Ayn Rand: life, ideas and books

Life

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905 and left Soviet Russia for the United States in the 1920s. She worked in Hollywood and wrote for the stage and the page: her play Night of January 16th reached Broadway in 1935, her novel We the Living appeared in 1936, the novella Anthem in England in 1938, The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957, her last completed work of fiction.

After that she wrote and lectured on her philosophy, called Objectivism, and with Nathaniel Branden co-founded The Objectivist Newsletter in 1962. She died in New York in 1982.

Ideas

Rand's philosophy holds that reason is man's only absolute and rejects faith and religion. She argued for rational self-interest as the moral ideal and condemned altruism as destructive. In politics she held that individual rights, including property rights, can be protected only by laissez-faire capitalism, which she considered the only moral social system, and she condemned the initiation of force. In art she promoted what she called romantic realism.

She disliked being labelled a conservative or a libertarian. She worked alongside conservatives against collectivism but parted from them on religion and ethics, preferring to describe herself as a radical for capitalism. She also criticised libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism, although she is commonly linked to the modern libertarian movement.

Major works

• We the Living (1936).
• Anthem (1938).
• The Fountainhead (1943).
• Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Why conservatives read her

Rand's novels have sold more than 37 million copies and have drawn many young readers toward the free-market right, and some politicians and economists, including Alan Greenspan, who was in her circle in the 1950s and 1960s, have acknowledged her influence. Her defence of the moral dignity of productive work and her hostility to the Soviet system overlap with the commitments of the American right, which is why she appears on so many reading lists.

The relationship has always been uneasy. In a 1957 review in National Review titled "Big Sister is Watching You", Whittaker Chambers attacked Atlas Shrugged, and the magazine under William F. Buckley Jr. continued to criticise her atheism and her ethics of egoism. Religious conservatives see her rejection of faith and of duty to others as incompatible with their tradition, while economists in the line of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek drew their arguments from other sources. Academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her work. She is included here as a figure who shaped the movement's followers, and who declined to belong to it.