942 by Scalara Films, Rome, despite resistance from the Italian government under Benito Mussolini. These films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.

Rand's first major professional success came with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead (1943). The novel was rejected by many publishers before finally being accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house. Despite these initial struggles The Fountainhead was successful, bringing Rand fame and financial security.

Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, becoming a bestseller. Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most complete statement of the Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of fiction. In its appendix, she offered this summary:

"My philosophy, in essence, is 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."

Along with Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara, as well as a handful of others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.

The Objectivist movement

Main article: The Objectivist movement

In 1950 Rand moved to New York City, where in 1951 she met the young psychology student Nathaniel Branden [1], who had read her book The Fountainhead at the age of 14. Branden, then 19, enjoyed discussing Rand's emerging Objectivist philosophy with her. Together, Branden and some of his other friends formed a group that they dubbed the Ayn Rand Collective, which included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. After several years, Rand and Branden's friendly relationship blossomed into a romantic affair despite the fact that both were married at the time. This affair was cleared with their spouses but led to the separation and then divorce of Nathaniel Branden from his wife.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction [2] and non-fiction [3] works, and by giving talks at several east-coast universities, largely through the Nathaniel Branden Institute ("the NBI") which Branden had established to promote her philosophy.

After a convoluted series of separations, Rand abruptly ended her relationship with both Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara Branden in 1968 when she learned of Nathaniel Branden's affair with Patrecia Scott (this later affair did not overlap chronologically with the earlier Branden/Rand affair). Rand refused to have any further dealings with the NBI. Rand then published a letter in "The Objectivist" announcing her repudiation of Branden for various reasons, including dishonesty, but did not mention their affair or her role in the schism. The two never reconciled, and Branden remained a persona non grata in the Objectivist movement.

File:Ayn rand stamp.jpg
1999 U.S. postage stamp honoring Rand.

Conflicts continued in the wake of the break with Branden and the subsequent collapse of the NBI. Many of her closest "Collective" friends began to part ways, and during the late 70's her activities within the formal Objectivist movement began to decline, a situation which increased after the death of her husband in 1979. One of her final projects was work on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982 in New York City, years after having successfully battled cancer, and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.

Philosophical influences

Rand rejected virtually all other philosophical schools. She acknowledged a shared intellectual lineage with Aristotle and John Locke, and more generally with the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Reason. She occasionally remarked with approval on specific philosophical positions of, e.g., Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. She seems also to have respected the American rationalist Brand Blanshard. However, she regarded most philosophers as at best incompetent and at worst positively evil. She singled out Immanuel Kant as the most influential of the latter sort.

Nonetheless, there are connections between Rand's views and those of other philosophers. She acknowledged that she had been influenced at an early age by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Though she later repudiated his thought, and reprinted her first novel, We The Living, with some wording changes in 1959, her own thought grew out of critical interaction with it. Generally, her political thought is in the tradition of classical liberalism. She expressed qualified enthusiasm for the economic thought of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. Later Objectivists, such as Richard Salsman, have claimed that Rand's economic theories are implicitly more supportive of the doctrines of Jean-Baptiste Say, though Rand herself was likely not acquainted with his work.

Politics and House Committee on Un-American Activities testimony

Rand's political views were radically anti-communist, anti-statist, and pro-capitalist. Her writings praised above all the human individual and the creative genius of which one is capable. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of egoism and individualism. Rand also had a strong dislike for mysticism, religion, and compulsory charity (forced extraction), all of which she believed helped foster a crippling culture of resentment towards individual human happiness and success.

In 1947, during the infamous Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. [4]. Rand's testimony involved analysis of the 1943 film Song of Russia. While many believe that Ayn Rand disclosed the names of members of the Communist Party in the U.S., thus exposing them to blacklisting, her testimony consisted entirely of comments regarding the disparity between her experiences in the Soviet Union and the fanciful portrayal of it in the film.

Rand argued that the movie grossly misrepresented the socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union. She told the committee that the film presented life in the USSR as being much better than it actually was. Apparently this 1943 film was intentional wartime propaganda by U.S. patriots, trying to put their Soviet allies in World War II under the best possible light. After the HUAC hearings, when Ayn Rand was asked about her feelings on the effectiveness of their investigations, she described the process as "futile."

Legacy

In 1985, Leonard Peikoff, a surviving member of "The Collective" and Ayn Rand's designated heir, established "The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism". The Institute has since registered the name Ayn Rand as a trademark, despite Rand's desire that her name never be used to promote the philosophy she developed. Rand expressed her wish to keep her name and the philosophy of Objectivism separate to ensure the survival of her ideas.

Another schism in the movement occurred in 1989, when Objectivist David Kelley wrote an article called "A Question of Sanction," [5] in which he defended his choice to speak to non-Objectivist libertarian groups. Kelley wrote that Objectivism was not a "closed system" and should engage with other philosophies. Peikoff, in an article for The Intellectual Activist called "Fact and Value" [6], argued that Objectivism is, indeed, a closed system, and that truth and moral goodness are intrinsically related. Peikoff expelled Kelley from his movement, whereupon Kelley founded The Institute for Objectivist Studies (now known as "The Objectivist Center").

Rand and Objectivism are less well known outside North America, though there are pockets of interest in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and her novels are reported to be very popular in India ([7]). Her work has had little effect on academic philosophy, for her followers are mostly (with some notable exceptions) drawn from the non-academic world.

Like all controversial philosophies, Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism have been subject to criticism. In the realm of analytic philosophy, however, it is more accurate to say that Rand's work has been mostly ignored. Some academics, however, are bringing her work into the mainstream.[8]. One sign of this is the existence of the Ayn Rand Society, founded in 1987, an organization of academic philosophers that is affiliated with the American Philosophical Association. Another sign that Rand is entering the mainstream is that selections from Rand's writings now regularly appear in philosophy textbooks and anthologies.

One example of critical attention paid to Rand by an analytic philosopher is the essay "On the Randian Argument" by Harvard University's Robert Nozick, which appears in his Socratic Puzzles. Nozick's own libertarian political conclusions are similar to Rand's, but his essay is critical of her argument. He argues that her solution to David Hume's famous is-ought problem is unsatisfactory: she asserts that preserving one's own life is objectively the highest value because it makes all other values possible, but Nozick believes she still needs to explain why a person could not rationally prefer the state of eventually dying and having no values. Thus, he argues, her attempt to deduce the morality of selfishness is essentially an instance of begging the question. Nevertheless, Nozick respected Rand as an author and noted that he found her books enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Rand has sometimes been viewed with suspicion for her practice of presenting her philosophy in fiction and non-fiction books aimed at a general audience rather than publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Rand's defenders note that she is part of a long literary tradition of authors who write philosophically-rich fiction — including Dante, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Albert Camus, and that other philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre presented their philosophies in both fictional and non-fictional forms.

Other critics argue that Rand’s idealistic philosophy and her Romantic literary style are not applicable to the inhabited world. In particular, those critics have claimed that Rand's novels are made up of one-dimensional characters. They dislike that most of the Objectivist heroes are incredibly intelligent and unencumbered by doubt. Some of the heroes are very rich. Others seem to have no shortcomings at all — especially Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. The antagonists are often weak, pathetic, full of uncertainty, and lacking in imagination and talent.

Defenders of Rand respond with counterexamples from her novels to show her range of characterization: Neither Eddie Willers nor Cherryl Taggart is particularly gifted or intelligent, but both are characters of dignity and respect; Leo Kovalensky suffers enormously due to his inability to cope with the brutality and banality of communism; Andrei Taganov dies after realizing his philosophical errors; Dominique Francon is initially bitterly unhappy because she believes evil is powerful; and Dagny Taggart thinks that she is capable of saving the world alone. Nor are all of her heroes rich: Howard Roark, Hank Rearden, and John Galt started out poor. Moreover, Hank Rearden is taken advantage of because of his social naïveté. As for the purportedly weak and pathetic villains, Rand's defenders point out that Ellsworth Toohey is represented as being a great strategist and communicator from an early age; Dr. Robert Stadler is a brilliant scientist; and the dynamic Gail Wynand fails utterly because he compromises his principles.

Rand herself replied to the criticism (and in advance of much of it) with her essay "The Goal of My Writing" (1963). There, and in other essays collected in her book The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (2nd rev. ed. 1975), Rand makes it clear that her goal is to project her vision of an ideal man: not man as he is, but man as he might and ought to be.

Bibliography

Fiction

Posthumous fiction

Nonfiction

Posthumous nonfiction

References

In addition to Rand's own works (listed above), the following references discuss Rand's life and/or literary work. References that discuss her philosophy can be found in the bibliography of work on Objectivism.

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