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AYN RAND LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHER 1905 - 1982
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AYN RANDLIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHER 1905 - 1982Life and WorkAyn Rand was born Alyssa Rosenbaum to a wealthy family in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 resulted in the forced expropriation of the Rosenbaum family business and reduced the family from riches to normalcy. Alienated by communism, the young Alyssa left the Soviet Union after graduating from college, changed her name, and settled in Hollywood, California. After learning English, she worked as a screenwriter for motion pictures and tried, initially unsuccessfully, to publish her fiction. Upon the successful publication of her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand continued to write prolifically, both fiction and philosophy, until seven years before her death in 1982. Rand was responsible for the renewal of libertarian thinking in the United States during a time otherwise dominated by liberal-left thought. As a political and moral philosopher, her importance lies in her development of “Objectivism,” both an epistemological and moral/political movement which embraced radical individualism, a disdain for any governmental limits on capitalism, and thorough disgust for the liberal-left’s welfare policies. This philosophy, while never embraced by the scholarly philosophical community, became very popular in the 1960s and 70s as an alternative to the egalitarian “New Left” quasi-socialism of Herbert Marcuse and others.
dependent. Rand always identified relativism with liberal-left thinking, believing that the same metaphysical dodging that led thinkers away from objective truths was also responsible for their failure to see the poor and downtrodden for what they really were—failures, humans of lesser ability than those who were more successful in the game of life. If, Rand reasoned, there were certain correct absolute truths, it followed that there were certain sure paths to success--hard work, ruthlessness and unashamed competitiveness--which if denied would lead to an inauthentic, unsuccessful life. Socially and politically, Rand’s philosophy embraced an individualism more radical than even early capitalist and individualist thinkers such as Adam Smith. Whereas Smith grudgingly acknowledged that government intervention was sometimes necessary to ameliorate the misery of the poor, Rand saw no such obligation. In the human world, like the natural world, only the strong should survive. Capitalism is the most authentic, “objective” system because it divides the strong, wise and successful people from those lacking in ability or drive. Absent any government interference, a natural process will separate the best individuals from those with nothing to contribute. But even if society was not better off for this ruthless and competitive individualism, capitalism was still ethically superior to socialism because it is the individual, not the collective, that receives the highest moral consideration in Rand’s view. Not only did she believe that the state has an obligation to ignore the poor; she also held that individual acts of charity were futile and unethical. Charity for Rand was motivated by a pathological guilt over being successful. The authentic individual feels no such guilt and knows that welfare handouts, whatever the source, only perpetuate the delusion of equality and social responsibility. The best political order, therefore, is one which recognizes the absolute sanctity of private property and individual rights. Any attempt by governments to limit these things was doomed to fail and immiserate civil society. This was true not only because of the logistical failure of communism or the welfare state; it was true by the very nature of reality. Since Rand’s ontological view presumed that the individual was the absolute starting point of philosophical analysis, the notions of “collective rights” or “common property” were self-contradictory. Only individuals can have rights or property. At times, Rand even went so far as to deny the reality of concepts such as culture and race, claiming that these were intellectually lazy abstractions. A collective, a culture, a race; these were nothing more than large groups of individuals and should be analyzed as such. As noted, Rand’s diatribic ideas never caught on in academic circles. They did, however, influence many other political thinkers. The current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, was a student of Rand and still considers himself an Objectivist. And Rand herself was a guest of honor in 1981 at the swearing in of President Ronald Reagan. Problems of Radical IndividualismNaturally, Rand’s ideas met with considerable indignation from those who did not share her vision of ruthless Darwinian individualism. Professional scholars saw her metaphysical Objectivism as too simplistic; the irrevocable law of thought just did not correspond to the often contradictory and vague working of genuine experience. Even if some objective truth did exist, they reasoned, this did not automatically allow for its philosophical cataloguing, and since Rand was not trained as a philosopher, she usually had no patience for the long and complicated work involved in justifying universal principles. Indeed, academic philosophy has long since written off her epistemological writings. Her moral and political writings, while enjoying more success than her hard philosophy, have also been met with attitudes ranging from shrugging dismissal to outrage. Since Rand boldly took to the individual as her ontological starting point, using this principle to justify moral and social individualism, an obvious objection has been that atomistic individualism does not correspond to real human experience. Socialism and Liberal thinkers give more attention to the reality of the community. They reason that human identity is largely the product of social interaction. For example, if I were to write twenty five or so phrases that described me, they would likely include things like my name, my profession, organizations to which I belong, activities, and the like. But most of these so-called self-descriptions are really descriptions of my social world. In fact, as communitarians argue, an individual stripped of all her social attributes would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to describe. Rand’s atomistic individual may make sense in a world populated by Robinson Crusoes, each living on their own little (well-resourced) islands, but that is not the way we live. Finally, Rand’s belief in the perfectibility of capitalism strikes many as naive and self-serving. Socialists have not only argued that capitalism results in undesirable consequences; they have also argued that capitalism is intrinsically flawed, that it contains contradictions within itself that make consequences like recessions, depressions and wars inevitable. Although Rand believed that rational capitalists would never go to war, socialist thinkers note that the expansion of markets and the imperative of profit-seeking often compromise otherwise irrational people. Implications for Debate Ayn Rand was one of the most prolific writers of our time, and debaters will find a myriad of her writings useful in philosophical and political debates. Obviously, she is a key source on the value of individualism. Additionally, her arguments against moral relativism, group rights and egalitarianism will probably get a great deal of use on any topic. Debaters interested in using her work ought to read one or two of her novels as well, since those stories are fully congruent with her philosophical work. Debaters should be aware, however, that few informed people are ‘neutral” about Ayn Rand. Most people either adore or despise her ideas.
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