The history of classical liberalism is filled with great thinkers. They have ranged from economists like Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises to politicians like John Bright and Richard Cobden, to political philosophers like FA Hayek and Robert Nozick. But the modern revival of the liberal concept was, to a large degree, lead by a woman with very unusual credentials. She was a novelist named Ayn Rand.

Her 1943 novel The Fountainhead was her first major breakthrough in the literary field. It was eventually made into a film and became a best seller in the United States. She had authored some other novels earlier which hadn’t been as successful. It was over a decade later, in 1957, that her major novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Even today it remains a major selling book around the world and clearly one of the most influential novels ever written.

A poll conducted by the Library of Congress asked Americans what book most influenced their life. Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible. Modern Library asked some intellectuals to list the 100 most important novels and Rand was entirely absent from the list. But when they asked the public to list the most important novels written Atlas Shrugged came in first. Her novel The Fountainhead placed 7th, Anthem placed 15th and We the Living placed 25th. And those are the only four novels she wrote!

But it appears that Atlas Shrugged, in spite of its size, is not just a favourite with adults. In 1998 the Library of Congress Center for the Book asked 20,000 American students to list their favourite novels. Students in grades 8 through 12 (approximately aged 13 to 18) listed Atlas Shrugged as their second favourite novel next to The Color Purple. This is even more surprising when you realize that The Color Purple, unlike Atlas Shrugged, is frequently compulsory reading for students in this age group.

Journalist Michelle Malkin, of the Seattle Times, noted in 1998 that Atlas Shrugged had sold some 5 million copies and continued to sell “briskly”. The New York Public Library put it on it’s famed “Books of the Century” list. And, notes Malkin, “It was also one of the most oft-cited books in a poll of successful executives on the century’s most influential tomes.”

A documentary on Rand was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998. And in 1999 the United States Post Office issued an Ayn Rand commemorative stamp. A biography of Rand by Barbara Branden was a best-seller and a not entirely flattering TV film was loosely based on the book.

Rand was born as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia. She lived through the last years of Czar Nicholas II and witnessed the rise of the Communist empire with Russia as its base. She graduated from the University of Petrograd and took a job as a museum guide and enrolled at the State Institute for Cinema Arts.

Already passionately anti-communist Rand was deeply in love with the West. Her interest in cinema served as a means for her to deal with Western culture. In 1926 she managed, though just barely, to get a visa to visit the United States. She never returned to the Soviet Union again. After spending sometime with relatives in Chicago Rand, who had by now adopted her famous pen name, left for Hollywood. Her desire was to be a script writer. She stumbled upon the famous director Cecil B. DeMille and introduced herself to him. He was fascinated by this Russian woman with the huge eyes and called her “Caviar”. He brought her to the set of his film The King of Kings and soon secured a job for her as an extra.

It was on that set that she met Frank O’Connor whom she married in 1929. She secured a job working in the wardrobe department of RKO Pictures. And in 1931 became an American citizen. In 1932 she became the head of wardrobe and she sold a screenplay to Universal.

Throughout these years she continued to practice her writing—especially since English was a second language for her. In 1933 she finished her autobiographical novel We the Living, about life in Soviet Russia. But it took three years until it was published in the US and in England. In 1934 a play, Penthouse Legend, later renamed The Night of January 16th was produced in Hollywood and then sold for Broadway. Rand left Hollywood for New York, her favourite city, and began writing The Fountainhead.

In 1937 she took some time off to write her poetic novelette Anthem but no US publisher could be found. A year later it was published in England. Rand then worked for the famous architect Ely Jacques Kahn as a means of researching her next novel The Fountainhead. She submitted The Fountainhead to a dozen publishers with no interest from any of them. Finally Bobb’s-Merrill contracts for the book and sets a January 1, 1943 deadline. Rand finished the book one day early.

When Warner Brothers buys the movie rights Rand is persuaded to move back to Hollywood to write the screenplay. She buys an ultra-modern home designed by architect Richard Neutra. But in 1951 she returns again to New York where she stayed until her death on March 6, 1982.

Rand was born in a society of collectivism and then witnessed first hand the Soviet experiment in socialism. Certainly such experience helped cause her to formulate her own ideas about the world. And it appears that most of her political philosophy she invented for herself. That is not to say that many of the ideas were not expressed by others. It is pretty clear that Rand did read Nietzsche and that she was taken with them.

But the release of Rand’s Journals reveals that during the writing of The Fountainhead that she debated with herself and eventually argued herself out of a Nietzschean position. What Rand adopted was a cohesive system of ideas which clearly falls within the classical liberal view of the world.

Rand, however, would not call herself a liberal. Of course in the United States the term had been appropriated by anti-liberal socialists and confusion still reigns over the label as a result. Rand preferred to refer to herself as a “radical for capitalism” and named her comprehensive philosophical system Objectivism.

Rand’s central message was clearly understood by many of her critics and that is why they attacked her and her novels. Rand was a staunch advocate of reason, individual rights, and capitalism. In an age of faith, collectivism, and socialism such views were not popular. But time has proven that Ayn Rand was right and that her critics were woefully in error.

There has been much speculation about whether Ayn Rand was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. Her novels were heavily philosophical indicating that she was a philosopher yet her philosophy was never presented systematically and when presented it was within a fictional context indicating that she was, first and foremost, a novelist. Rand herself answered that question is a series of journals which she kept for her own edification. She wrote:

“I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer. But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the means to the last; the absolutely necessary means, but only the means; the fiction story is the end. Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle, I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the principle interest me only as the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose; and my life purpose is the creation of the kind of world (people and events) that I like—that is, that represents human perfection.”

Rand was a philosopher but only as a means to another end: being a novelist. Long before others began asking this question concerning Rand she asked and answered the question herself. The fact that she asked and answered such a question is even more incredible when we realize that she wrote the above on May 4, 1946 before The Fountainhead was published and before she wrote Atlas Shrugged—her two most philosophical novels.

Rand said that art “is a selective recreation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical value-judgments”. Since a novelist is an artist Rand believed that a novelist would select those human traits and experiences which are fundamentally important and recreate them in the novel. Artists cannot simply recreate reality as it is but must selectively choose what aspects of life to portray and they will do so according to their own value system. “Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction.”

The reason for Rand’s writing, she said was “to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it”. Therefore Rand had to portray “the perfect man and his perfect life” which required her to “discover my own philosophical statement and definition of the perfection”.

Known today for her philosophy Rand never considered herself primarily a philosopher. Philosophy was the foundation of her writing because she wished to portray the perfect man and the fundamental characteristics of human perfection. But such perfection could only be portrayed accurately if she first understood the nature of reality and its meaning. This is what Rand set out to do, not to be a philosopher but so that she could be a novelist. The presentation of the ideal was her goal but obviously such a presentation could only be made after the ideal was properly defined and understood.

Thus Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism came about out of necessity. And yet she effectively portrayed ideas in a fictional context and gave hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a passionate interest in philosophical issues. For Rand philosophy was not an abstract mind game played by intellectuals to amuse themselves and impress others. Philosophy was the necessary component of rational life and could not be avoided. In a lecture to the graduating class of the West Point military academy Rand said:

“You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew. But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight; self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”

Philosophy is thus unavoidable. It is inescapable. It is fundamental to the nature of reality and man. The choice before man, said Rand, was to think rationally or not. The consequences are determined by reality and they too are unavoidable. Thus for Rand the fundamental choice of human existences is to think or not to think. And that is what Rand did best: think. For the sake of her writing she carved out a unique philosophical system that is logical and consistent. It was the by-product of her primary goal, that of being a novelist. One can only imagine what would have been achieved had philosophy been her primary goal! Rand, of course, spent thousands of hours thinking through the ideas which were to become the dominant principles of Objectivism and wrote millions of words to express those ideas. To summarize those concepts does them an injustice as the summary can never express the complete context of the system.

Therefore the prudent writer would let Rand summarize them herself. Before Atlas Shrugged was published Rand spoke to a sales conference at Random House and was asked by a salesman to summarize her philosophy while standing on one foot—something which took her almost 1,100 pages to do in Atlas Shrugged. Rand took up the challenge and responded:

  1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

  2. Epistemology: Reason

  3. Ethics: Self-interest

  4. Politics: Capitalism.

 The first area of philosophy is metaphysics and Rand held that objective reality was the proper foundation of any philosophical system. What this means is that reality exists and it exists as something specific. To exist an entity must exist as something, that is, it must have a specific nature. Sometimes Rand explained this by saying “A is A” or “Existence exists”. “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.” “If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.”

“Whatever degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness —are axioms you cannot escape, these two are irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition your might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of the solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.”

What Rand is saying is that everything that exists must exist as something and that to exist as something it must exist as something specific. Simply put: all existence has a specific nature. The next area of philosophy is that of epistemology or the theory of knowledge. The basic principle here is that of reason: “the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses”. Reason is man’s only tool for understanding reality and for integrating that knowledge into his life. It is the only system of grasping nature which is consistent with nature itself. Any other non-rational system of obtaining knowledge is fundamentally at war with reality and thus doomed to failure from the start.

Philosopher Leonard Peikoff, in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand explained it this way:

“Reason is the faculty which begins with facts (sensory data) which organizes these data in accordance with facts (the mathematical relationships among concretes); and which is guided at each step by rules that rest on the fundamental fact (the law of identity). The rules require that each cognition be reduced back to the facts one started with. In regard to reason’s every element and aspect, from matter to form to method and from start to finish, one conclusions inescapable: reason is the existence-oriented faculty.

“Why should I accept reason?’ means: ‘Why should I accept reality?’ The answer is that existence exists, and only existence exists. Man’s choice is either to accept reason or to consign his consciousness and life to a void. One cannot seek a proof that reason is reliable, because reason is the faculty of proof; one must accept and use reason in any attempt to prove anything. But, using reason, one can identify its relationship to the facts of reality and thereby validate the faculty.”

In Objectivism reason is the only method by which an individual can perceive and understand the specific nature of reality. Reality is the final judge concerning the validity of an idea or action. Rand noted that each individual is free to hold any conviction they wish but not free to escape the consequences. Knowledge is not automatic but must be obtained through human action or effort but knowledge is necessary for human survival. Rand said that man :

“...is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every ‘is’ implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

From this foundation Rand investigates the next area of philosophical inquiry: human ethics. Unlike others who have said that ethics, or the “oughts” of human existence, have no foundation in reality, or the “is’s”, Rand took the opposite perspective. She said that what “is” leads to the “oughts” of life. Ethics she contended in deeply rooted in reality. The nature of being human is the “is” and human ethics, rationally considered, is the “ought”. Rand defined her belief this way: “The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.”

The fundamental right is the right to life itself. But life is not an automatic process but requires man to interact with nature. The interaction necessary for life is the source of the right to liberty. A man who creates to sustain life, but is restricted from keeping the product of his labor. cannot survive. This requirement for survival is the foundation for the right to property. The triad of rights proposed by the classical liberals was always the right to life, liberty and property. The American founding fathers enshrined these rational rights into the American system of law. According to the 1772 Resolutions of the Town of Boston, “among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these, First a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; Thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can....” The Virginia Declaration of Rights also clearly stated these fundamental rights; “all men... have certain inherent rights... namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property.”

Starting with reality, using reason as a tool, Rand established a system of ethics incumbent on all men. That ethical system could only survive in a political system where the rights of individuals, not collectives, are supreme. In such a system the power structure must be restrained so as to guarantee that individuals are free to produce and keep the product of their labor. Men would be free to exchange their goods and labor with other men as they see fit, treating each other as traders and not as slaves or masters. Rand said such a system required market capitalism. Thus, under a Randian system of ethics, the political system would be limited to protecting the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

Rand’s political views have been greatly discussed and often ripped completely out of context by her opponents. As we have briefly shown here Rand did not simply believe in free minds and free markets because of some whim on her part. Her political beliefs were deeply rooted in her system of ethics, which is based on her epistemology, which is based on her metaphysics. Whatever one’s view of Ayn Rand it is obvious that she took ideas seriously and thoroughly considered the positions she took. In September, 1971 Miss Rand summarized her ideas thusly:

“...I shall say that I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This—the supremacy of reason—was. is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics. The hierarchical structure cannot be reversed, nor can any of its levels hold without the fundamental one—as those who have tried are beginning to discover.”

While classical liberal thinking has had a long tradition intellectually it was Rand, through her novels, which put those ideas in a format that appealed to the general public. Liberal academics will never have the influence that Rand had on the general public because she tapped into the needs of each culture to create myths or stories. Her novels grabbed a person emotionally as well as intellectually. As stories they showed how ideas effect life and that is why they helped create new generations of individuals passionately dedicated to individual rights and liberal values.