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Ayn Rand (Ayn rhymes with "mine"), born Alissa (Alice) Zinovievna Rosenbaum (February 2, 1905–March 6, 1982), was a controversial American philosopher and novelist, most famous for her philosophy of Objectivism. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize above all her notions of individualism, egoism, rational self-interest, and capitalism. Her novels were based upon the archetype of the "Randian hero", a man whose genius leads others to reject him, but who nonetheless perseveres to prove himself superior. Rand viewed this hero as the "ideal man" and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase these men.
Biography
Ayn Rand was born to Jewish parents in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd. In late 1925 she was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She arrived in the U.S. in February 1926, at the age of 21. After a brief stay with them in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the USSR, 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 extreme anti-socialist views (she assumed her name would appear in the credits of films with an anti-communist message, attracting the attention of Soviet officials). While there is a well-known rumour that she named herself after the Remington Rand typewriter, recent evidence suggests that this is not the case.[1] (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_faq_index2#ar_q3b)
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic expenses. While working as a Hollywood extra on Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings she bumped (on purpose) into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, and married him in 1929.
Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios. Rand subsequently wrote the play, The Night of January 16th in 1934 and published two novels, We The Living [2] (http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-we-the-living.asp) (1936), and Anthem [3] (http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-anthem.asp) (1938). Anthem, despite its appearance as a short story, is actually considered by some to be an epic prose poem.
Without Rand's knowledge, We The Living was made into a pair of films, Noi viva 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 version approved by Rand and released as We the Living in 1986.
Rand's first major success came with the best-selling novel The Fountainhead [4] (http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-fountainhead.asp) (1943). The manuscript for this book was difficult to get into print. It was initially taken from publisher to publisher, collecting rejection slips as it went, before it was picked up by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house. The book was so successful that the royalties and movie rights made Rand famous and financially secure.
In 1947, as a "friendly witness" for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rand testified against alleged Communist propagandists in Hollywood [5] (http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.html). Rand's testimony involved analysis of the 1943 film Song of Russia. 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 (however, Rand herself had not been in the Soviet Union since 1925 which makes the basis of her assumptions questionable). 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."
Rand's political views were extremely anti-communist, anti-statist, and pro-capitalist. Her writings praised above all the human individual and the genius of which he is capable. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of egoism and individualism. One of her novels included stories of educated, wealthy persons who found their lives unfairly burdened with the hassles of taxation, bureaucracy and other forms of heavy-handed government interference. Rand also had a strong dislike for organized religion and compulsory charity, both of which she believed helped foster a culture of guilt in successful people.
In the early 1950s Rand moved to New York. She gave talks at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1960), Princeton University, New Jersey (1960), Columbia University, New York (1960, 1962), The University of Wisconsin (1961), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1961), Harvard University, Cambridge (1962), and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (1962).
In 1951 Rand met the young psychology student Nathaniel Branden [6] (http://www.nathanielbranden.com/fs/new.html), who had read her book The Fountainhead at the age of 14. Branden, now 19, enjoyed discussing Rand's emerging Objectivist philosophy with her. Branden's relationship with Rand eventually took on romantic and sexual aspects, though they were both married at the time, justifying the rationality of relationship to themselves and their partners using Rand's Objectivist philosophy. This ultimately ended with the destruction of their partnership, noted later, as well as the failure of an institute begun for the advancement of Objectivism.
Rand published the book described as her "magnum opus", Atlas Shrugged [7] (http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged.asp) in 1957. This book, just as The Fountainhead also became a best seller. It is also named as one of the "25 books that have most shaped readers lives" in a 1995–1996 list developed with the theme "Shape Your Future—READ!"
Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most complete statement of Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of fiction. Along with Branden, Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy, which she termed Objectivism.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction [8] (http://www.aynrand.org/books.shtml) and non-fiction [9] (http://www.aynrand.org/books_nonfiction.shtml) works.
Rand's philosophical alliances were few. She acknowledged an intellectual debt to Aristotle and 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 (throughout history, not only her contemporaries) as at best incompetent and at worst positively evil, singling out Immanuel Kant as the most influential of the latter sort. Her treatment of other philosophers might be one of the reasons her own nonfiction is sometimes dismissed as pseudophilosophy.
Nonetheless, there are connections between Rand's views and those of other philosophers. She admitted that she had been influenced at an early age by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Though she later repudiated his thought, her own thought grew out of critical interaction with it (some philosophers have suggested that she was also influenced by Karl Marx and other dialectical thinkers in this negative way). Strong similarities can be detected between her ethical views and the doctrines of Epicurus and the Stoics, and between her views on government and those of John Locke (both saw individual self-preservation as a basic moral good and argued that governments must be instrumental to it). More generally, her political thought can be seen as fitting in the tradition of classical liberalism that includes William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Patterson, and Rose Wilder Lane. She expressed qualified enthusiasm for the economic thought of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. In metaphysics and epistemology, she was (again like John Locke) an empiricist realist: she tried to navigate a way between the Humean and positivist empiricisms of her day (e.g., as developed by Rudolf Carnap) and Platonic rationalism (as exhibited in the writings of Gottlob Frege and G. E. Moore).
Rand broke with both Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara Branden in 1968. Ayn Rand described the break to be the result of her finding out about behavior incompatible with the tenets of her Objectivist philosophy. In fact, the final break was triggered by Rand finding out that Nathaniel Branden, still married to Barbara, was having an affair with another woman, in addition to Rand. According to the Brandens' accounts, Rand threatened to "publically denounce" Nathaniel, and told him "if you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health -- you'll be impotent for the next twenty years."
Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982 and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
Legacy
In 1985, Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's designated legal and “intellectual” 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 Ayn Rand's desire that her name never be used to promote the philosophy she developed. During her life Ayn Rand expressed her wishes to keep her name and the philosophy of Objectivism separate. It is understood that this was in order to assure the continued survival of the philosophy she developed once her own life was over.
In 1989, a schism in the movement occurred. Objectivist David Kelley wrote an article called "A Question of Sanction," [10] (http://www.wetheliving.com/boston/sanction.html) in which he defended his choice to speak to non-Objectivist libertarian groups. Kelley said that Objectivism was not a "closed system" and condoned tolerance of and intellectual debate with other philosophies. Peikoff, in an article for The Intellectual Activist called "Fact and Value" [11] (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_f-v), said that Objectivism is, in fact, closed and that factual truth and moral goodness are intrinsically related. Peikoff essentially expelled Kelley from the Objectivist movement, and Kelley founded The Institute for Objectivist Studies (now known as The Objectivist Center [12] (http://www.ios.org/)) in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Controversy
Rand's fiction and philosophy of Objectivism have been the subject of a great deal of criticism.
Academic philosophers have been generally hostile to Rand - at least to the extent that they have paid any attention to her. Some criticize her for her sweeping denouncements of historical philosophers, and even her (alleged) ignorance about the actual views of some of these philosophers. Many simply believe that her two most well-known positions - egoism in behavioral ethics and rights-based, libertarian capitalism in politics - are false. Others disapprove of her practice of explicating her philosophy in popular fiction and essays, rather than publishing in scholarly journals. In addition, technical objections have been raised by some academics and independent scholars to Rand's positions on classic philosophical problems, e.g., her attempted solution to the problem of universals, her rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, her treatment of modality, and her rejection of a priori knowledge.
Many theists object both to Rand's characterization of religion as a form of irrationality (she claimed that the concept of God as an omnipotent, all-knowing, all good being was incoherent) and to Rand's ethical theory, in which selfishness is the basic virtue and altruism is evil (it should be noted that Rand's definitions for the words "selfishness" and "altruism" were somewhat different than the definitions used by most people).
Rand's portrayal of women in several books has also been a source of contention. Some feel that the women are portrayed as secondary or adjunct to the heroic men of the stories. Other believe that certain scenes involve false and harmful views about human sexuality (e.g., the so-called "rape scene" involving Dominique Francon and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead). Others counter that Rand's heroines exemplify many positive characteristics, including independence, intelligence, and strength.
Rand's novels have also been attacked on literary grounds (though there has been very little discussion of her novels among academics in English and related fields). Some fault her novels for clunky writing and repetitious use of vocabulary (e.g., "angular," "granite," "chiseled", "effortless," "purposeful," "purposive", etc.). Some believe that the Objectivist heroes are unrealistic, inhuman, and two-dimensional (John Galt, in particular, is often cited). It has been alleged that Rand's portrayal of her antagonists is even worse (they are predictably weak, pathetic, full of uncertainty, and lacking in imagination and talent). In addition, the novels are alleged to contain errors or omissions in terms of the reality of social interactions, economics, technology, and history. Rand replied to some such criticism (and in advance of much of it) in her essay "The Goal of My Writing" (1963) [collected in her book The Romanic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (2nd rev. ed. 1975)]. There, Rand makes it clear that her goal is to project her vision of an ideal man, that is, not man as he is, but man as he might be and ought to be.
Michael Shermer has claimed that Objectivism resembles a cult [13] (http://www.skeptic.com/02.2.shermer-unlikely-cult.html), but many Objectivists deny this. Some Objectivists admit that the Nathaniel Branden Institute of the 1960s was cult-like, though claim that the movement has grown beyond this.
Quotes
See Ayn Rand quotes at Wikiquote (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand).
References
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, 1943. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1957. New York: Random House.
- The Unlikeliest Cult In History by Michael Shermer, The Skeptic Magazine vol 2, #2. [14] (http://www.skeptic.com/02.2.shermer-unlikely-cult.html)
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