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Ayn Rand is not an easy writer to classify or to pin down. She is a self described objectivist but to understand objectivism, you have to read her books, especially "Atlas Shrugged". And while she is often considered the catalyst behind the modern Libertarian movement, her intellectual heir, Leonard Piekov insists that she wanted nothing to do with any populist movement and would not have wanted to have that distinction. Yet, have it she does and, perhaps, for good reason.
Any Rand was born in Petrograd as Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 and immigrated to Chicago in 1926. She never returned. Her childhood dream was to be a writer and her early favorites were the romanticists Rostant and Hugo. Her family was wealthy, her father a pharmacist, but the Russian Revolution nationalized the pharmacy when she was 17 and they were brought to dire poverty. She personally witnessed some of the earliest shots of the revolution. These events profoundly influenced her thinking and her writing. While not autobiographical, "We the Living" comes close to telling her own story.
Her books are hard to read without affecting the reader. She was philosopher, economist, champion of human rights and fierce individualist…all tied into one not very tidy package. Her interviews could be brisk, sometimes even short, and her writing style has that same sense of absoluteness. Her books endure, though, because they speak and they challenge, not because they paint a pretty picture or because they make the reader feel good. Of her books, her novels, perhaps, are most often read and most accessible.
"The Fountainhead" is the story of her sense of morality and integrity. It's the story of her rebellious hero, Howard Roark, an architect and fierce individualist who builds skyscrapers for which his nemesis Keating steals credit. Unscathed, Roark continues building for the sake of building, not for the sake of the popularity or social status that Keating craves and is willing to compromise all else to attain. In the end, one of them wins over the other and is rewarded. A third character, Dominique, believes that integrity will lead to destruction by the world. It is interesting to learn what she discovers at the end of the novel.
In "We the Living", Rand's earliest novel from 1936, Rand tells the story of a young woman who is torn by two young men during the early days of the Russian Revolution; an aristocrat whom she loves and a communist who loves her. An Italian film was made of this book before the Second World War but the Nazi's destroyed it. Before she died, she was largely able to reconstruct the film. Another early novel from 1938 is "Anthem", a story about Rand's view of the human spirit and has often been compared to Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1984".
Perhaps most essential in the communication of her notion of objectivism is "Atlas Shrugged". With the opening words, "Who is John Galt?" and repeated many times before we actually meet him, we are introduced to industrialists Dagney Taggart, the railroad heiress, Francisco d'Anconia, president of a copper mine in S. America and Hank Reardon, a Steel empire founder and president and Dagney's secret lover. When we finally meet John Galt, it's when he takes over the radio waves and Rand spends an entire chapter preaching about man's highest moral ideals, her sermon on the mount.
Objectivism is about rationalism, about the individual. As an appendix to "Atlas Shrugged", she wrote, "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Objectivism rejects the ethical codes of self-sacrifice and selflessness altruism doesn't exist. One of her non-fictional works, "The Virtue of Selfishness" is a collection of essays, most of which appeared in "The Objectivist Newsletter", on this subject. Many people find her comments about government appealing. For example:
"The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence - to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness."
Dave Burrows
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