Читать книгу Ayn Rand - Chris Matthew Sciabarra - Страница 16
ОглавлениеNot long after her arrival in America, Alissa Rosenbaum renamed herself Ayn Rand. In her early writings, she engages in a concerted effort to understand and critique polarities she had confronted in the Russia of her youth. She focuses primarily on the dialectical unity of religion and statism. She gropes toward a philosophical synthesis that rejects faith and force, but integrates the splits within human existence, between mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice.
NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER
Rand was once asked if she was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. In typically dialectical fashion, she responded, “Both” ([1961] 1992T):
In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. (New Intellectual, vii)
Rand’s literary and philosophical goals were internally related. She could not pursue her literary project without gradually articulating a philosophical framework. And she could not apply her philosophy without expressing its values concretely in stories, screenplays, dramas, and novels. Thus Rand transcended the dualism between philosophy and art, social thought and entertainment. As she stated in a journal entry dated 4 May 1946, she had no interest in presenting newly discovered knowledge “in its abstract, general form.”1 She wished to apply her knowledge “in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story.” Such a fusion of the abstract and the concrete led Rand to wonder if she represented “a peculiar phenomenon.” Like Nina Berberova and other Russian writers, Rand believed, with no show of modesty, that she had achieved “the proper integration of a complete human being” (xiv).
Rand’s goal in writing was “the projection of an ideal man.” This literary portrayal was, for her, “an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”2 But the “ideal man” was not a pure abstraction. He had to be related to “the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires.”3 By defining the values such an ideal man would have and by delineating the social conditions that would make it possible for him to exist and flourish, Rand slowly moved from best-selling novelist to public philosopher. She shifted from the specifically anticommunist political themes of her first novel, We the Living, to the broad metaphysical and epistemological themes of Atlas Shrugged. She eventually boasted that she was “challenging the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years.”4 Her formal philosophy, “untainted by any Kantian influence,” aimed to reconnect the elements in human existence “which Kant had severed.”5
DIGESTING THE PAST
There is no evidence to suggest that Rand explicitly criticized the works of Russian philosophers. No journals from her Russian period are extant, and the journal entries currently available date a full dozen years after her university encounters with Lossky. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rand drew from her own experiences in Russia to compose a number of short stories and plays. Many of these unpublished stories appear in The Early Ayn Rand, among them, “Good Copy,” “Escort,” “The Night King,” “Her Second Career,” and “The Husband I Bought.”6 This last tale of unrequited love was based on Rand’s first romantic experiences in Russia with a man who was probably exiled to Siberia.7
In 1931–32, she wrote a film treatment and screenplay called “Red Pawn,” which dealt specifically with the evil of Soviet communism. Of greater philosophical importance, however, is the secondary theme of this work. For the first time, Rand dealt with “the philosophic identity of Communism and religion.”8 In Rand’s Russia, religion offered the only organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. Religion was viewed as communism’s natural enemy. Whereas communism was atheistic and materialistic, religion celebrated God’s existence and human spiritual redemption.
Rand examined this opposition between two dominant Russian cultural forces and refused to accept their apparent hostility as evidence for their mutual exclusivity. She recognized that something fundamental united the communists and the believers. Tracing their essential similarities became one of Rand’s earliest philosophical preoccupations.
For Rand, communism was a secular substitute for religion. Like the Church before it, communism subjugated the individual to an allegedly higher power. In this respect, religion and communism were identical. The main difference between them was their respective agencies of domination. For believers, it was God; for the communists, it was the state.9
Though Rand had not yet mastered English, she created tantalizing images in “Red Pawn” to dramatize the organic conjunction of religion and communism. Much of the movie action is situated on Strastnoy Island, a “bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast.”10 In the czarist days, a monastery occupied the island. But since the Revolution, the monastery had been converted into a Soviet prison.11
Rand writes that the island’s library occupied the former chapel of the old monastery. In the library, a sacred mural remained, depicting Christ’s walk to Golgotha. But above the mural, the communists had scrawled, in red letters, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” Red flags were sketched into the raised hand of St. Vladimir. A hammer and sickle were superimposed on Moses’ tablets. The fresh paint dripped down the chapel walls.
Tall candles in silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime. Their little red flames stood immobile, each candle transformed into a chandelier by the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints; they burned without motion, without noise, a silent, resigned service in memory of the past—around a picture of Lenin.12
Others would have seen the superimposed communist symbols as a defilement of a Christian sanctuary; Rand saw an organic conjunction of corresponding worldviews. Her mixture of religious and communist images suggests that the two cultural forces had interpenetrated one another, serving similar goals, if not the same master.
WE THE LIVING
Comparable imagery is evident in Rand’s first published novel, We the Living. In a passage ultimately deleted from the original 1936 edition, Rand presents a fairy tale about a mighty Viking who is hated by both the King and the Priest.13 While the King despises the Viking for his refusal to bow to royal authority, the Priest hates the Viking because he “looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.”14
The enraged King promises his royal subjects a material reward for the Viking’s head. Similarly, the Priest assures his parishioners that their sins will be forgiven if they kill the Viking. When the Viking embarks on a quest for the sacred city, however, his anticipated triumph prompts his adversaries to be more conciliatory. The King offers the Viking a royal banner to plant in the sacred city. The Priest offers the Viking a temple banner. But the Viking refuses to take either. For on the mast of his ship “was his own banner, that had never been lowered.” He conquers the sacred city, and toasts, “To a life … which is a reason unto itself.” Rand writes: “A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life” (180).
This tale was but another symbolic way for Rand to say that statism and religion are at war with the sovereign individual. The King, a symbol of statism, is no different from the Priest, a symbol of religion; both are fundamentally opposed to the independent Viking who refuses to worship either.
Rand wrote We the Living, originally entitled, Air Tight: A Novel of Red Russia, between 1930 and 1933, “to get Russia out of her system.”15 Far simpler in its structure than her later novels, We the Living offered, in Rand’s view, the most classic plot progression of any of her works. Moreover, it was, Rand said, the closest to an autobiography that she would ever write.16 Despite differences between Rand and the main character, Kira Argounova, Kira is clearly a stand-in for Rand. In fact, throughout her fiction, it was never Rand’s custom to distance herself from the views of her central protagonists. In this sense, they are all Rand.
Kira is a young engineering student enrolled at Petrograd University. The novel chronicles her personal struggle under the harsh conditions of Soviet dictatorship. The plot centers on a fatal romantic triangle between Kira and the two men who love her. Kira falls in love with a counterrevolutionary, Leo Kovalensky. When Leo develops tuberculosis, Kira becomes the mistress of a heroic communist revolutionary, Andrei Taganov, in order to gain access to food and money for Leo’s welfare.
Andrei is a virtuous, if misguided, character—much more admirable than Leo, Kira’s true love. Andrei epitomizes the idealism of the revolution, refusing to be corrupted by the growing tyranny of the regime. But the regime is corrupt, and it gradually destroys the best of its citizens. In the end, Kira is alienated from both men. Leo becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, and Andrei, confronting the utter bankruptcy of his ideals, commits suicide. With nothing left for her in Russia, Kira attempts to escape across the border, but is shot by the border patrol and left to bleed to death in the snow. In a last shining moment, she sees that “Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”17
In We the Living, Kira, unlike Rand herself, did not escape communism. Rand wanted to show how dictatorship thwarts escape, crushes values, crushes life itself. Escape from such a system is a fluke, in Rand’s view. Totalitarianism necessarily perpetuates an “airtight” environment of brutality and repression; spiritual and physical death are its essential by-products.18
A “NIETZSCHEAN” PHASE?
In 1936, We the Living was issued by Macmillan in a limited edition of three thousand copies. It was not reissued until 1959, after Rand had established herself as a best-selling author. In the second edition, Rand made several revisions, which she described as “editorial line-changes.” In the original edition, Rand claimed that her writing “reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English.”19 Hence, she wished to correct “awkward” and “confusing” formulations.
However, a number of scholars have reviewed Rand’s modifications and concluded that these were not strictly linguistic. The most compelling case is offered by Ronald Merrill, who argues that Rand excised those references in the first edition which implied an endorsement of Nietzsche’s ethical principles, that the weak may be sacrificed for the sake of the strong. The second edition reflects the attitudes of the more mature Rand.20
In the first edition, there is a scene in which Kira and Andrei debate the meaning of communism. Andrei assumes that Kira admires the communist ideal, but rejects its methods. But she surprises him. She states: “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.”21
Andrei retorts, “Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” Kira answers. “Admirable. If you’re right. But are you right?” In the second edition, Rand has removed this entire exchange. Kira merely states, “I loathe your ideals.” She keeps her own counsel concerning his methods.
The conversation between these two characters continues in the first edition, when Kira argues that there are things which are sacred to the individual that cannot be touched by the state or the collective. Andrei rejects Kira’s claims, declaring “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few.” Kira answers:
“You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in fifth sentence.]
In the revised edition, Kira states:
“Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in the fourth sentence.]
In the original passage, Kira has contempt for the masses and is inclined to see them destroyed. In response to Andrei, Kira shows an unquestioning resolve to side with the exalted few in any conflict with the “puny, shrivelled, helpless” masses. She rejects the credo of “justice for all” when it becomes a euphemism for any attempt to make all human beings metaphysically equal.
In the comparable passage from the 1959 revised edition, Kira expresses a similar contempt for the masses. But here, Kira’s language is less vitriolic. She answers Andrei with a question, not a protest. She rejects those who would attempt to achieve metaphysical egalitarianism through the injustice of granting values to those who have no right to them. Yet in both editions of the novel, Kira follows her exchange with Andrei by stating: “I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live!” Even Ronald Merrill agrees that in this belief, Rand’s Kira has moved away from a stark “Nietzschean” ethos. Merrill argues that Kira’s sentiment foreshadows Rand’s mature Objectivist position. In fact, Merrill believes that Rand’s conception of egoism developed largely as a reaction to the Nietzschean orientation of her youth.
Stephen Hicks, in a review of Merrill’s book, argues that Merrill’s conclusion is premature, since only a full disclosure of Rand’s early journals will settle the issue of her alleged Nietzschean phase. Rand finished her novel in 1933, and published it in 1936. Hicks argues correctly that there is evidence in one of her published journal entries that Rand rejected the “Nietzschean” ethos as early as 1934. In this entry, foreshadowing the character of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, Rand condemns those who would achieve power through the masses. If Rand had rejected Nietzsche in 1934, it is likely that she would have revised those passages which could have been interpreted as Nietzschean, before the book was actually published.22
Hicks states further that Rand may have allowed Andrei to set the terms of the debate, much as the communist state sets the terms for each of the characters in We the Living. Rand had not yet constructed a full theoretical response to the ethics of altruism, and Kira reflects this void. Having fully developed her own rational egoist ethic in later years, it may have been easier for Rand to eliminate the ambiguous passages, rather than to have provided a full philosophical explanation of their actual meaning.23
There may be some merit to Merrill’s contention that Rand went through a “Nietzschean” phase, but I tend to agree with Hicks that the evidence for such a provocative thesis is inconclusive. However, there are two important issues which must be emphasized because they shed much light on Rand’s attitudes toward the Nietzschean worldview:
First, in my discussion of the Silver Age of Russian philosophy, it was clear that Russian writers had stressed the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. Rand was probably exposed to this particular interpretation of Nietzsche from a very early age. Though Rand was most impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of altruism and Christianity, she concretized his grand, abstract metaphors with her own images. Despite her initial attraction to Nietzsche’s work, Rand necessarily rejected his Dionysian impulses. And though she continued to draw from Nietzschean imagery as late as The Fountainhead, she was probably already moving away from Nietzsche as early as her student years.
Second, and more important, Rand was moving toward a nondualistic philosophical framework. While she was exploring the philosophic identity of religion and communism, she was also beginning to see that both forces perpetuated a social dualism that forced the individual to choose between two sides of the same false coin.
In the religious realm, the fraud was obvious to Rand. For instance, in 1934 she wrote a play, Ideal, which depicted religion as causing hypocrisy and opposing integrity. Religion, for Rand, divorces ideals from life on earth, by viewing “this world [as] of no consequence.” An evangelist in Ideal proclaims: “Whatever beauty [the world] offers us is here only that we may sacrifice it—for the greater beauty beyond.”24 Religion tells people that beauty is unreachable and that nobility emerges from the sacrifice, not the achievement, of values.25 It condemns people for not achieving unreachable ideals, ideals they do not really wish to attain because their very realization would demand self-annihilation.
This recognition of religion as a source of social dualism reappears in Rand’s journal entries during this same period. Rand argued that religion engenders a metaphysical split between this world and the next, between human existence on earth and an illusory life after death.26 In Rand’s view, religion declares war on the human ability to think, and it is consequently “the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.” It fragments living and thinking, and sees “ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability of living and thinking quite differently, in other words eliminating thinking from your actual life” (2).
It is for this reason that Rand saw “Faith as the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” But at this point in her intellectual development, Rand was not certain about why people have abdicated the use of logical reasoning in the governance of their lives. She asked if reason is impossible to individuals, or if individuals have merely been taught that it is futile. If people have been taught such, then “the teacher is the church.” Rand hoped “to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”27
Just as religion was a source of social dualism, so too was statism. The theme of We the Living, according to Rand, was the “individual against the State” (New Intellectual, 60). Rand did not believe that there was a necessary incompatibility between the individual and all forms of government. She was not an anarchist; she rejected neither government per se, nor truly human social relationships. What she opposed was statism in all its incarnations.
Communism both constituted and perpetuated a social dichotomy between the individual and the masses. Under communism, the masses are collectively organized by the coercive state. In such a system, the individual has no alternative but conflict with the society at large. Hence, it is quite possible that in the early edition of the novel, Kira’s call to sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few is the only alternative she can advocate within the context of communism, which sacrifices the few for the sake of the many. Just as religion pits thinking against living, communism pits the individual against the community. Within this context, Kira is forced to choose between two poles of a deadly duality. When she is able to remove herself briefly from this context, she exclaims that indeed, she does not wish to fight for or against the people. She wants only “to be left alone.”
Like Rand, Kira lived in a society which had no developed concept of the individual. The Russian language does not even have a word for “privacy.”28 This peculiarity of Russian might have motivated Rand to write, several years later, in The Fountainhead: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy” (684). Russian religious and political culture did not recognize the sphere of the private. Kira knew that it was “an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt.” But under communism, “they make it felt with particular ugliness” (We the Living, 49). She protests to Andrei, that it is “a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven, and then not to dream of it, but to demand it” (107).
Hence, Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses, as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective. It is a system that compels Kira to see the world dualistically, in terms of herself versus everyone else. Soviet communism had appropriated the essence of Russian sobornost’, the fusion of the individual and the collective whole. But instead of preserving the uniqueness and privacy of its members, it sought to annihilate their individual identities. For Rand, communism is a system that defeats “the living” by robbing them of the very qualities that make them human. It institutionalizes a war of the masses against the solitary person.
After she wrote We the Living, Rand knew that she had more work to do. By 1934, she began to view her writing as part of a broader project. In her own words, “These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master philosophy—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has been said.”29
She intended that her journals would be only for her own use and did not worry if her thoughts appeared “disjointed.” Despite her humility in characterizing herself as “an amateur philosopher,” Rand’s musings are much more articulate and self-conscious than she intimates.
Rand hoped that once her ideas were fully developed, she would be able to present them as a “Mathematics of Philosophy.” She aimed to “arrange the whole in a logical system, proceeding from a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems” (7). But it was clear to her that such a project would take time and effort.
In her journals, Rand dealt critically with the writings of other thinkers, such as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Peter Kropotkin, and José Ortega y Gasset. Having rejected both religion and communism, both the worship of God and the idolatry of the collective, Rand wanted to grasp why people allowed themselves to obey standards set by others. Reading Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, she was perplexed by the actions of “the mass man.” Mass men are not those who obeyed their own standards. Rather, they submit to the dictates of others. They are not genuine individuals, in Rand’s view. Since they lack internally generated ideals, they cannot be free. Rand believed that no human quality such as freedom could be “disconnected from its content.” She asked: “Isn’t there a terrible mistake of abstraction here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said, ‘not freedom from what, but freedom for what’?”30
For Rand, the “mistake of abstraction” is the social division of ideals and action, theory and practice, morality and practicality. No human value can be separated from the conditions that make its achievement possible. Rand was developing a view of the individual that included not merely negative notions of freedom, but positive notions of autonomy and self-responsibility. Autonomy demands that individuals achieve values by their own effort, not by a mystical alliance with God or a selfless union with the collective. The person who attains values and power by pandering to the masses is to be rejected as “a slave to those masses.” A genuine selfishness, an “exalted egoism,” demands that the individual achieve his or her “own theoretical values and then apply them to practical reality,” for it is one’s “actual living” that must take priority “over all other considerations.”31
Seeing “history as a deadly battle of the mass and the individual” (8), Rand was poised to begin working on a mammoth literary project whose “first purpose … is a defense of egoism in its real meaning.”32 Her working title for the book was Second-Hand Lives. Ultimately, it would be called The Fountainhead.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD
In 1935, Rand began to outline the plot and characters of the book that would be her first, genuine commercial success. In these early outlines, Rand continues in her quest for a nondualistic, integrated view of human being.
The Fountainhead follows the exploits of Howard Roark, Rand’s first, fully formed “ideal man.”33 Roark is a brilliant architect, a man of integrity expelled from school for his unwillingness to conform to traditional architectural styles. One of Roark’s classmates is Peter Keating, a man who always relied on Roark’s assistance to complete school projects. While Roark is destitute and looking for work, Keating becomes a professional success by manipulating those around him, and by imitating old and tired architectural standards. He lives a “second-hand” life, in which “the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person” (Fountainhead, 607).
Throughout the novel, we meet other characters, such as Dominique Francon, Gail Wynand, and Ellsworth Toohey. Dominique is Roark’s beloved, and one of the more bizarre characters in the novel. She separates herself from the things that she grows to love, including Roark. She is convinced that no man of integrity can succeed in a world ruled by the mob. Wynand, the most tragic figure in Rand’s fiction, is a newspaper magnate who boasts that he has the power to mold the tastes of the masses. His belief that everyone can be corrupted is challenged by his encounters with Roark. Toohey, a critic writing for Wynand’s newspaper, is an arch collectivist. He organizes public protests against Roark’s “arrogant” architectural stylings. Through Toohey’s intervention, Roark is prevented from winning many important building contracts.
But Roark continues his struggle to create buildings in a distinctive and brilliantly imaginative style. In the final sequences of the novel, the ambitious Peter Keating seeks to exploit Roark’s expertise to secure a lucrative contract for the design of a public housing project. Knowing that he will never get the opportunity to implement some of his most cost-effective plans for housing, Roark agrees to submit designs for the project—in Keating’s name—on the condition that the blueprints not be altered. Toohey senses that these plans are not Keating’s creation; he recognizes Roark’s impeccable technique. When the plans are altered significantly and distorted, and the project is built, Roark is outraged. He dynamites the public housing project, is arrested, and brought to trial.
During the trial, Wynand, now Roark’s friend, decides to embark on a press campaign to build support for the indicted architect. For the first time in his life, Wynand finds the strength to stand for a principle not dictated by the masses. To his grief, he discovers that he cannot alter public opinion. He faces the realization that he has created a vast business empire by pandering to the tastes of the mob; he is its slave and not its master.
Roark defends himself in court by enunciating the principles of individualism. He asserts that the authorities had no right to alter his plans. In one of Rand’s characteristically romantic endings, Roark is vindicated of criminal charges. He agrees to rebuild the project according to his own specifications. The novel concludes with Howard Roark triumphant.
Though The Fountainhead is fiction, in it Rand articulates a far more integrated—and specifically Randian—view of human existence than she had presented in any previous book. Yet in her portrayal of Howard Roark, the influence of Nietzsche can still be detected.34 Rand had wanted to place a quotation from Nietzsche at the beginning of The Fountainhead when it was first issued in 1943, but she removed the passage before the manuscript went to publication. In 1968, she quoted it in the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead. She explained that despite her profound disagreement with Nietzsche’s metaphysics and epistemology, she remained impressed by his ability to project man’s greatness in beautifully poetic and emotional terms. She quoted from Beyond Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche celebrates the “fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to he found, and perhaps also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.”35
In her outlines of 26 December 1935, Rand had this same imagery in mind when she described Howard Roark as “the noble soul par excellence.” Rand stated that Roark is “man as man should be. The self-sufficient, self-confident, the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified.… A man who is what he should be.”36 At this time, Rand did not provide a full philosophical articulation of what human beings “should be.” But she did present, in fictional form, her own understanding of the nature of the genuine individualist as distinguished from the mass man. For Rand, the individualist transcends dualism, whereas the mass man is split between the dictates of his own conscience and the demands of society. Ultimately, the mass man, or “second-hander,” abdicates his own soul.
The individualist, symbolized in the character of Roark, was not a spiritual abstraction disconnected from material reality. Rand presented Roark as a fully integrated being of mind and body. She matched Roark’s integrity of spirit with a consummate physical strength. Roark’s egoism is not boastful, conceited, or ostentatious. In her outline of 9 February 1936, she wrote that Roark is “natural” in his selfishness. “He has the quiet, complete, irrevocable calm of an iron conviction. No dramatics, no hysteria.” This spiritual tranquility is matched by Roark’s “tall, slender, somewhat angular” appearance. His passionate sensuality is captured in the hardness of his muscles. He walks swiftly, with ease, “as if movement requires no effort whatever, a body to which movement is as natural as immobility, without a definite line to divide them, a light, flowing, lazy ease of motion, an energy so complete that it assumes the ease of laziness.”37
Roark is the exact opposite of the mass man, for “he was born without the ability to consider others.” This does not mean that Roark is incapable of social relationships, or that he would trample on the rights of others to achieve his goals. For Rand, Roark’s egoism entailed a cohesion of self. Roark is not a solipsist or a brute. His self is the focal point of responsibility, decision making, and value. It is Roark’s own happiness that is his “basic, primary consideration.” Roark owes nothing to others, nor does he seek to impose obligations on them. As a Randian hero, Roark is an atheist. He was “born without any ‘religious brain center.’” His intransigent mind “does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself” (699).
By contrast, Rand portrays most of the other characters in The Fountainhead as variations of the mass man. Keating, like so many other secondary characters in the novel, tries to achieve greatness as defined by others. He is the “perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist—in the accepted meaning of the word.” He is vain and greedy, a “mob man at heart,” who sacrifices everything for the sake of a professional success that lacks personal significance. Keating “has no self and, therefore, cannot have any ethics.” He exists in an empty shell, never achieving the full distinction of what an individual “should be.”
Whereas Keating attempts to live through others by submitting to social conventions, Wynand attempts to rule others by forcing them to submit to his dictates. But as a publishing magnate, Wynand “rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.” The Fountainhead depicts what happens when Wynand attempts to stand on principles that are genuinely his own. For Rand, Wynand is “a man who could have been.”
By contrast, Toohey achieves distinction by extolling humanitarian causes and glorifying collectivism. He is unable to attain values through productive effort and can only achieve greatness in the eyes of others by crushing and ridiculing the heroic. Rand describes him as “a man who never could be—and knows it” (698). Toohey seeks domination by diminishing the value of all things so as to reflect his own inferiority.38
Continuing the use of Nietzschean imagery in her notes, Rand explains that Toohey’s character has “an insane will to power, a lust for superiority that can be expressed only through others” (700). Toohey is a parody of this Nietzschean will to power; he exhibits a superior intellect and force of personality entirely directed toward the inversion and obliteration of values.39 But Rand also uses Toohey to subtly celebrate Nietzsche in her finished novel. Nietzsche becomes a persistent target of Toohey’s derision. For instance, in one of his newspaper columns denouncing Roark’s architectural design of the Enright House, Toohey states: “It is not our function—paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like [Nietzsche]—to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.”40
When a photograph of Roark appears in The Banner, Toohey mocks Rand’s protagonist for his exalted expression of admiration toward the Enright House that he has created. With obvious Nietzschean overtones, Toohey writes, in the newspaper caption below the photo, “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” (343).
More important than all of these subtle allusions to Nietzsche is Rand’s portrait of Toohey. Through Toohey’s character, Rand presents the thesis “that only mental control over others is true control.” Toohey seeks primarily, a spiritual communism, in which each individual is spiritually subordinated “to the mass in every way conceivable.” He hopes to achieve social domination through “the tremendous power of numbers.” Stressing the metaphysical equality of all men as a means of obliterating any “consideration given to the content of their character,” Toohey is a genuine mass man. For Toohey, individuals are valuable only in relation to the masses they serve. Voicing contempt for his betters “because they are better,”41 Toohey encapsulates all that is evil in modern politics.
But Toohey also symbolizes the essence of the Russian sobornost’ against which Rand was reacting. In Russian thought, sobornost’ signified a mystic or spiritual union of all people in society. Individuals would allegedly retain their uniqueness, but in practice, the Russian ideal involved the dissolution of the individual into an organic totality. The communists merely secularized this vision of conciliarity; they retained the Russian impulse toward the material and spiritual subordination of the individual, but substituted the State for the body of Christ.
Toohey’s newspaper column, “One Small Voice,” features endless attacks against individualism that reek of Russian sobornost’. In many ways, he extols the virtue of the cultic loss of self, a theme that was prominent in the writings of the Nietzschean Russian Symbolists. But Toohey goes further: he advocates the sacrificing and subordinating of the individual to the almighty One. Rand uncovers this pretentious use of altruistic language as an ideological tool to conquer the human spirit, to make men small and insignificant, to rule the masses by elevating mediocrity and ridiculing greatness.
In her portrayal of Toohey, Rand also continues her literary policy of integrating the traits of mind and body. She depicts her chief villain as a repulsive swine. She writes in her outline, that Toohey’s “puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.”42
Despite her emphasis on the individual’s ego as the fountainhead of human progress, Rand had provided a far more complex psychological portrait of the mass men as fragmented and incomplete. In opposition to this splintered picture of a human being, Rand began to articulate a nondualistic, nonatomistic view of the genuine individual.
While writing The Fountainhead, Rand continued her paean to individualism in her novelette, Anthem, originally titled Ego (Reedstrom 1993b). Written in 1937, first published in England in 1938, Rand’s futuristic story offers an alternative to Zamiatin’s visions of a technologically advanced collectivist dystopia. Rand projects the primitive conditions that must predominate in any social order that destroys the individual. In Anthem, total collectivism has led to the obliteration of industry and the distortion of human relationships. Peoples’ names have been replaced by euphemistic code words and numerical notations. Even the word “I” has been lost. The rediscovery of this word by the protagonist of the story is one of Rand’s most poetic tributes to individualism. Foreshadowing the egoistic ethical credo of Atlas Shrugged, uniting body and soul through secular means, Equality 7-2521 proclaims:
“I am. I think. I will. What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.… This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.… My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.”43
At the end of the novelette, Rand’s protagonist has renamed himself Prometheus. He escapes the collectivist society with the woman he loves to build a new individualist culture. In her elevation of Promethean individuality, Rand inherits the Nietzschean-Symbolist leitmotif, without its penchant for Dionysian emotionalism, organic collectivism, or the cultic loss of self.44 The genuine individual is neither slave nor master; he does not submit to, or seek self-assertion through, the rule of the collective.
EARLY NONFICTION
Mixed reviews of The Fountainhead did not block Rand from achieving commercial success. In the early 1940s, Rand was planning to write her first nonfiction work, “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” She wrote a condensed version called, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” which appeared in Reader’s Digest. Rand considered the essay a “bromide” to serve as the credo for a broad union of Old Right intellectuals committed to capitalism. The group never materialized primarily because of its ideological diversity (B. Branden 1986, 163). Nevertheless, during this period, Rand had the opportunity to interact with several conservative and libertarian thinkers and activists, including Channing Pollock, Albert Jay Nock, Ruth Alexander, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the father of the contemporary Austrian school of economics and the teacher of the renowned Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek (163, 188). Rand championed the Austrian school of economics in her later nonfiction essays. Though she shared much in common with her procapitalist political contemporaries, she was often disappointed by what she perceived as their cynicism, subjectivism, and mysticism.
Despite its political clichés, “The Only Path to Tomorrow” provides a first peek at Rand as a public philosopher. In the essay, Rand argues that totalitarian ideology is the greatest threat to civilization. She posits a historical antagonism between “Active Man” and “Passive Man.” “Active Man” is another name for Howard Roark. “Active Man” is the individualist. He is a producer, creator, and originator. He requires independence and “neither needs nor seeks power over other men—nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion” (Rand 1944, 89).
“Passive Man” was another name for Peter Keating. He dreads independence and “is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told” (90). Collectivism breeds upon such passivity. It is an ideology that unites the masses through “the ancient principle of savagery.”
Interestingly, Rand does not argue that the needy are parasites on the wealthy. She states emphatically that “Passive Man” can be rich or poor. Coming from all social classes, the “Passive Man” is a parasite on the genuine productive achievements of the “Active Man.” This theme reappears in much more sophisticated form in Rand’s mature critique of contemporary statism.
Rand’s well-known antipathy for Soviet collectivism enabled her to contribute an anticommunist tract to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Written in 1946, the “Screen Guide for Americans” followed the same form as her earlier Reader’s Digest article. Rand supported the communists’ right to express their ideas, but argued that moviegoers and producers should not be obligated to patronize and sanction projects that aimed to corrupt American institutions.
In the pamphlet, Rand posited a stark battle between Freedom and Slavery, between republican government and dictatorship. Of greatest philosophical relevance is Rand’s contention that the dictator is not an individualist. He is “by definition … the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collection of men” (Rand 1947, 49). Rand had transferred her insights on the “soul of the collectivist” into a successful piece of political propaganda for the Hollywood film industry.
Throughout the 1940s, Rand wrote several screenplays, including the film version of The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey; You Came Along, starring Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott; and an especially romantic Love Letters, with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.45 These works adumbrate typically Randian themes, but they are of little or no independent philosophical interest. The 1940s were marked by something much more important to Rand’s intellectual maturation. The celebrated author began working on the magnum opus of her literary career.
ATLAS SHRUGGED
In The Fountainhead, Rand focused on the principles of individualism and collectivism as manifested within the individual’s soul. The personal conflicts faced by each of her characters are primarily internal. Each character is a mixture of two extremes symbolized by Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. The characters are defined not by their relations to one another, but by their specific natures. Their social ties were secondary and derivative of the central theme.
In 1945, Rand began to outline a new novel, initially called The Strike. She wanted to change her focus radically by delving deeply into the dialectical interrelationships between characters, social structures, and institutional processes. She wished to proceed “from persons, in terms of history, society, and the world.” Her emphasis was not on Active Man or Passive Man, not on prime movers or second-handers. Rather, “the story must be primarily a picture of the whole,” Rand stated in her journal.46 For Rand, Atlas Shrugged was “to be much more a ‘social’ novel than The Fountainhead.” First and foremost, the novel had to focus on the cluster of relationships that constitute the social totality:
Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are out consciously to destroy him. But the theme was Roark—not Roark’s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation. (x)
As a novel, Atlas Shrugged explores these relations in every dimension of human life. Rand traces the links between political economy and sex, education and art, metaphysics and psychology, money and moral values. She concentrates extensively on the union of spiritual and physical realms, on the specific, concrete means by which certain productive individuals move the world, and by which others live off of their creations. She attempts to show the social importance of the creative act by documenting what would happen if the prime movers, the “men of the mind,” were to go on strike.47
No summary of Atlas Shrugged could possibly unravel its intricacies. The book boasts a long list of protagonists and villains, but it centers around the exploits of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, two industrialists who attempt to keep their respective businesses afloat in a global economy plagued by extensive government intervention and growing social chaos. The economic devastation wrought by growing statism is made worse by a conspiracy of omission. As the state becomes more intrusive, creative thinkers and producers from every profession begin to disappear. They unite secretly behind John Galt, a brilliant inventor, who leads a “strike of the men of the mind.” These people of creative ability desert their businesses and leave the statists nothing to loot. They retire to a capitalist utopia in the mountains of Colorado known as Galt’s Gulch.
It takes Dagny a long time to realize that she is fighting to keep her transcontinental railroad alive in a parasitical society that is slowly consuming her. As the world heads toward cataclysm, the leader of the United States government takes to the airwaves to issue a call for calm. Using specially developed technology, Galt interrupts the broadcast and proceeds to explain the cause of the decline of civilization. His speech touches on nearly every major branch of philosophy; it is the essence of Rand’s Objectivist worldview. Galt asks the remaining producers to stop permitting their own victimization and join the strike. When the strike succeeds in stopping the motor of the world, the people of creative ability return on their own terms, to rebuild a truly human society.
Integrating science fiction and fantasy, symbolism and realism, philosophy and romance, Rand’s novel inspires passionate responses from admirers and critics alike. Admirers see the book as the credo of a new intellectual movement, but critics from both ends of the political spectrum are repulsed. Left-leaning reviewers abhorred Rand’s preoccupation with capitalism, whereas conservative columnists were sickened by Rand’s atheism. Granville Hicks (1957) asserted that “the book is written out of hate.” He condemned Rand for “cheerfully” celebrating “the destruction of civilization.” And Whittaker Chambers, writing for National Review, sensed that Rand was heavily indebted to Nietzsche. But he believed that in her atheism and “materialism,” Rand had greater affinity with Marx. Chambers wrote: “Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Chambers believed that in the “dictatorial tone” and “overriding arrogance” of the book, one can hear a voice “from almost any page … commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”48
These hostile reviews from the left and the right partially reflected Rand’s own belief that she had finally achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis that was neither Marxist nor religious. In her philosophic journals, Rand explained that her novel had to “vindicate the industrialist” as “the author of material production.” Rand wished to secularize the spiritual, and spiritualize the material:
The material is only the expression of the spiritual; that it can neither be created nor used without the spiritual (thought); that it has no meaning without the spiritual, that it is only the means to a spiritual end—and therefore, any new achievement in the realm of material production is an act of high spirituality, a great triumph and expression of man’s spirit. And that those who despise “the material” are those who despise man and whose basic premises are aimed at man’s destruction.49
For Rand, the “spiritual” did not pertain to an otherworldly faculty, but rather to an activity of human consciousness. Reason, as “the highest kind of spiritual activity,” was required “to conquer, control, and create in the material realm” (ibid.). Rand did not limit material activities to purely industrial production. She wished to “show that any original rational idea, in any sphere of human activity, is an act of creation and creativeness” (ibid.). This applies equally to the activity of industrialists and artists, businessmen and intellectuals, scientists and philosophers. Each of these spheres is accorded epistemological significance.
By connecting reason and production, thought and activity, theory and practice, Rand intended to uncover the “deeper, philosophical error” upon which these dichotomies were based. As such, Atlas Shrugged was designed to “blast the separation of man into ‘body’ and ‘soul,’ the opposition of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’” Rand rejected the metaphysical dualists who had bifurcated human existence. She proclaimed in her journals that “man is an indivisible entity.” Mind and body “can be considered separately only for purposes of discussion, not in actual fact.” In reality, the human individual is an integrated whole.
This vision is central to Galt’s sixty-page speech, which took Rand two years to complete (B. Branden 1986, 266). It abounds with ideas and principles that served as the basis for Rand’s formal philosophical totality. But Rand’s transcendence of dualism is just as obvious in those sections of Galt’s speech which were edited out of the final manuscript. Rand writes:
You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?50
Rand’s revolt against dualism was motivated by a profound desire to exalt a heroic and integrated view of human existence. Even in the sex act, Rand’s characters show a passionate spirituality that is not cut off from intense physical pleasure. In her journals, Rand explained that she wanted to dramatize the “essential, unbreakable tie between sex and spirit—which is the tie between body and soul.” The religionists damned human beings for the sins of the flesh, whereas the materialists divorced man’s mind from the functions of his body. Rand proclaimed that her morality of rational selfishness was designed for human life on earth. In her ethos, sex is as much a spiritual celebration as it is a physical one.51
Rand projects this mind-body synthesis in a fictional representation of the “ideal man.” She explains that her chief protagonist, John Galt, “has no intellectual contradiction and, therefore, no inner conflict.” He experiences a joy in living that is not determined by pain or fear or guilt.52 Each of Rand’s heroes reflects this same “worship of joy” to a lesser degree, but all are united by Galt’s oath, one that is similar to the credo enunciated by Equality 7-2521 in Anthem. Galt states: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (1069).
After years of literary and philosophic integration, Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957. She credited herself with having created a new, nonreligious morality through an aesthetic medium. She aimed to bridge the gap between art and entertainment. She wrote in her journal that traditional morality sees “art” and “entertainment” as polar opposites. Art is supposed to be “serious and dull.” Entertainment is enjoyable, but superficial. No serious work of art, in such a traditional view, could possibly be both entertaining and “true to the deeper essence of life.”53 Rand rejected this distinction, and presented her novel as an organic totality, a work that fused action, adventure, and sensuality with philosophy, contemplation, and spirituality.
THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER
After Atlas Shrugged, Rand turned toward a more systematized presentation of her philosophy in essays, books, and lectures. As early as 1958, a year after the publication of the novel, she was planning a book on her philosophy, which she had named Objectivism.54 Its subtitle was to be “A Philosophy for Living on Earth.” In her journal, Rand wrote: “The purpose of this book is to make its sub-title redundant.”55 Though Rand never authored such a systematic formal treatise, much the same could be said about the subtitles of her anthologies, particularly The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand sought to make these books’ subtitles redundant too. She labored for many years as the champion of both “rational selfishness” and “laissez-faire capitalism.” Her concept of egoism conjoined the adjective “rational” to the noun “selfishness” in such a way to collapse their distinctions. Human beings are most selfish when they are pursuing their own rationally defined values and interests. Human beings are most rational when their values and interests are self-motivated. Likewise, Rand sought to collapse the distinction between the adjective “laissez-faire” and the noun “capitalism.” Capitalism was an unknown ideal for Rand, because it had yet to be discovered in its purest and only legitimate form.
It could be said that for Rand, the notion of rational self-interest was internal to the concept of egoism; the notion of laissez-faire was internal to the concept of a genuinely capitalist social system. She and others explored many of these principles with increasing breadth and depth in such publications as The Objectivist Newsletter (1962–65), The Objectivist (1966–71), and The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–76). Important essays from these periodicals were anthologized in such nonfiction works as The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967), The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), The Romantic Manifesto (1971), Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979), and Rand’s posthumously published works, Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982) and The Voice of Reason (1989). However, Rand’s first nonfiction work to appear in book form was the lead essay of For the New Intellectual, which presented philosophical passages culled from the body of Rand’s fiction. Rand’s harsh and polemical tone, coupled with her caricaturing of many philosophers, led Sidney Hook to denounce the book for its sloganeering: “This is the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union. In a free culture there must always be room for vigorous polemic and controversy but civility of mind is integral to the concept of a civilized society.”56
Despite pinpointing a very real lack of civility in Rand’s exposition, Hook did not realize that Rand’s impulse toward synthesis was indeed the way philosophy had been written in Russia for many generations. Rand provoked the wrath of academicians partially because, like her Russian philosophical ancestors, she was an outcast, a social critic writing with a passionately immoderate tone that was far more accessible to the general public and far less considerate of scholarly give-and-take.
As her sales increased, so did her impact. She electrified audiences on television and radio, and in newspapers and magazines. With the establishment of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (N.B.I.), Rand’s philosophy was mass marketed through the rental of taped courses. Rand made personal appearances at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, New York University, and other college campuses across the country. On 2 October 1963, she received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.), from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in recognition of her growing influence (Gladstein 1984, ii).
But in 1968, the Objectivist movement was torn asunder in a schism between Rand and two of her closest friends and associates, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. In later years, it became apparent that the schism was inextricably tied to a collapsing love affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden.57 Even though Rand continued to publish and lecture in the ensuing years, her fractured movement disintegrated under the weight of charges and countercharges. Eventually, Rand’s disillusionment with the state of the world led to her virtual retirement from public life.
Ayn Rand died on 6 March 1982 and was buried in Valhalla, New York.
In the years since her death, Objectivist philosophy has emerged as a veritable tradition of thought.
Flowing almost directly from what remained of Rand’s inner circle are the “orthodox” Objectivists, led by Leonard Peikoff. The orthodox school consists of thinkers such as Harry Binswanger, Edwin Locke, Edith Packer, George Reisman, John Ridpath, and Peter Schwartz, among others.
Leonard Peikoff received his doctorate in philosophy at New York University in 1964 under the direction of Sidney Hook. Peikoff’s dissertation was titled “The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classic Logical Ontologism.”58 His mentor criticized him as a “monist” and a “Hegelian,” but this did not deter Peikoff from his Objectivist predilections.59 Yet like a genuine Hegelian, Peikoff argues that no philosophic problems can be resolved in a vacuum, since all issues are interconnected.60 Admitting to a tendency toward rationalism, Peikoff never tires of quoting Hegel’s dictum that “The True is the Whole.”61 He repeats this credo in his books, articles, and courses, warning of the danger of “one-sided distortions” (1983T, lecture 7). His presentation has always been more deductive than inductive, more synthetic than analytic.62 But in many ways, the Peikoff-Rand link parallels the relationship between Engels and Marx. Like Engels, Peikoff has continued to publish and edit many of his mentor’s previously unavailable writings. He has also made an important contribution to the formalized presentation of Rand’s philosophy in his 1991 book, which derives from both the written and oral tradition of Objectivism.
In contrast to the Randian orthodoxy, there are those neo-Objectivist thinkers who are generally associated with the Atlas Society (formerly the Institute for Objectivist Studies), an organization headed by David Kelley. Kelley’s Evidence of the Senses is a realist defense of perception in the Objectivist tradition. Other thinkers who have spoken at Atlas forums or written for its periodicals, include Joan and Allan Blumenthal, Stephen Hicks, the late George Walsh, and the late Kay Nolte Smith.
There is also a group of “libertarian” neo-Objectivists, consisting of such theorists as Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Douglas Den Uyl, and Douglas Rasmussen. This group of thinkers relates Rand’s work to the Aristotelian, classical liberal, and modern libertarian traditions.
Finally, one cannot discount the contributions of Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden. Despite leaving Rand’s inner circle in 1968, the Brandens have each moved in the direction of “revisionism.”63 Nathaniel Branden in particular has emerged from his years with Rand as an important theorist and practitioner of “biocentric” psychology. As the so-called father of the self-esteem movement, Branden has emphasized the role of self-esteem in nearly every aspect of human life. His books include The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969), The Disowned Self (1971), The Psychology of Romantic Love (1980), Honoring the Self (1983), and The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994). Even though he departs from some of Rand’s formulations, he continues to build on the Objectivist approach.64
