This charge, often delivered with fervor and hatred that barely masks anti-Israel prejudice, carries enormous moral weight for many people as it invites comparisons to the Holocaust. Let’s break down why this claim has no basis in reality.

The Holocaust is the paradigmatic case of genocide. Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews and millions of others.⁴ What distinguished this massacre from others?

Genocide has a specific motivation: Perpetrators of genocide judge certain groups to be inherently superior to others.⁵ The Nazis believed that Jews and others were corrupting the German race through intermarriage. From this warped perspective, the mass deportation and murder of millions of innocent and unarmed people was rationalized by the Nazis as an act of self-defense.

But of course the Jews posed no real threat of violence to anyone in Germany, none that could possibly justify removing them by force. Instead, they were merely an obstacle in the way of the perverse goal of racial purification. Thus, in reality, genocide is not any kind of “self-defense” but unprovoked aggression against innocent individuals.

By contrast, Hamas has long posed a military and terrorist threat against Israel, since its founding in 1987. Since it consolidated dictatorial rule in Gaza in 2007, it’s launched numerous rocket attacks on Israel. On October 7th, 2023, their operatives invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 hostages. It was the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history. Israel rightfully demanded the immediate return of the hostages, and Hamas refused. Israel did not want war: It wanted to hold the perpetrators of October 7th responsible for their crimes, and to allow its citizens to continue with their lives in a free society. In stark contrast with the Nazi genocide, Israel’s war was truly motivated by self-defense.

The attack by Hamas on October 7th, on the other hand, was genuinely genocidal: It aimed at killing Jews and at destroying the nation of Israel out of religiously inspired antisemitic hatred. The 1988 Hamas Charter cites Islamic texts: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.”⁶ Sickeningly, Hamas frames the killing of Jews as virtuous and deserving of divine reward, and teaches children in schools that Jews are inherently corrupt, violent, and treacherous.⁷ All of this aims at fomenting ongoing hatred against Jews, using antisemitic tropes, such as claims of global financial manipulation and warmongering. They eerily echo Nazi propaganda.

Moreover, to the extent that civilians in Gaza suffer from the war, it is the moral responsibility of Hamas. It initiated a barbaric attack, leading Israel to retaliate in self-defense. Further, Hamas treats Palestinians as mere pawns to be sacrificed in their religious and racial war. Hamas orders Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation orders, intentionally putting them in harm’s way, and uses houses, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure as command centers or arms depots.

By contrast, Israel clearly has no such mission to kill all Palestinians: It sought the destruction of Hamas. If Israel did want to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza, it could do so easily, by simply smothering Gaza with bombs indiscriminately. Instead, Israel minimizes violence against noncombatants, via humanitarian corridors, bomb warnings, and the use of precision weapons. I would argue that Israel goes too far in attempting to protect enemy civilians. But even if you thought Israel’s military tactics were unjust, this would still provide no basis for the charge of genocide.

The charge of Israeli genocide is morally corrupt. It requires an incredible series of evasions. It evades that Israel’s motivation is self-defense, and that Hamas’s is actually to commit genocide. It evades that Israel seeks to defend its citizens against a genocidal opponent that repeatedly attacks them. In truth, Israel’s war to defeat a fanatical enemy is the moral opposite of genocide.

Consider the moral inversion: The focus of Israel as the perpetrator of genocide not only distracts from this reality but treats the real perpetrators of genocide (Hamas and its many supporters) as victims. Giving Hamas this moral cover enables their genocide.

Justice demands that we condemn this inversion and dismiss the mendacious charge of genocide against Israel.

Image credit: HAZEM BADER / AFP via Getty Images

1. New York Times, “Vance Heckled in Antiwar Protest at Turning Point USA Event,” April 14, 2026.

2. Mathilda Heller, “German Lawyers File Complaint against Merz, Officials for ‘Aiding and Abetting Gaza Genocide,’” Jerusalem Post, April 14, 2026.

3. Marjorie Cohn, “The Failure to Stop Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Has Allowed It to Expand Into Lebanon,” Truthout, April 13, 2026.

4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?" Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed March 21, 2026.

5. Ayn Rand Institute, “Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?,” New Ideal, October 13, 2025.

6. Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (Hamas), The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), August 18, 1988, art. 7, accessed March 21, 2026.

7. Elliott Abrams, “The Palestinian Authority Continues to Teach Hate and to Reward Terror,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 31, 2025.

While Netflix had the WBD board’s blessing, the merger faced an insurmountable challenge from regulators’ and Trump’s opposition. Eventually, David Ellison’s Paramount wrested WBD out of Netflix’s hands. But the saga ended with unanswered questions: was Netflix simply unable to outbid its competition, or was it pressured into submission by those holding discretionary power over business by means of antitrust laws? And if two media companies were strong-armed out of the deal, were their First Amendment rights violated?

It might seem that David Ellison’s Paramount simply offered more money than Netflix investors thought WBD was worth. But to think Neflix was simply outbid, one would have to ignore that Paramount’s deal was backed by the president of the United States in exchange for Ellison’s promise of sweeping changes to the Trump-critical editorial board at CNN (owned by WBD).

Ellison himself boasted that Paramount’s regulatory path was more certain than Netflix’s because of his friendly relationship with the administration, and because the size of the Paramount/WBD merger wouldn’t trigger an automatic presumption of illegality under the antitrust laws (as a Netflix/WBD combination likely would). Despite the DOJ’s promise that Paramount will “absolutely not” have a fast track to approval, and despite being a merger of two major legacy film-studio-and-network operators, Paramount in fact faced no hurdles in clearing the review stage in which the DOJ bogged down Netflix.

Because of differential regulatory scrutiny, Netflix didn’t just lose a business opportunity. Together with WBD they were strong-armed out of the deal. Withdrawing in the face of an uphill regulatory battle is not the same as losing a fair competitive bid.

Uniquely concerning, as many recognize, is that they were strong-armed because of Trump’s hostility to Netflix’s ideology and CNN’s critical stance toward the administration. Republicans more broadly opposed the merger because they are terrified of how a diversified Hogwarts could affect their children, fearing that Netflix–WBD would spread more “woke” ideas.

With regard to CNN, the threat to intellectual freedom is out in the open. But the attack on freedom of thought is also on display when antitrust enforcers scrutinize a private business deal because they’d prefer Netflix’s influence in the culture be pruned. Both WBD and Netflix were robbed of their intellectual freedom protected by the First Amendment. Don’t let the idea that it was a routine antitrust merger investigation obscure that.

Even if Paramount weren’t trying to snatch the deal, consider what Netflix and WBD would have had to avoid during the regulatory review process to curry political favor. A stand-up special that would pique the interest of vengeful regulators? A documentary unfavorable to the administration? A movie that triggers sensitivities of the party in power? What would get silently killed or edited while the threat of antitrust loomed over the deal?

Netflix and WBD faced an impossible choice: pursue their business strategy at the cost of fighting an unwinnable regulatory battle while walking on eggshells in their content decisions, or withdraw from the deal. So they withdrew. Paramount’s higher bid made the fight less attractive, but it doesn’t mean the antitrust threat didn’t play a role in swaying WBD away from Netflix.

With the Netflix deal killed, the projects Netflix and WBD would have produced together died too. What things will go unsaid and not be portrayed in what documentaries, movies, or shows that will not be made? The state’s intervention silenced the voice of the new company before it could take its first breath.

To regulate the size of a media company is to regulate the reach of its ideas, and thereby violate the freedom of thought, speech, and action, all of which are inseparable from each other. Blocking a merger between Netflix/WBD because it would have too much “power” is like threatening a publisher by saying, “Nice printing presses you’ve got here — it would be a shame if you lost a few.” Inhibiting the free use of property is inhibiting free thought and communication that property serves.

Regardless of whether you favor Netflix, prefer Paramount, or simply want WBD to stay a separate entity, you should be worried about any side using the force of law to push the outcome in their favor.

If we don’t defend the right of businesses to merge and speak freely, we will soon find that the only voices left are those the government has cleared for broadcast. That is a horror story we should only see on the screen, not in reality.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on April 15, 2026.

Image credit: NurPhoto / NurPhoto / via Getty Images

A&M’s policy bans professors from teaching “gender ideology” and even just raising the topics of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” That last part is notable: no discussion of these topics is permitted, even if it includes multiple viewpoints and encourages students to think for themselves.

The implicit view is that exposure to certain ideas, by itself, has a corrupting effect. Hearing the views of “gender ideology” expressed or even described is thought to act on students’ impressionable minds, turning them into adherents to this ideology. The only safe policy is to shield them from such notions entirely.

But I for one don’t experience ideas as imprinting themselves on my mind against my will, turning me into a mindless adherent. I was exposed to many “woke” claims as a college student, but I was able to think about the arguments and evidence presented in their favor and decide whether or not to accept them.

Upon assessing the evidence and arguments, I did accept a few, such as the point that women and non-white people still face subtle forms of discrimination that others sometimes do not notice. But I did not encounter any compelling reasons for the notion that grouping people into identity-based collectives and treating the historically oppressed groups more favorably is a solution. So I did not accept this idea.

True, some people do choose to unthinkingly absorb ideas from others, including “gender ideology.” The idea that all knowledge works this way is probably familiar to religious conservatives. Their worldview preaches blind faith rather than rational understanding as the way to know religious truths. But religious conservatives should not assume everyone parrots the viewpoints of whatever seeming authorities they happen to have encountered.

The only way a university can help dogmatic students who unthinkingly accept ideas from others is by urging them to think for themselves. Sheltering all students from controversial or false ideas to allegedly “protect” those with this mindset only inhibits the intellectual development of the students who are most thoughtful.

Image credit: MAXIM ZHURAVLEV / iStock / via Getty Images

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, defines “state capitalism” as “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”¹ Ip argues that the U.S. is becoming more similar to China by adopting “state capitalism with American characteristics.” Commentators at prominent organizations like The Washington Post, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Cato Institute have made similar statements.^2,3,4,5

There’s reason to worry that the United States is heading toward a system like China’s where the government exerts more control over businesses. But the term “state capitalism” obscures the real nature of this disturbing trend and muddies our understanding of capitalism. There’s a different concept — one completely antithetical to capitalism — that accurately captures the current trend, and it’s one that opponents of that trend desperately need to understand more deeply.

The Marxist origin of “state capitalism”

One reason to be suspicious of the term “state capitalism” is its origin. The term doesn’t come from advocates of free markets, but from Marxist theoreticians.

According to Marx, genuine socialism arises only when the state “withers away” after the revolution of the working class. His collaborator Friedrich Engels claimed that a system in which the state seizes private businesses from their owners and runs them itself is still a form of capitalism, and the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht introduced the term “state capitalism” to name the situation Engels described.^6,7

Subsequently, some Marxists have used the term to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. The brutal Soviet dictatorship, they argued, cannot be blamed on socialism, because it is not real socialism — it’s “state capitalism.”⁸

This origin gives opponents of Marxism (like Ip and Cato) every reason to ask whether it carries false Marxist assumptions that distort discussions of political systems.

It does. The term “state capitalism” presupposes the Marxist view that the defining feature of capitalism is that a “class” of people owns the “means of production” and employs others to perform labor (who are thereby, they say, “exploited”). Marxists consequently don’t claim to recognize a fundamental difference between private industry and industries owned and operated by the state. To Marxists, any society in which one “class” of people owns the means of production is some type of capitalism. Under the “real socialism” they imagine, “classes” will disappear along with the state.

The Marxist view, in essence, is that the state becomes a capitalist by owning and operating a business. But this wrongly conflates private businesses with government-owned businesses. By applying “state capitalism” to China and to Trump’s policy of acquiring ownership shares in businesses, Ip and others are buying into a blatantly Marxist distortion.

Private vs. state-owned businesses

There are fundamental differences between private ownership and state control that must not be ignored. A private business operating in a free economy can only deal with people by voluntary agreement. Its employees, suppliers, customers and investors are free to decide whether to deal with it or not. And it can only stay in existence by figuring out how to make profits — which it can only do by producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Not so with state-owned businesses like China’s three largest mobile carriers, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. These three companies almost completely dominate the market because the Chinese government prohibits any new company from entering the field unless it is at least 51% government-owned. This means that anyone who wants to do business in the telecommunications market is forced to deal with one of these three firms.

And although Chinese state-owned enterprises have some nominal autonomy in their operation, they must seek approval on all major decisions from a committee of members of the Chinese Communist Party organized within the enterprise.⁹ And the central government body that oversees many of the country’s state-owned enterprises can force them directly to make changes to their operations. For example, all three of these companies were engaged both in operating cellular networks and in constructing cell towers. In 2014, however, the Chinese government forced these companies to give up their tower construction businesses. It took over their assets related to tower construction and created a new state-owned business, China Tower Company.¹⁰

These state-owned businesses operate in a fundamentally different way from Verizon and AT&T. The owners of private companies are free to decide which industries to enter, what goods and services to produce. They succeed by creating value and offering trades that people willingly agree to. But a government forcibly controls the decisions of executives of state-owned businesses companies. And it runs a business like China Mobile by wielding force to limit competition. Describing this authoritarian control as a kind of “capitalism” obscures the fundamental difference between voluntary trade and coercion.

Marxists, of course, want to obscure that difference, because they want to destroy the system of free enterprise. The coinage “state capitalism” doesn’t just permit them to whitewash Marxism by distancing it from the Soviet nightmare; it also enables them to smear private entrepreneurs by equating their operations with government coercion. Advocates of economic freedom should not walk into their trap.

The right concept for America’s ominous direction

Think about what it means more broadly to say that both China and a country with completely free, private enterprise are “capitalist” societies simply because someone or other “owns” its businesses.

China, a country with state ownership of businesses, is a brutal dictatorship that heavily restricts speech, surveils its citizens and arrests them for long periods of time without any due process.¹¹ A country with free markets in which businesses are privately owned could also completely and consistently protect individual rights, including not just property rights but also freedom of expression, personal liberty and due process. On all the most important political issues, such a country would be the opposite of China. Equating them under the label “capitalism” would be absurd. It would serve only to whitewash China and/or smear free countries.

I would argue, following Ayn Rand, that capitalism is best understood as a system “based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”¹² This definition highlights the stark difference between a country of private enterprise and a country in which the economy is largely controlled by the state, and reserves the term “capitalism” only for the former.

On this conception of capitalism, it doesn’t make sense to think the United States was a fully capitalist country even pre-Trump. The U.S. certainly has much more private ownership and economic freedom than China, and it does a far better job protecting citizens’ rights more generally. But the regulatory state has long infringed in major ways on Americans’ economic freedom. By the 21st century, the American economy was already only partly capitalist, mixed with heavy elements of statism. It would be most apt to describe it as a mixed economy moving further and further away from capitalism.

What is it moving toward? If not “state capitalism,” is there a name for the specific type of statism toward which the U.S. is moving under Trump? Another statement from Rand is illuminating here. In contrast to socialism, which abolishes private property in favor of state ownership of industry, there is a variant of statism in which individuals “retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”¹³

The name for that system is fascism.

Although people today mainly associate fascism with racism and nationalism, Rand’s point is that there is also a characteristically fascist type of control over the economy.¹⁴ In spite of still calling themselves “communist,” the Chinese government exercises this same type of fascist control over many of its officially private businesses. And Trump’s use of tariffs and regulation to control American businesses are an ominous step in America’s journey toward the same destination.

Those of us who oppose the shift of the U.S. political system in the direction of China should name it clearly for what it is. We are not in a transition from one type of capitalism to another, “state capitalism,” but a transition away from capitalism and toward a fascist form of statism. If we are to have a chance at reversing this transition, we must clearly identify it as a fascistic trend, not equate it with its opposite.

Image credit: Djavan Rodriguez /iStock / via Getty Images

1. Greg Ip, “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/economy/the-u-s-marches-toward-state-capitalism-with-american-characteristics-f75cafa8.

2. Editorial Board, “Yet Another Step Toward State Capitalism,” Washington Post, March 28, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/29/graphite-mining-government-stake-state-capitalism.

3. William Henagan, “State Capitalism in America: The Government as Investor, Broker, Rentier . . . Thug?” Council of Foreign Relations, October 28, 2025, https://www.cfr.org/articles/state-capitalism-america-government-investor-broker-rentierthug.

4. Michael Chapman, “Trump’s ‘State Capitalism . . . a Hybrid Between Socialism and Capitalism’ Won’t Make America Great Again,” Cato Institute, August 28, 2025, https://www.cato.org/blog/trumps-state-capitalism-hybrid-between-socialism-capitalism-wont-make-america-great-again.

5. The Editorial Board, “American ‘State Capitalism’ Is Destined for Failure,” Bloomberg, October 24, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-24/american-state-capitalism-is-destined-for-failure.

6. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1908), chap. 3, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39257/pg39257-images.html.

7. Mike Wright et al., “State Capitalism in International Context: Varieties and Variations,” Journal of World Business 56, no. 2 (2021): 101160, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2020.101160.

8. David Lane, “The Challenge of State Capitalisms,” in Global Neoliberal Capitalism and the Alternatives: From Social Democracy to State Capitalisms (Bristol, 2023; online edn., Policy Press Scholarship Online, 18 Jan. 2024), “The Marxist State-capitalist Critique of the Soviet Economy,” https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529220902.003.0015.

9. Wendy Leutert and Sarah Eaton, “Deepening Not Departure: Xi Jinping’s Governance of China’s State-owned Economy,” China Quarterly 248, no. S1 (2021): 200–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741021000795.

10. Tianqi Gu, “The Latest Round of China’s State-owned Enterprise Reforms: The State Advances, the Private Sector Retreats?,” Cogent Social Sciences 10, no. 1 (2024): 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2024.2443033.

11. “The Sinister Disappearance of China’s Bosses,” The Economist, October 8, 2025, https://www.economist.com/business/2025/10/08/the-sinister-disappearance-of-chinas-bosses.

12. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, edited by Ayn Rand (Signet, 1966), 10.

13. Ayn Rand, “The Fascist New Frontier,” in The Ayn Rand Column, edited by Peter Schwartz, 2nd ed. (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1998), 98.

14. Rand is not the only one who thinks this. See the discussion in this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, starting at 45:27.

This winter, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and I co-taught an ARI course titled “Reactionary Authoritarianism: From Mussolini to the ‘New Right.’” Working through the historical readings and lectures with Nikos gave me a richer understanding of the ancestors of today’s anti-freedom factions — and the dynamics that enable them. Three brief reflections:

1. What fueled fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism lives on.

To understand the rise of these movements in the 20th century, it’s crucial to view them as part of a wider trend, not only or primarily as responses to such upheavals as World War I and the Great Depression. The wider trend, Nikos argued, is a rejection of the best features of the Enlightenment: its emphasis on reason, individualism, and freedom. That anti-Enlightenment impulse lives on. You can see it infusing the self-described “post-liberals,” the “new right,” the National Conservatives, and other MAGA-adjacent factions today, which repudiate “individualism” and “capitalism” in favor of the nation or tribe.

2. The deliberate attacks on “individualism.”

It’s well known how fascists and Nazis vilified “individualism,” but a theme throughout the course is how thoroughly that ideal was misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted by its detractors. Deliberately so. The individual, left free to think and act on his own, was seen as corrosive of group bonds. But in reviling the individual, they offer a false picture: a self-absorbed seeker of momentary, decadent pleasures, unconcerned with moral norms and traditions. Such people exist, but as Ayn Rand argued, it’s false to view them as (genuine) individualists. Consider how she projects the ideal of individualism in the character of Howard Roark, whose animating principle is his independent rational judgment, and who is vested deeply in building a lifelong productive career; Roark rejects moral norms and traditions when he judges them to be irrational.

The distortion relies on what Rand called a “package deal”: the fallacious bundling together of things that are essentially different. Part of how this works: they lump the rational individualist together with the self-absorbed pleasure seeker, because of superficial, non-essential commonality, since they appear self-interested and stand apart from the collective. Echoes of this are evident today in the writings of Patrick Deneen (Regime Change; Why Liberalism Failed) and Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism), whose work we’ve written about in New Ideal and analyzed on the podcast. There’s urgent work to be done clearing away the package-deal conception of individualism and educating people about the actual nature of this ideal.

3. The power of moral sanction.

Well before Britain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938, the German political establishment had already enabled his entry into the mainstream. A similar pattern was involved in Mussolini’s rise in Italy. Broadly, the ideologists of racism, tribalism, authoritarianism, and kindred factions are often grasping for precisely this: a moral sanction from reputable, establishment figures. They want the semblance of belonging in respectable, civilized society. This is an enduring dynamic that people grossly under-recognize.

Flash forward to a recent example, but on a far smaller scale. When Tucker Carlson hosted the racist, antisemitic, misogynistic influencer Nick Fuentes for a long, friendly conversation, it was moral laundering. Fuentes was getting the same thing he enjoyed after his 2022 dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Seeing this pattern — then and now — deepened my appreciation for Rand’s insight that evil is impotent and parasitic on the good. Put another way, there is enormous power in withholding the “sanction of the victim.”

One personal highlight of this eight-week course was working with Nikos Sotirakopoulos. He led the course, selected the readings, and lectured each week; I consulted on the outline and chimed in during class. Nikos is a dedicated, energizing teacher and a historian committed to getting at the facts of the matter.

Coming up this spring and summer are several new ARI courses, including on Rand’s individualist ethics, the corporation, and globalization — frequent targets of today’s dominant political tribes.

Rand came to America 100 years ago this February as an expatriate from Soviet Russia. She was indignant at the question in 1973, no doubt, because she saw clearly the fate that awaited her had she not escaped. She knew that, as an outspoken anti-communist, individualist writer, she would not have survived Soviet persecution. So, in 1926, she applied for a visa to travel to the U.S. to study the film industry. While she had assured both Soviet and American immigration officials that she planned to return to the USSR to share what she had learned, this was never her intention.

Immigration was not a subject of cultural controversy in the heyday of Rand’s career as a political commentator, as it is in ours. So, she never explicitly wrote about such a controversy in her nonfiction essays. She does, of course, endorse free trade as “the essence of capitalism’s foreign policy.” She also endorsed Isabel Paterson’s characterization of free trade, in which “any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.”² Free trade obviously includes the freedom of movement.

Still, opponents of freedom of immigration are incredulous that it is implied by the principles of capitalism. The questioner in 1973 thinks it would be against the self-interest of a nation’s citizens to allow freedom of immigration that lowers a country’s standard of living. Rand replies forcefully that the questioner has no understanding of her conception of individualist self-interest: freedom of immigration does not have this effect and, even assuming it did, rational self-interest could never include the right to forcibly bar others’ freedom to trade, move and compete, violating their right to pursue their own self-interest.

In any case, no one who is familiar with Rand’s most famous works should be surprised for a moment by her position on immigration. Her most famous works are also the works that bear the mark of her own experience as an immigrant and of her empathy for other individuals fighting the same battle. I’m speaking, of course, of her fiction.

Rand’s fiction does not focus on the immigration of non-Americans into America. It does, however, portray the plight of the migrant, more abstractly considered. Three out of four of her major works of fiction portray heroes and heroines who must seek refuge somewhere far away from home to live in freedom — whether or not in another national jurisdiction.

Like all of Rand’s fictional heroes and like Rand herself, Rand’s heroes are unwilling to settle for a life of stagnation or oppression. They risk everything to find a better life somewhere else, even when it means picking up stakes and (often) breaking ties with everyone they know.

Anyone who appreciates Rand’s heroes would do well to ponder how their stories relate to the current immigration debate. To assist them, I will highlight the relevant aspects of these stories.

(Note: this essay contains plot spoilers.)

We the Living

We the Living, Rand’s semi-autobiographical account of life under communism in Soviet Russia, was her first novel, and the one that most obviously tells the story of the spirit of one exceptionally brave and fiercely independent would-be migrant to the West, Kira Argounova.

Like Rand herself, Kira and her family are uprooted from their native St. Petersburg by the Russian Civil War. Kira flees home with her family to the distant Crimea (in present-day Ukraine) to take refuge from the Reds behind White Russian lines. When the Reds are victorious, they return to a renamed Petrograd where they have lost everything: her father’s business, their home, most material comforts, and their freedom (they are regularly conscripted into street labor and forbidden from most other jobs).

Throughout the story, for Kira and her family the “magic words” that give them distant hope are “from abroad”: news of possible action against the Soviets, rare, smuggled cosmetics, the latest operettas, news of unheard-of comforts and freedoms — and hope of refuge abroad.³

Kira then tries to flee Russia when her lover Leo pays black market figures who “smuggle human flesh” to take them to Germany.⁴ “Beyond the snow was the world; beyond the snow was that consummate entity to which the country behind them bowed reverently, wistfully, tragically: Abroad. Life began beyond the snow.”⁵ But they are intercepted by the Red Baltic Fleet, and Leo is imprisoned. Only chance decency from the powerful gets him out.

For a while Kira dreams of becoming an engineer in Russia, but her hopes are dashed when she is expelled from the university for her bourgeois origins. She watches workers at a building site, imagining herself as an engineer, but realizing it will never happen in Russia. She still has hope: “And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: ‘Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .’”⁶

Leo nearly dies from tuberculosis and then is psychologically destroyed as he is cut off from all avenues of meaningful work. Kira sees him falling apart but saves money from his work in the black market: “For the escape. For Europe. . . . We'll do it . . . some day.”⁷ But when Leo is arrested for his black marketeering, he breaks. She now has nothing left in Russia. She proclaims this to a member of the secret police:

Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself? And who — in this damned universe — who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left — look! . . . . Well, here I am! Here’s what’s left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life.⁸

With Leo gone, Kira makes a last, desperate attempt to get out of this airtight cellar — on her own. She applies for a foreign passport but is told it would be pointless because “No foreign country will admit a Russian.”⁹ She’s told that if she tries to escape, she’ll have no money, no profession, no friends. She does not care. “I want to get out.”¹⁰ She knows that human life is more than eating and digesting food.

Her foreign passport is denied. She is indifferent: she knows no one has the right to forbid life to the living and dares to flee the country illegally. She sells everything she can to buy information about a way across the border with Latvia, and a white coat to serve as camouflage as she walks across the border in the snow. Her relatives try one last time to give her hope that things will change for the better. But she bids them farewell.

The ending of We the Living is unforgettable. But as it approaches, we see an expression of the conviction that propels Kira forward to a better life, the view that the misery and evil around her are an aberration and that things must be better, abroad:

She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was awaiting her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.¹¹ 

Anthem

None of Ayn Rand’s other novels bear the mark of the migrant experience as explicitly as We the Living. But Anthem and Atlas Shrugged feature analogous plot elements, in which heroes, beset by restrictions and oppression in their native land and wanting a better life seek to escape. Even more important, like all of Ayn Rand’s fiction, they portray heroes willing to stake everything for the sake of their happiness.

Anthem is set in a dystopian future society that has regressed to a medieval standard of living because of a global collectivist dictatorship. The word “I” has been replaced by “we.” Equality 7-2521, obviously more intelligent and curious than his peers, longs to be a scientific scholar. But he is assigned a “life Mandate” as a street sweeper. Though torn by guilt for his “sin of preference,” he refuses to accept his lot: he steals away in the night to an abandoned tunnel where he discovers remnants of ancient technology and re-invents the light bulb. Holding out hope that he will be able to become a scholar, he shares his invention with the authorities. But the Council of Scholars condemns him for the crime of thinking for himself and challenging the established “knowledge.”

So, Equality flees from his society, alone into an uninhabited, ungoverned “Uncharted Forest.” In this new freedom, he discovers further remnants of the long-lost civilization, re-discovers the word “I” and abandons the morality that had paralyzed him with guilt. He realizes that the morality that each must serve as a means to others had brought his society to its primitive state.

In rejecting the morality that bound him in service, he realizes he is not tied down to his brothers or his place of birth: “Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the lodestone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.”¹² He realizes his happiness is not the means to any other end, but “its own goal.”¹³ With his new knowledge and conviction, he begins a plan to help his friends escape from the collectivist society and build a new and powerful free society in the Uncharted Forest.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged repeats the pattern of Anthem’s allegory, but tells the story in a more recognizable, contemporary American setting. In this setting, all the nations of the world except America have collapsed into collectivist “People’s States.” Many of those left with ambition and hope for the future, like Argentinean Francisco d’Anconia and Norwegian Ragnar Danneskjöld, have come to America. But America is rapidly turning into a People’s State itself. The world of Atlas Shrugged represents the horror of a world where there is no longer any “abroad” left to which anyone can flee.

Like Equality, John Galt in Atlas is also an innovative genius who has invented an electrical wonder (a new source of power). But he is never tempted to share his invention with his society once he realizes the depth of its demand for his sacrifice. So, he destroys all remnants of his invention and quits his job as a researcher.

Rather than escaping to an uncharted wilderness as Equality does, Galt convinces his friends Francisco and Ragnar to go on strike with him, withdrawing the intellectual value they add to the world. Eventually they take refuge with other strikers in the American wilderness, in a valley in the Colorado mountains. Each of them is an ambitious individual who is unwilling to settle for the role of well-fed slave in the collapsing world.

Like Equality, Galt wants to rescue his friends and comrades in spirit from the collapsing world. But he struggles to convince them to join. To achieve this goal, he formulates a new moral philosophy, giving full and conscious voice to the values of ambitious people pursuing their own happiness through creative production. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden eventually join, but not without first having to break free from one form or another of the same errors that tied Equality to his society. But like Equality, Galt and the other strikers hope eventually to rebuild society when the country collapses and the road is clear. And this is the society Galt envisions:

Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.¹⁴

Here it is hard not to see that Galt wants to make America a refuge for those who would escape the rest of the world’s People’s States. He does not imagine that all who come will be paragons of virtue. Some will be irresponsible, but in the society he creates, none of these will have the power to drag others down with them.

A sanctuary for free minds

In 1946, just after she had begun work on Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was also at work on a screenplay dramatizing the history of the development of the American atomic bomb. Though the screenplay for “Top Secret”would never be completed, nor the movie ever made, her research notes draw connections between many of the themes we’ve already explored. The atomic bomb was a quintessential American innovation made possible by the relative freedom in America vs. in the Axis nations — and by the minds of the immigrants fleeing those nations:

The fact is that Germany did not, could not and never would have created the atomic bomb; nor Italy; nor Russia. . . .

Is it an accident that since the beginning of the machine age, all the great, basic, epoch-making inventions and discoveries [“the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the motion picture, the radio”] have come from America and England? Mostly from America, secondly from England — and with very few contributions from all the other countries. Why? Anglo-Saxon superiority? No. The inventors were of all races and nationalities. But they all had to work either in America or in England. . . . If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains — that only free men could have achieved it — we really deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our particular heads.¹⁵

Rand goes on to speak of how Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner all had to flee various statist dictatorships to continue their work. “They could not continue to work there. They had to escape to a free country.”¹⁶ Rand’s notes for Lise Meitner’s story are particularly evocative, as it must have reminded her of her own story escaping Soviet Russia:

Lise Meitner is forced to leave Germany. On the train going to the frontier, she is snubbed and pushed around by arrogant Nazi brown-shirts; the Nazi State has damned her on three counts: the old are useless, women are useless, Jews are useless. She sits alone in a corner of the train, her mind intent on the inexplicable experiment; she makes calculations on a piece of paper. A solution occurs to her suddenly; it is a stunning solution — but she must keep quiet about it. At the frontier, Nazis search her luggage: they take from her an old camera, a typewriter, and other physical objects of such nature; nothing of value to the State, they declare, can be taken out of Germany. We see a close-up of Lise Meitner — the broad forehead, the intelligent eyes. What she is taking out is in her mind.¹⁷

Ayn Rand saw America as an important sanctuary for free minds who rebel against oppressive regimes. She held that even when they sought refuge from an enemy nation during the deadliest war in human history.

Ayn Rand’s fiction is well known for celebrating heroic individuals who create value in the pursuit of their happiness and so defy tyrannical governments who would suppress them. And for Rand the quest for happiness is morally sacred: each of us has the right to pursue our happiness to the ends of the earth.

It’s no wonder then that some of Rand’s heroes and heroines literally go to the ends of the earth — as she did herself when she immigrated to America. So there should be no confusion why she would later say she could never advocate the restriction of immigration. Anyone surprised by this does not grasp the moral meaning of Ayn Rand’s fiction.

Image credit: New York Times Co. / Getty Images

1. Ayn Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” Q&A Session, Ford Hall Forum, Boston, June 1973.

2. Ayn Rand, “The Roots of War,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 35.

3. Ayn Rand, We the Living (New York: Signet, 2011), 70.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Ibid., 116.

6. Ibid., 338.

7. Ibid., 340.

8. Ibid., 426–27.

9. Ibid., 469.

10. Ibid., 470.

11. Ibid., 489–90.

12. Ayn Rand, Anthem (New York: Signet, 1961), 95.

13. Ibid., 95.

14. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged,978.

15. Ayn Rand, “An Analysis of the Proper Approach to a Picture on the Atomic Bomb,” January 2, 1946m 16, Ayn Rand Archives, 048_04B_009.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 048_04B_007.

SpaceX’s reusable Falcon Heavy now delivers payloads to orbit for under $700 per pound; Blue Origin’s New Glenn targets a similar price point. SpaceX’s Starship aims to reduce costs further to under 10s of dollars per pound. The industry’s radical cost reduction has enabled entire new sectors: private planetary science missions, commercial space stations, and asteroid mining ventures.

What changed? The legal framework governing space launch services.

Until 1984, the U.S. government maintained a complete monopoly on space launch through NASA and the Department of Defense. Even after the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 technically permitted private launches, NASA effectively blocked commercial competition by using the Space Shuttle program to offer taxpayer subsidized launch services.

The Space Shuttle, despite being pitched as a vehicle to make spaceflight routine and affordable, ultimately cost approximately $29,000 per pound to orbit — roughly ten times more expensive than Apollo’s Saturn V. It also suffered two tragic failures. Meanwhile, NASA acquired and then abandoned the promising Delta Clipper vertical landing rocket in 1996, delaying by two decades the technology that would eventually revolutionize spaceflight.

The industry’s unfettering occurred gradually: the 1990 Launch Services Purchase Act required NASA and the Department of Defense to procure commercial launch services; the 1998 Commercial Space Act declared that “free and competitive markets create the most efficient conditions for promoting economic development” in space; and the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act established a framework for private crewed spaceflight.

The final barrier fell in 2014 when SpaceX successfully challenged the Air Force’s practice of awarding launch contracts exclusively to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a government-created merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s launch businesses. Only then could new entrants compete on equal terms for lucrative military contracts.

The dramatic improvements made possible by this expanded freedom aren’t merely about better management or technology. They reflect the fundamental difference between government and market approaches to innovation. NASA secures funding through taxation — the forcible expropriation of wealth — by convincing politicians that its programs serve political objectives. Private companies must convince investors to voluntarily provide capital to create commercially viable ventures.

This distinction creates entirely different measures of success. When entrepreneurs are free, they must integrate scientific possibilities with economic realities to deliver valuable services at competitive prices. Success is measured objectively by profitability, which enables increased investment in improved technology. When innovation is administered by the government, “success” is determined by political factors disconnected from economic reality.

The old space industry employed brilliant scientific thinkers, but, because its course was controlled by government force, it necessarily lacked the brilliant entrepreneurial thinkers required for self-sustaining technological progress. Scientists discover what is physically possible, and, when given the freedom to do so, entrepreneurs discover what is economically possible. Together, they transform those possibilities into world-changing realities.

For this progress to continue and to accelerate, the space industry must not merely benefit from its newfound freedom but actively defend it. To this end, the industry must demand that governments take affirmative steps to protect its freedom. The 2015 SPACE Act, Florida’s 2023 Spaceflight Entity Liability Bill, and similar legislation are important steps toward protecting property rights and defining liabilities in space. But more must be done.

For example, as orbital space becomes more crowded, some regions of orbital space may be made unusable by a cascade of colliding objects. Whatever the technical fix, entities that place and operate satellites in stable orbits should be recognized as having a property right not only in the satellites but in the orbits they occupy. Such a property rights framework would recognize the freedom of those creating value in orbital space to continue to do so while avoiding both a tragedy of the commons and more of the central planning that has hobbled space exploration.

America leads in space technology because it has led in the expansion of economic freedom to launch and to explore. By removing barriers to innovation and establishing clear rights and liabilities, we can ensure that the space industry continues or even accelerates its rapid progress. As the cost of reaching orbit falls below $100 per pound, entirely new possibilities will emerge that we can scarcely imagine today.

After fifty years of stagnation, the space industry has finally been unleashed. To secure continued progress in the space industry and to bring its dynamism to other cutting-edge industries, we must recognize and double down on the defense of its essential catalyst: freedom.

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"There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value."
AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED

It is with this sentence from Atlas Shrugged that Ayn Rand began her first exposition of her mature moral philosophy.¹ The Aristotelian resonances are palpable. Aristotle was the first to conceive of life as an activity of which there are distinct forms corresponding to different species, such that there could be such a thing as “Man’s Life” — a form of life specific to human beings.² Aristotle characterized this human form of life as a life of reason, and he was the first to hold up such a life as a standard of value — a “target for living well” — with reference to which an individual could choose all of his goals and actions (EE I.2 1214b6–11). In these respects, Rand’s ethics is deeply Aristotelian, but her conception of the rational, human form of life differs markedly from Aristotle’s own, and there are related differences in the roles the standard of Man’s Life plays in their respective moral philosophies.

According to Aristotle, the ideal of Man’s Life is realized most fully by a philosopher engaged in contemplation of eternal verities — an activity that (in his view) is not meant to bear fruit in action. This same ideal is realized, though in a secondary way, by a political leader prudently deliberating for the sake of his city.³ The contemplator and the statesman both live lives of leisure, in which their time is released from the activities needed to produce the goods needed for survival, and so they are able to focus on living well as distinct from merely living. Thus, for Aristotle, a life of moneymaking (chrēmatistēs) fails to realize the ideal of Man’s Life, because it is something forced upon one by lack of resources (EN I.5 1096a5–6).⁴ By contrast, Rand wrote that “the words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”⁵ It is “the Producer” whom she regarded as “the man of reason” or “the thinker” (FTNI 21), and she characterized production as “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). Although she writes of producers in all professions and at all levels of ability, her ideal is epitomized by “[t]he great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors” (Fountainhead 710).

In the first two sections of this paper, I elucidate the content of the human form of life as understood by Aristotle and Rand, respectively. In my third section, I show how the differences in their view of Man’s Life reflect (and contribute to) different views of how a form of life can serve as an ethical standard. These differences, in turn, have implications for the extent to which their respective moral philosophies provide objective guidance rooted in knowledge of human nature, rather than merely systematizing existing mores or reading them into human nature. Accordingly, I close with a discussion of the objectivity of what each thinker regards as moral knowledge.

Aristotle’s Leisurely Ideal⁶

The subject of Aristotle’s inquiry in ethics is “the human good” — that is, the ultimate end sought in and achievable by human action. By the end of Nicomachean Ethics I.7 (cf. EE II.1) he has identified this good with the excellent performance of the human function. For Aristotle, life is (in its fundamental sense) an activity (DA II.3), and what distinguishes human life from plant and animal life is that the activity centrally involves reason. Thus he thinks that the target at which we must aim to live well is a complete life of reason-involving activity performed excellently. To do something well or excellently is to do it in accordance with the appropriate virtues, and human virtues are those states from which reason functions well. Consequently, most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics (and Eudemian Ethics) is given over to examining virtue. Since Man’s Life is political — that is, lived in citystates — the treatise ends (EN X.9) with a transition into the Politics, which work provides further details about Man’s Life, taking care to distinguish its proper realization — “living well” — from mere “living” (Pol. 1257b41–8a1).

Aristotle’s teaching in Nicomachean Ethics can be briefly summarized as follows. Virtue comes in two broad types corresponding to two broad roles that reason plays in our lives: intellectual virtue perfects our thinking itself, whereas characterological virtue perfects our desires (and consequently our decisions) so that they accord with excellent reasoning.⁷

Thinking can be subdivided into two broad types: contemplation of truths that cannot be changed and deliberation about things we can effect. Contemplation is perfected by the sciences (epistēmai) — chiefly by sophia, which is the science by which we contemplate being qua being in light of its fundamental and universal causes. Deliberation is divisible into deliberation about how to produce specific types of effects (such as health or buildings) and general deliberation about how to act (including whether and when to produce the aforementioned effects). The first sort of deliberation is perfected by the various arts (technai), and the second, by phronēsis.⁸

The characterological virtues are stable dispositions to have desires or feelings that accord with the dictates of phronēsis. Each characterological virtue corresponds to a type of desire or feeling — for example, temperance, to the desire for bodily pleasures; mildness, to anger; wit, to the desire to joke and laugh. The virtue is a disposition to have the relevant desire or feeling in the right amount along any of the dimensions along which it might be possible to have it excessively or deficiently. Anger, for example, may be too intense or not intense enough, it may be directed at too many people or too few, and it may come on and pass too quickly or too slowly. Along each of these dimensions, this is a way of being angry that is intermediate between the errors of excess and deficiency, and this is the way that accords with phronēsis. The characterological virtue of mildness (the subject of EN IV.5) consists of being disposed to be angry in this intermediate way. Since desires or feelings motivate action, each characterological virtue motivates its possessor to act in a characteristic way, and one acquires a characterological virtue by being habituated into its characteristic way of acting.

Phronēsis and the characterological virtues form a set, as neither is possible (in its fully developed form) without the other. The exercise of these virtues is an instance of the functioning that is a human being’s chief good. Because of this, a life focused on exercising these abilities to their fullest qualifies as a happy or successful life. This is the political life — the life of a statesman. For it is in managing the affairs of a city that one has occasion to exercise one’s deliberative abilities on the largest scale with regard to the most important practical problems, and in doing this one faces many decisions that call for the exercise of characterological virtue. However, there is a still better life: the contemplative life, which is devoted to the development and exercise of sophia.

The contemplative life is better than the political because the activity on which it is focused is valuable only for its own sake, rather than being valued (even partially) for any contribution it makes to anything distinct from itself. By contrast, some of the value of a statesman’s deliberation derives from the fact that it enables contemplation.⁹ The productive activity that is perfected by the arts is primarily valued for its products, which are valuable (ultimately) because they enable activities of the other two types. Although there are indications (esp. Met. A.1) that Aristotle accords some intrinsic value to productive activity, and although there is a tradition inspired by Aristotle that extols the technai as virtues, it is clear from the Politics that Aristotle does not think that a life centered around productive work can be well lived. Indeed, he thinks that the performance of many of these activities is incompatible with living well (and so should disqualify one from citizenship).¹⁰ For some people to live well — to fully realize the human form of life — these activities must be relegated to their inferiors, who then participate in living well only by enabling it in their superiors.

What, then, is the human form of life that serves as an ethical standard for Aristotle? Schematically, it is an ordered set of activities in which one activity (contemplation) is intrinsically valuable and performed entirely for its own sake, while all the others exist at least in part to serve it. This subservience makes the subservient activities less valuable than the activity they serve. Some of the lesser activities may also have some intrinsic value (perhaps, as suggested by Lear [2004], due to their resemblance to the one best activity), but others are merely instrumental. The merely instrumental activities (at least many of them) diminish any life that includes them.

At best, such instrumental activities are an unwelcome distraction from the real business of human living; but Aristotle thinks that many of them also degrade the soul of anyone who performs these activities, and that this makes such people unfit for the leisurely activities of contemplation and statesmanlike deliberation.¹¹ Such productive activities can thus have no part in the lives of those individuals who most fully realize the human form of life, so on a societal scale Man’s Life is characterized by a caste system in which some classes of people exist to serve others.¹²

This social hierarchy recapitulates an ontological hierarchy, at the top of which sits Aristotle’s God — a self-sufficient, supernatural mind that engages only in contemplation of itself. The movements that make up the natural world can be characterized as a side effect of this divine selfcontemplation. The natural world is no part of God’s aim, but realizing something like the self-sufficiency of God’s contemplative activity is the aim of the motions of the bodies within the natural world (from stars down to animals and plants). The human contemplator approximates this ideal most closely, becoming godlike in a way that makes it ambiguous whether he, in performing this activity, is part of the natural world at all.¹³

Thus, Aristotle suggests that the life of contemplation may be a divine form of life that is better than the human one. If so, then it may be that it is God’s Life, rather than Man’s, that is the standard of value — the target at which we should aim in all our actions. Aristotle raises this possibility in Nicomachean Ethics X.7, where he rejects the advice to “think human, since you are human” (1177b33) and urges readers to pursue the divine life of contemplation, which seems superior to human life. However, the conclusion of that chapter makes clear that he doesn’t accept the premise behind the advice that pursuing the life of contemplation (insofar as this is possible to a human being) amounts to directing one’s aim away from Man’s Life. Since a man’s mind is his best and most controlling element, it is what he is most of all. Thus, in aiming away from contemplation (which most gratifies the mind), a man would be aiming away from his own life.

Still, even if Aristotle can resolve the tension between a human being’s aiming at the divine and at the human, the role of divinity in Aristotle’s philosophy complicates the idea that Man’s Life is the standard of value in his ethics. For the very notion of the divine creates a standard that is distinct from Man’s Life. It is in accordance with this divine standard that Man’s Life is better than that of other animals and that, among human lives, a contemplator’s life is better than a statesman’s or a producer’s. To fully realize the standard of Man’s Life, as the best contemplators do, is to realize as fully as mortality permits this supernatural standard.

Rand’s Productive Ideal

For Rand, the activity that epitomizes reasoning is not a contemplation detached from meeting material needs; it is production: “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). By (almost all) contemporary lights, this view has an obvious advantage over Aristotle’s: if producing things required by human survival is an essential part of Man’s Life, rather than a distraction from it (or worse), then the ability of some of us to lead fully human lives needn’t depend on some exploited underclass’s doing this (intrinsically worthless, but instrumentally valuable) work for us. However, some might worry that, in centering human life on productive work, Rand is overfocusing on material needs and neglecting the higher values in life that make it worth living. In Aristotle’s terms, we might worry that by centering human life on “the problem of survival,” Rand is showing that what she prizes is merely living, rather than living well (Pol. I.9 1257b40). This is Aristotle’s criticism of those who overvalue moneymaking (chrematistikē). By his lights, such an attitude is slavish, and one might even imagine Aristotle viewing contemporary society as one from which freedom rather than slavery has been eliminated.¹⁴

This notion of universal slavery looms large in criticisms of capitalism (Rand’s ideal form of society) from all quarters.¹⁵ Critics of Rand have often pointed out the limitations of (what they see as) an ethics that makes all value merely instrumental on prolonging one’s life.¹⁶ Some readers have tried to avoid these implications by interpreting Rand along more Aristotelian lines.¹⁷

In explicating her view of Man’s Life as one of production, we should be mindful of how she might respond to such criticism. Toward this end, it will be helpful to consider how she developed her mature view (which is the target of such criticism) starting from a position that is closer to Aristotle’s.

In early notes and in her first novel, Rand draws a distinction that might be compared to Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. It is the distinction between living (as Rand’s protagonists do) and merely existing (as she thought most people did).¹⁸ Distinctions along these lines can be found in other literary authors, and considering a few quotes will help us see what is and is not distinctive to Rand:

• A contemporaneous English translation of an essay by Victor Hugo (1864a), whom Rand considered the “greatest novelist in world literature” (RM 147), reads: “It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives. To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one’s self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, commonsense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience.” (Hugo 1864b, 256)¹⁹

• Leo Tolstoy (2000, 239) wrote of people who exhibit “a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone.”

• Oscar Wilde (1891, 17), in extolling the individualism he thought would be possible only under socialism, wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except in the imaginative place of art. In action, we never have.”

• Jack London (2015, 6493) described many people as “unburied dead” and is reported to have declared: “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”²⁰

• Francis Hodgson Burnet (1907) described the protagonist of her novel The Shuttle as having “a genius for living, for being vital”: “Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less” (112, cf. 60). “She’s Life itself! … What a thing it is for a man or woman to be Life — instead of a mass of tissue and muscle and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!” (274).

• Sinclair Lewis (1920, 265), who was Rand’s favorite contemporary writer in the 1930s (cf. Mayhew 2007b, 219–20), wrote of people who exhibit “the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking.”

There are differences between the views expressed in these passages, but in all of them “living” (or being “alive”) is associated with a spiritual quality that many (perhaps most) people lack. The people who aren’t alive engage in metabolism and move about in the world eating and working to satisfy their physiological needs, but their existence lacks purpose and is devoid of passion.

In contrast to such people, consider what Kira Argounova, the heroine of Rand’s We the Living, says about being alive: “What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself?” (WTL36 496, cf. WTL 385).²¹ What Kira has wanted since childhood was to build aluminum bridges (WTL36 43, WTL 35). What she seeks out of life is a specific productive career, but in Rand’s descriptions of this ambition, we read nothing about the purpose the bridges are to serve or why she thinks building them out of aluminum will serve this purpose; much less do we hear about any money she hopes to make from the bridges. What attracts Kira to building is not any survival need that she thinks her bridges will serve (for herself or for others), nor is it a protestant (or proletarian) ethic that valorizes work as such. We’re told that Kira “had chosen a future of the hardest work,” despite her “aristocratic … conviction that labor and effort were ignoble” (WTL36 42–43, cf. WTL 34). What attracts her is a spiritual quality in her chosen work. It is the audacity of shaping the physical world on a grand scale — of bending it to her will. What Kira admires and seeks to realize in her own life is the self-assertiveness of a unique individual’s creating something on a grand scale. We can see this same attitude in Rand’s admiring description of Petrograd: “Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An inexorable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city” (WTL36 285, cf. WTL 223).

Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is also a builder. Here is what he says, early in the novel, about why he chose this career: “It’s because I’ve never believed in God… . Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them” (Fountainhead 38–39). It is certainly not for the sake of the clients that Roark wants to build: he tells us early in the novel that he intends to have clients in order to build, rather than the reverse (14). He later describes “the meaning of life” as “the material the earth offers you and what you make of it,” illustrating his point by bending a tree branch into an arc and saying, “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing” (577).

Although the careers that Rand extols in her early writing (through The Fountainhead) do meet survival needs, she focuses not on solving the problem of survival but on the spiritual-cum-physical achievement of imposing one’s vision on the world. This, for the early Rand, is what Man’s Life is about. To use a distinction employed by Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged, we might say that the early Rand saw Man’s Life as a life of living up to “the best within us” rather than a life devoted to such mundane matters as “business and earning a living” (Atlas 6).²² The mundane matters are for the sake of the higher, spiritual ones.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, this way of thinking is subverted. In the novel’s denouement, Eddie comes to realize that “business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible — that is the best within us” (1166). Rand’s point here is not that Kira’s and Roark’s priorities in her earlier novels were inverted. Her point is, rather, that it is essential to the spiritual activity she extolled in those earlier works that this activity is the ultimate source of the material values on which human survival directly depends. Recognizing that the spiritual activity that Kira called “living” is self-sustaining enables us to live (and to love our lives) more fully and consistently.

We can see some germs of this perspective, in Rand’s earlier work and in some of the other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors quoted above. These authors often portray the spiritual qualities associated with living (as opposed to merely existing) as making characters effective, and this efficacy extends to such productive enterprises as the factory by which Jean Valjean reinvigorates the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Betty Vanderpole’s rebuilding of the Stornham Court estate in Burnett’s The Shuttle, and Martin Edin’s literary career in London’s eponymous novel. Burnett is explicit about the connection between Betty’s “genius for living” and literal survival, for she writes of this genius keeping her alive and contrasts this with being “kept alive by others.”

The revitalizations of Montreuil-sur-Mer and Stornham Court are instances of bourgeois or upwardly mobile newcomers supplanting the practices of an exhausted aristocracy, and so these episodes could be seen to represent a respect in which the emerging capitalist social system is more vital than the feudal system it was supplanting. Socialist authors, such as Wilde and London, looked forward to the greater material prosperity that they imagined would result once the abolition of private property (somehow) enabled more widespread vitality. We can see this same motivation in Andrei Tagonov and Stepan Timoshenko, the most admirable Communist characters in Rand’s We the Living. These men are among the living, and they “made a revolution” in order “to raise men to our own level.”²³ In time Tagonov and Timoshenko realize that the Soviet regime they have made possible sacrifices the living for the sake of those who merely exist and that the result is both spiritual desolation and grinding poverty. This point is made also in Rand’s Anthem (published between We the Living and The Fountainhead), which depicts a collectivistic society of the future that, because of such sacrifices, has regressed to a pre-industrial state of existence in which hardly anyone lives past middle age.

Howard Roark articulates the point in his courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. He attributes the spiritual activity that is characteristic of Rand’s heroes to the faculty of reason, and he emphasizes reason’s role in both Man’s “glory” and his survival:

His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power — that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons — a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind. (Fountainhead 678–79)

The elevated way of life celebrated in Rand’s early fiction is one that she views both as the proper human form of life and as quite different from how people typically lead their lives. In these respects, her view is like Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. But Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life differs from Aristotle’s in two important respects. The first is that Rand emphasized individuality and personal values in a way that Aristotle did not (but nineteenth-century literary authors did). The second is that the life Rand idealized involves such paradigmatically productive activities as building bridges, skyscrapers, and (in Anthem) light bulbs.

From Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life, it is a comparatively small step (especially after the industrial revolution) to observe that the work of creative geniuses plays an outsized role in human survival. This takes us to The Fountainhead’s view of the great creators. It is a further step from here to grasp that the same spiritual activity (though in different forms and at different scales) makes possible all of the actions by which human beings produce the (spiritual and physical) values on which human survival depends. It is a still further step to grasp that this fact about the spiritual activity with which Kira identified living is essential to this activity. This last step, which is unique to Rand, marks a fundamental development in the understanding of Man’s Life. Absent this step, “Man’s Life” is understood as a certain, elevated lifestyle — a specific way of spending one’s time — to which human nature suits us. Rand’s insight upgrades it into a genuine conception of a life.

Rand characterizes life as “a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action” (VOS 16, cf. Aristotle, DA 416b17 on the power of nutrition). For different living species to have different forms of life is for them to sustain themselves by different processes of self-generated action. The human process — the only process by which even a human being’s crudest physiological needs can be met — is a rational process. Rational activity is not just a distinguishing feature of human life by dint of which we live well, as opposed to merely living; rather, reason (or “man’s mind”) is man’s “basic tool of survival” (Atlas 1011).

This is true even in the most primitive hunter-gatherer conditions (which Roark alludes to in his speech). But, so long as human beings lived a primarily agricultural and low-tech form of existence, it would have been difficult to appreciate the full scope of reason’s role in human survival. Aristotle, of course, acknowledges that reason (via the technai) plays a significant role in the process of human survival, but he thinks that all the relevant technai were discovered and perfected (or nearly perfected) long ago, and their continued exercise doesn’t much impress him.²⁴

The most intense and impressive activities of reason of which Aristotle was aware (such as those involved in axiomatizing geometry or in identifying causes of astronomical phenomena) played no obvious role in human survival, so it is not surprising that he regarded such exercises of rationality as ends-in-themselves that make no contribution to the business of living. From Rand’s perspective, however, Aristotle’s view represents an intense valuing of the mind coupled with an impoverished understanding of what she called “the role of the mind in man’s existence” (FTNI 97, RM 72). This last is what she described as the theme of Atlas Shrugged.

Before delving deeper into Atlas, it’s worth commenting on the allusion to Aristotle in the passage from Roark’s speech. Roark describes the creator’s mind as “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover.” Roark’s creators are like the Aristotelian Prime Mover in at least two respects. First, they are first causes, as opposed to things that act only because they are moved by others. The primary contrast here is to the people Roark calls “second-handers” (Fountainhead 633–36) — those whose lives are animated only as the aftereffects of the thinking of others. In the years after The Fountainhead, Rand would further articulate her view of human thought as a first cause into a theory of free will that is centered on a primary choice to engage or disengage one’s mind.²⁵

The second respect in which Roark’s creators are like Aristotle’s Prime Mover is that they engage in their activity for its own sake, rather than for the sake of an end beyond itself, and (at least many of) the positive effects of their activities on others form no part of their motivation. However, unlike the purely contemplative activity of the Aristotelian Prime Mover, the Roarkian Creators’ activities are productive and so are deeply engaged with the natural (and, in some cases, social) world.²⁶

The work Roark regards as an end-in-itself isn’t limited to contemplating architectural principles, or even to designing buildings in his head or on paper. He loves to build. This love certainly includes the products of the building; for it is essential to the activity (and to Roark’s love of it) that it produces buildings that serve a purpose.²⁷ Nevertheless, Roark doesn’t build for the mere sake of the buildings’ existing (or their purpose’s getting served), but for the sake of building them. If he found that there were already plenty of buildings of the sort he liked in the world (apart from his action), rather than being fulfilled he would look for something else to create. What he wants isn’t simply the world to be shaped a certain way; he wants to shape it.

As the example of Roark illustrates, valuing a productive activity stands in a subtle relation to valuing its product. For the activity to be productive it must be aimed at the product, and the activity’s value depends on the product’s actually serving a survival need. But what one values in valuing the product is not the (generic) fulfillment of that need, but the product itself. And part of valuing a product as such is regarding it as something produced (whether by oneself or by someone else). Loving a productive activity is not just loving either a need’s getting met or the product by which it gets met; it is valuing the activity of meeting the need by creating the product. The need is an essential part of the context that gives rise to the activity, but the need’s satisfaction is not that for the sake of which the activity is loved.

If Rand’s ethics is correct, then all proper human activities play a role in fulfilling biological needs, and this is essential to these activities’ being proper. Nevertheless, it is possible for someone to love such an activity without attending to the need that gives rise to it (as Kira does in the case of engineering), or without even being aware of this need. Hidden in the remains of a railroad tunnel from a collapsed and forgotten industrial civilization, the hero of Anthem begins conducting scientific experiments with no purpose in mind beyond satisfying his curiosity. It is only after he has reinvented the light bulb that he comes to realize that the scientific research he loves is life-sustaining as well as spiritually rewarding, and it is later still that he comes to see working to sustain one’s life as noble.²⁸ Arguably, Aristotle was in a similar epistemic position when he regarded contemplation as an end-in-itself. Like the hero of Anthem, he loved seeking causes, which he saw as epitomizing the activity of reason, but he misunderstood the role of such reasoning in human life as a whole.

This brings us to Atlas Shrugged’s theme of the “role of reason in man’s existence.” As I’ve written elsewhere (Salmieri 2009b), this theme can be divided into two broad aspects: reason as the productive faculty and reason as the valuing faculty. As the productive faculty, reason is the source of material values on which human life depends. The novel illustrates reason’s role (through technology) in the production of food, shelter, and other necessities of survival. It illustrates the grand scale of the reason-guided productive activity that makes possible the comparatively long, safe, and healthy lives that modern residents of first world countries take for granted. And it illustrates the intensity of the reasoning involved in the relevant productive achievements. Reason is also the valuing faculty, in that it is responsible for the spiritual activities that Rand extolled in her earlier writing. It is by reason that (as Kira put it) we “know how to want,” and this knowing is the source of personal commitments to values and of the emotional intensity that the early Rand viewed as essential to living (as distinct from merely existing).

Atlas treats these two aspects of reason’s functioning as a systematic whole. The activity that the heroes love and engage in as an end-in-itself is one of rationally conceiving life-supporting values and then bringing these values into existence through productive action. This activity is portrayed as the core activity of human life. The novel illustrates how values of many sorts (romantic love, sex, abstract science, philosophy, art, wealth, friendship) each play a role in this process, and it shows the corrupted and destructive form these values take when pursued in ways that drop this context. Thus, for the mature Rand to say that man is the “rational animal” (ITOE 44) is to say that the very process by which human beings live is essentially rational.

The components of this life stand in various means-end relations, as when one cooks a meal in order to eat it, but these relations are not all unidirectional (as the Aristotelian means-end relation seems to be), and so the value of a means is not always derived from and lesser than the value of the end. One cooks in order to eat, but one eats in order to have energy to perform activities of which cooking is one. Living, which is the ultimate end, is not some atomic activity to which all one’s other activities are mere means. Rather the end — one’s life — is a complex, self-sustaining activity, composed of many parts (some more central, others peripheral).

Rand’s conception of one’s life as one’s ultimate value should not be confused with the idea of an “inclusive end” that figures in the secondary literature on Aristotle’s ethics.²⁹ An inclusive end is one that subsumes (some of) the other values that are pursued for its sake rather than merely resulting causally from them. In some versions of this view, the other values are made more valuable by being constituents of the inclusive end, but as the idea is usually understood, each of the values subsumed in the inclusive end has some intrinsic value apart from its effects and from its participation in a larger whole. The inclusive end is valuable because it combines things that are valuable in themselves, and (perhaps) because the combination enhances its constituents in such a manner as to make the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts.

For Rand, by contrast, there are no intrinsic values, and the value of each component of a life depends entirely on its effects and on its relation to the whole life.³⁰ This is true for life in general (e.g., for a plant’s life or an animal’s). In the human case, there’s an added component. Since it is reason that integrates the pursuit of these many values into a self-sustaining life, each value’s status as a value depends on the valuer’s knowing how to achieve and utilize the value in a way that serves his life as a whole. Of course, this knowledge can be more or less extensive and more or less explicit. We will see in the next two sections how Rand thinks moral philosophy gives us explicit abstract knowledge of how to integrate values into a human life, and how Aristotle’s ethics relates to hers on this count.

Abstract Standards and Personal Purposes

Because Aristotle’s conception of Man’s Life includes practicing one of two specific occupations (that of a philosopher or that of a statesman), it strikes contemporary readers as unduly narrow and insensitive to the deeply personal factors that incline different people to different careers. We now take it for granted that there is a wide range of possible and equally valuable careers, and that a person’s choice between them will depend on personal preferences or other individuating factors.

Aristotle isn’t blind to the fact that ethical principles need to be applied to individuals in a way that is tailored to their differing features and circumstances — indeed this is something he stresses. But there is a difference between tailoring the same suit differently for different individuals and designing a different suit for each. This point should be familiar from The Fountainhead: Keating adapts old designs to new sites (which requires a modicum of intelligence), whereas Roark creates a new design for each building (always following the same abstract architectural principles). There is an emphasis on the value of creativity, individuality, and the personal in Rand’s work (and in modernity generally) that is missing (or at least muted) in Aristotle. We can see this in the somewhat differing roles that (what amounts to) the idea of a standard of value plays in the work of the two philosophers.

Although I suggest Aristotle and Rand both treat Man’s Life as a standard of moral value, the terms “standard of value” and “morality” are not found in Aristotle, so it is worth saying a bit about how Rand uses them and about the corresponding terminology in Aristotle. Rand defines morality as “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions — the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life” (VOS 13). And she defines a “standard” as “an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose” (27). So, when she speaks of the standard of value of a morality, she means an abstract principle by which one can guide one’s life as a whole by selecting specific goals and specific means to them.

Aristotle formulates what amounts to this same idea of a comprehensive guiding principle for life via the metaphor of a target: “Everyone who is able to live according to his own choice should set up some target for living well (whether it’s honor or reputation or wealth or education) looking to which he will take all of his actions; since not having one’s life arranged toward some end is a sign of great folly. So, first of all, we must define for ourselves without haste or carelessness (i) those things in which living well consists and (ii) those things without which living well is impossible for human beings” (Aristotle, EE I.2 1214b6–14).³¹ The idea of a “target for living well” is explained by the comment that it is something the person can “look to” in taking all of his actions and, thereby, arrange his life toward an end. Aristotle’s advice isn’t simply that everyone who can should erect some such target; for the context makes clear that he thinks there is a correct target, which we can identify by attending to two questions: (i) In what things does living well consist? (ii) What (other) things are prerequisites for a human being’s living well? The four possible targets Aristotle suggests (“honor, reputation, wealth, or education”) are candidate answers (which Aristotle goes on to reject) for the first of these questions.³² The candidates’ function in the passage is to concretize the idea of a target around which a life could be organized. Each target is abstract enough to serve as a standard of value (in Rand’s sense) — a guide by which a person could select his more specific goals and values. And each leads to a distinctive and recognizable type of life. Having introduced the idea of a target (or standard of value), Aristotle immediately shifts to the task of identifying the correct target.

The passage we have been discussing comes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, but we find the target metaphor also in the Nicomachean Ethics. There it is introduced after Aristotle discusses the goods of various endeavors and the respects in which one good can be subordinate to another. This suggests to him the idea of a “chief good,” which is desired for its own sake and for the sake of which we do everything we do. If there is such a good, Aristotle writes, knowledge of it will make us “like archers with a target to aim at, more likely to hit on what is right” (EN 1094a22–24). Later, he recapitulates that “there is a target to which the man who has reason looks and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly” (1138b22–23).

I take it that, for Aristotle, the target and the ultimate good are the same in one respect but distinct in another. To use an Aristotelian turn of phrase, they are the same in number, but their being is not the same. There is a certain item — a certain activity (as we’ll see) — that is the chief good for human beings, and this item is the human good, whether or not anyone recognizes it as such. Moreover, this activity is the good of each particular human being, whether or not that human being recognizes this. But it is only when I recognize this item as my good that it becomes a target for me — something I can use to consciously guide my action. And the good’s status as a target makes it easier for me to attain it.

Does Rand share this view of the relation between the ultimate value and the target? She writes: “An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means — and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil” (VOS 17).

Here the ultimate value is said to set the standard of value rather than to be that standard, but the same thing — an organism’s life — is placed in both roles. We saw earlier that Rand distinguishes between a standard and a purpose; the former is an abstraction that serves as a guide to the achievement of the latter, which is a concrete. She applies this point to the human case as follows: “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man — in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life” (VOS 27).

The point that a standard is abstract — whereas a purpose is concrete — presumably applies in the case of nonhuman organisms as well. Lassie’s life will be her ultimate value; and because Lassie is a dog, Dog’s Life will be the standard with reference to which it can be determined what furthers or threatens Lassie’s life.³³ Of course, Lassie herself will not consciously appeal to this abstract standard when evaluating things, but her owner or veterinarian may make decisions for her with this standard in view. Moreover, an account of the reason Lassie pursues the various items she does would appeal to the standard of Dog’s Life. For example, an explanation of why she’s so protective of Timmy would appeal to the fact that a dog is a domesticated pack animal that lives by serving its human master. Unbeknownst to Lassie, this fact about Dog’s Life (when combined with facts about Lassie’s circumstances) explains her valuing of Timmy. This distinction between standard and purpose is more important in the case of human beings precisely because, unlike dogs, we can have an abstract understanding of our form of life and use this understanding to select our personal values. Moreover, the process of applying the abstract standard to one’s own concrete case is an important instance of the reasoning that is the distinguishing feature of human life.

The target Aristotle speaks of in the first books of the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics is presumably meant to be the relatively abstract account he’s providing in those works. This account is the same for a beginner in gymnastics and for Milo the wrestler (to repurpose Aristotle’s example from EN 1106a33), even though the specific actions that each one will need to take to hit this target will be different. Central to Aristotle’s conception of practical virtue is the ability to reason well about particular cases. This reasoning involves a nuanced recognition of how relevant abstract considerations pertaining to the standard apply to an individual case, in light of the many factors that differentiate the individual and his circumstances from those of others.

For Rand, there is an additional respect in which the distinction between the abstract standard and the concrete purpose matters: part of reason’s role in life is choosing one’s purposes — including one’s overarching purpose in life. This is not simply a matter of recognizing how some predetermined, universal end can best be achieved given one’s distinctive features and circumstances. Rather, it is a matter of conceiving of a new, distinctive end for oneself. “You set the goal and the meaning; the field of choice and possibilities is immense; the only necessity involved is that you use the material as it is and your tool (reason) as it is — that you understand them for what they are before you choose or achieve a purpose” (Papers 032_11B_002_060 / Journals 294).

Once one recognizes all the pertinent facts, including those that give rise to the need for a moral standard and all the particular facts about oneself and one’s circumstances, there are inexhaustibly many possible lives one can choose as one’s purpose. Each of these purposes constitutes a concrete instance of the human form of life that must be conceived with reference both to the abstract standard (and the facts that give rise to it) and to the differentiating features of oneself and one’s circumstances. This conceiving is not merely a matter of adapting an existing form to a new concrete situation, it’s a new creative act.

An analogy may be instructive here. Think of a poet composing a sonnet for the wedding of two friends. In doing so, he makes reference both to the abstract form of a sonnet and to the many specific details of the couple and the occasion. But there are many possible poems that are instances of the sonnet form and that would be suitable to recite at this wedding. The poet’s task is not to pick out the most suitable poem from this infinite set (as if the infinity of potential poems already existed somewhere to be selected from).³⁴ Rather, his task is to compose a sonnet for the occasion. The sonnet is a new creation of the poet. And, even though a sonnet is a fairly rigid form, think of how different the poet’s activity is from simply plugging concretes about the couple into some preset formula — like filling out a Mad Lib. Most notably, the poem will need to have a theme and a central idea for how to express this theme in the sonnet form.³⁵ But neither the theme nor the central idea is established by the sonnet form, by the occasion of the wedding, or by any facts about the couple. All of these factors will be relevant to the poet’s choice of theme and central idea — and to all the other choices involved in executing the central idea — but the choices themselves involve new acts of creative reasoning on the poet’s part. Composition consists largely in such acts of creative reasoning. And it is in the nature of such acts that, no matter how well the poet does his job, it would be possible for someone to do it equally well by composing a wholly different sonnet (perhaps with a wholly different theme). It is this sort of creative reasoning that, in Rand’s view, is involved in setting the core purposes that shape one’s life and thereby composing an ultimate value (or purpose) for oneself. In this process moral principles (including the standard of Man’s Life) play something like the role of principles of literary composition.

I don’t know that Aristotle would disagree with this point. Even within the contemplative life, there must be many choices about which things to study in which ways. How does one divide one’s time between studying mathematics and the natural world? In one’s study of nature, does one focus more on animals (as Aristotle did) or on plants (as did Theophrastus)? Even if different options may be better for different people with different talents or circumstances, it’s doubtful that such considerations would mandate a single best syllabus for any individual’s contemplative career. Likewise, there are presumably different roles a statesman could play in his city, and it may be that, even given a particular set of facts about his talents and circumstances, there are multiple political careers for him to choose among. However, although Aristotle’s view is consistent with there being such scope for personal choice and may even imply it, this is not something he calls attention to, and he does not valorize the making of such choices as an exercise of reason.

To return to the example of the wedding sonnet, if we value the sonnet, we do not value it simply as a functional item that serves its purpose in the wedding ceremony (to whatever extent it does). Rather, we also value it as the work of a specific artist, bearing the mark of his specific personality and sensibility. Likewise, when Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged loves Taggart Transcontinental and John Galt (the two concrete values that are central to her life), she loves them not merely as values that can constitute and sustain a human life, but as her specific chosen ends. There is an individualistic element here that we might call Romantic, insofar as it stems from an emphasis on the choices of individuals reflecting the details of their souls.

This individualistic, Romantic perspective is largely absent from Aristotle. He comes nearest to it when he points out that poets love their own works (and parents, their own children) more than they do other people’s, because they are their own creations.³⁶ But there is something impersonal — and unromantic — in his accounts of love and of literary creation. Although, as Robert Mayhew argues in chapter 13 of this volume, Aristotle’s theory of literary creation stresses some of the methods of literary integration that would later be essential to the Romantic movement in literature, it lacks the emphasis on the author’s distinctive personal values that is also characteristic of this school.³⁷ Likewise Aristotle’s account of love (discussed by Allan Gotthelf in chapter 14 of this volume) stresses the importance of character and virtue to the highest forms of love, but he says comparatively little about the sorts of individualizing features that make one person love a particular other person as distinct from others who may share his virtues — the sorts of features that Rand captures in her concept of a “sense of life.”³⁸

Rand’s distinction between a standard and a purpose brings out the abstractness of the former and the concreteness of the latter. The relation of the abstract standard to the concrete purpose isn’t one of tailoring the former to the latter but, rather, of using the former as a guide in one’s creation of the latter. This distinction helps us think in a new way about what we might call paradigmatic instances of the standard — individuals that fulfill it perfectly and dramatically. Aristotle’s God and the people whom Rand (borrowing Aristotelian language) calls “Prime Movers” are examples of such paradigmatic instances of Aristotle’s and Rand’s respective moral standards — of Man’s Life.³⁹

The more we think of contemplation (or whatever one holds as the highest activity) as a single concrete activity that admits of some variation (such that it can be tailored to individual cases), the more natural it is to identify this standard with an individual who embodies it most fully. If one does this, one’s standard becomes in effect likeness to this individual. Aristotle’s cosmology and ethics are both plausibly interpreted along these lines. The stars revolve in order to be like God, and the philosopher contemplates for the same reason. We can describe this as seeking to be like God — or as seeking to realize in oneself the abstraction of which God is the fullest embodiment. But insofar as the standard is such that there is a single way to embody it most fully, these two descriptions amount to the same thing. By contrast, when a standard is understood as an abstract principle that exists for the sake of guiding us in the achievement of different concrete purposes, there cannot be any single, unique paradigm instance of the standard with which it can be identified in the way that the activity of contemplation can be identified with Aristotle’s God.

John Galt is Rand’s fullest literary embodiment of her moral standard, and there is a sense in which anyone attempting to live up to this standard is striving to be like Galt. Indeed, Galt serves as an inspiration to the other heroes in Atlas Shrugged, and Rand writes of the ways in which literary heroes can serve such a role.⁴⁰ However, it is in the nature of Rand’s standard that Galt’s life is just one of a potentially infinite number of different lives that could fulfill the standard perfectly — lives that involve wholly different careers, interests, friends, priorities, and so on, all falling equally under such abstractions as “rationality,” “productiveness,” and “pride.” Such lives are not variations on any single theme, any more than are all Romantic piano concertos or all buildings designed in accordance with Roark’s principles. It is essential to a building’s perfectly realizing these principles that it is not just numerically unique but is integrated around a distinct idea conceived to fulfill its individual purpose in its individual setting. In the same way, Galt’s individuality is essential to his realizing Rand’s ideal. One seeks to be like Galt (or to build like Roark or to compose like Tchaikovsky) not by seeking to be concretely like him but by realizing in a new and distinctive way the same abstractions that he epitomizes.⁴¹

For Rand, paradigmatic concretes play a heuristic role in helping one to hold and implement a standard, rather than themselves serving as standards to which other things approximate. We can see this in her brief discussion of the “psycho-epistemological function of a personified (concretized) human ideal”:

Observe that every religion has a mythology — a dramatized concretization of its moral code embodied in the figures of men who are its ultimate product…. This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.

Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: “What would Roark do in this situation?” — and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do — and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him. (“Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM 10, emphasis added)

The concretized ideal is a model created by the artist to dramatically embody abstract principles. And its proper function is to help us to isolate and identify these principles, rather than to serve as a standard directly. We live well, not to the extent that we approximate to being Roark but to the extent that we, like Roark, act with such virtues as independence and integrity.⁴²

The Objectivity of the Moral Code

Part of the appeal of the idea of a distinctively human form of life as a standard for ethics is that it purports to provide an objective standard for morality. We are a certain species with a certain nature that fits us to live in a certain way. Moral principles can be derived from an understanding of this nature and its implications, rather than being mere systematizations of our (personal or societal) preferences or prejudices. I take it that the promise of some sort of objective grounding for ethics accounts for much of the appeal of works such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, with its suggestion that moral goodness and badness are akin to features that make members of other species fit or unfit to carry on the ways of life of their species.⁴³

I indicated earlier how the most abhorrent features of Aristotle’s ethics — his endorsement of slavery and attitude toward productive work — stem from his distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values, and I showed how Rand’s alternative view of value underwrites a view in which a nonexploitative harmony of interests is possible between people (and within each individual). Now I want to raise a related, methodological question. Is there anything in Aristotle’s approach to ethics that provides a ground on which he could and should have rejected the exploitative features of the classical Greek way of life that we now regard as evil? More generally, does an Aristotelian approach to ethics put us in a position to reflect critically on the way of life into which we have been acculturated?

Of course, we cannot expect that Aristotle could have seen everything that we now recognize as wrong with every classical Greek practice or institution. Nor should we expect it to be easy for us to identify any immoral aspects of current mores that may be obvious to future generations. However, part of the job of moral philosophy is to equip us to differentiate the good from the parochial — to determine what is wrong as well as what is right about the ways of life to which we’re accustomed and to evaluate challenges to this way of life once they’ve been suggested. The idea of a human function or form of life that can serve as a moral standard brings with it a promise of objectivity. It suggests that the way of life the Aristotelian advocates is grounded in nature rather than in the customs or prejudices of an individual or a society. If the human form of life is our standard of value, then, once we encounter radical suggestions such as that slavery may be wrong or that moneylending may not be, we should be able to use the standard to settle the matter. No doubt, it may take skill or nuance to apply the standard correctly, but it ought to be possible to do it, and it ought to be possible to recognize cases in which it has been done. Otherwise, the standard is nothing more than a codification of our preexisting moral attitudes — including any relevant prejudices we may have.

The abhorrent and parochial features of Aristotle’s own view of Man’s Life should make us sensitive to the possibility of simply reading into nature our own prejudices, whatever they may be. The connection between Man’s Life and survival in Rand’s ethics is meant to give us a means to ensure that no mere prejudices get included as elements of Man’s Life.

When Rand describes “Man’s Life” as the standard of value, this phrase is not meant to name some preferred lifestyle that she counts as “living well” for a man and that she venerates over other ways in which men might equally well sustain themselves. Rather, she means “man’s survival qua man” — that is, “the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan — in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice” (VOS 26). Each of the moral values and virtues that she identifies as components of “Man’s Life” are supposed to play a causal role in the process by which a human being survives across a human lifespan. This is not to say that a person would necessarily (or even probably) die young without it. There are all sorts of ways in which organisms can subsist despite dysfunctions. But a trait is not a dysfunction at all unless it drains or distracts from the process by which the organism survives. Likewise, any alleged immorality is not genuinely immoral unless it is a drain or distraction from the process by which a human being survives, and conversely nothing is genuinely moral unless it makes some contribution to this process. Rand’s morality is meant to identify in abstract and essentialized terms the portions of that process that are subject to choice. (Dysfunctions that aren’t due to choice are unhealthy — or otherwise bad — without being immoral.)

The idea of an ethical standard based on Man’s Life cannot provide objectivity if our conception of that form of life derives the whole of its content from the habits and mores that happen to be dominant in our milieu. This is, in effect, how Rand viewed Aristotle’s standard: “The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise” (VOS 14). Aristotle did consider — at least to a certain extent — why a phronimos acts as he does. The chapters on the characterological virtues, for example, describe some of the considerations relevant to particular virtues. But Rand is right that Aristotle didn’t think these questions admit of exact and abstract answers.

In any case, the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists who extol phronēsis do not prize any of the specific considerations from which Aristotle says the phronimos reasons. What these ethicists stress (and often exaggerate) is the quasi-perceptual character of phronēsis itself.⁴⁴ Thus they reference the phronimos as the standard of what to do, and the standard (such as it is) to which Aristotle himself appeals is neglected. Some interpreters and revivers of Aristotelian ethics go so far as to deny that there is any abstract standard there.⁴⁵

If the idea of a human form of life as a standard of value is to do any real work, it needs to derive at least some of its content from a broadly biological understanding of what a form-of-life is, in general, and what the human form is, in particular. However, it would also be a mistake to read off ethics in too facile a manner from an antecedent understanding of biology. Some worry that the attempt to ground morality in biological functions opens up the possibility that traits such as violence and deception could turn out to be virtues.⁴⁶ And we should not forget that forms of nonprocreative sex have often been deemed vicious on the grounds that they involve uses of our sexual organs that are counter to what are supposed to be their natural biological purposes. If we think such conclusions are unwarranted, we must be on guard against the possibility of erring in our attempts to derive ethical content from our understanding of human biology.

If we are concerned about objectivity, we can neither prejudicially valorize as parts of Man’s Life whatever moral views we happen to hold, nor can we blithely infer moral content from biology while remaining (as Aristotle puts it) “inexperienced in the actions of life” (EN 1095a3). There is a third alternative. If there is a human form of life, if moral goodness consists in realizing it (or approximating to it), and if we are decent people who know some significant moral truths on the basis of our inarticulate experience (or because of our upbringing), then we ought to be able to draw on an independent understanding of our natures as members of the human species to understand why the actions or traits that we correctly regard as morally good form part of the human form of life (whereas their contraries do not).

The fact that the human form of life is essentially rational is a rudimentary biological fact graspable without specialized study — analogous to the fact that falcons and other birds of prey live lives of predation, whereas deer lead lives of grazing and fleeing. Rand’s ethics, which is intended as an articulation the contents of Man’s Life, traces out the consequences of this and related facts. These consequences are not meant to be deduced from biological facts ab initio. Just as, in an Aristotelian science, many of the facts to be demonstrated are already known on the basis of experience, so too in ethics, decent and experienced people may already possess and live by moral knowledge, before they come to understand the basis of this knowledge in the requirements of Man’s Life. Thus, one of the minor heroes of Atlas Shrugged says that the character who taught him this moral code has “merely named what I had lived by, what every man lives by — at and to the extent of such time as he doesn’t spend destroying himself” (Atlas 447).

The moral code (or explicit moral theory) formulates the relevant truths explicitly and identifies them as parts of the human survival process. In this way it helps an individual who already knew and lived by some of these truths in an inarticulate manner to integrate his pursuits into a self-sustaining whole (a life). The process of integration is error correcting in that conflicts among one’s values (including between one’s concrete values and one’s moral code) are evidence that some of the values (or moral beliefs) are mistaken and must be revised.⁴⁷

What are these ethical facts that form part of Rand’s moral theory but can initially be grasped and applied experientially? One is the value of the spiritual qualities (such as passion, independence, and creativity) that the early Rand extolled. Another is the recognition that the values on which one’s life depends need to be produced by reason-directed human effort so that (if one is not to be a parasite, which is self-defeating in innumerable ways) one must live productively. Other parts of Rand’s code include the virtue of honesty (which she conceptualizes as the recognition that the unreal is unreal and can have no value), the virtue of independence (the recognition that thinking is not an activity one person can perform for another), the virtue of justice (the recognition that one must be objective in assessing the characters of others and that one must treat them accordingly), and the “trader principle” (which states that one must deal with others only voluntarily, to mutual benefit by mutual consent, rather than treating people as prey or as objects of charity). The validation of these virtues is too large a topic to take up here.⁴⁸ I mention them just to give a sense of the sort of content included in the moral code and to indicate the role Rand thinks it plays in human life.

Notice that these virtues are more abstract and more absolute than the content of Aristotelian ethics. Earlier I noted that, for Rand, an individual must compose his life using the standard of Man’s Life as an abstract guide in the process; the content of Rand’s ethics can be seen as principles of composition for a life analogous to principles of literary composition. The moral principles specify the broad values that a human life requires, and the broad sorts of actions by which those values can be pursued in a coherent and self-sustaining manner.

The putatively biological fact about human beings that neo-Aristotelian ethicists most often appeal to is that man is a social animal. I take it that the point of describing man as a social animal and of comparing human beings in this respect to bees, ants, and herd animals (rather than simply just pointing out that human beings live in societies) is to draw on biology in something like the way I recommended earlier. We don’t simply catalogue the ways people conduct their lives and claim that this constitutes a human way of life, which is our function. Instead, we recognize our form of life as one that is rooted in our nature and that can be illuminated by comparisons to the lives of animals with relevantly similar natures.

But such comparisons with other animals that live in groups cannot be illuminating unless they are drawn with due attention to the characteristics that differentiate us from all other animals. The essence of humanity — our fundamental distinguishing characteristic — is rationality, and rationality makes a profound difference in every aspect of life that we engage in consciously (as opposed to the physiological activities of what Aristotle calls the nutritive soul). We should, therefore, expect it to make a profound difference in the nature of our sociality. This is Rand’s view, at any rate. “Man,” one of her protagonists says, “is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach” (Atlas 747). The “looters” in question are those who think that we should live in a collectivistic, rather than an individualistic, society. In a later essay, she elaborates on how the faculty of reason (here described as “a conceptual consciousness”) requires a distinctive form of social existence:

Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man’s nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life — but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered). (“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL 2:2, 127)

The idea that rationality makes human beings very different from other animals, even with respect to functions or faculties that we share with them at a generic level, brings me to a point mentioned earlier in connection with the worry about inferring ethical conclusions from (putatively) biological knowledge about a human function. Sexuality is one area in which many such inferences have been drawn that may strike us as misguided. It is obvious that reproduction is the — or at least a — “natural” function of our sex organs, and this has sometimes been thought to justify condemnations of various nonreproductive forms of sex as unnatural and (therefore) improper. But human beings are essentially rational animals, and part of reason’s role in human life is to enable each human being to compose for himself an individual life made up of specific values and practices that cohere into a self-sustaining whole. As the faculty that directs and organizes human life, reason replaces (or supersedes) the physiological or psychological mechanisms by which the activities of other organisms are organized into self-sustaining lives. Reason is free to find new uses for any of our faculties — uses for which they may not have evolved and for which they may not be employed in other species. Reason is likewise free to discover ways to alter these faculties (e.g., via birth control pills, vasectomies, or abortions) to better suit them to these chosen purposes.

 In the process of natural selection organs often come to serve purposes other than those for which they initially evolved. There is nothing to prevent reason from similarly repurposing faculties within the span of any individual’s life. New, life-sustaining uses for faculties can be discovered and promulgated through the culture. This is what has happened with the many nonprocreative uses of our sexual faculties by which we pursue pleasure and celebrate spiritual values. Likewise, reason is free to find new ways to achieve the values played by reproduction in individual human lives. Reproduction serves such material values as ensuring that there are young people to assist in one’s dotage, and it serves spiritual values such as having progeny to whom to pass on one’s way of life (which, for a human being, crucially includes one’s ideas and values). All the ways discovered thus far to achieve these values require that some people reproduce; but a given individual needn’t have offspring himself to share in these values. In some social animals (e.g., bees), a small subset of the community specializes in reproduction, and the rest of the community is sterile. So, we cannot infer that every human being should seek to reproduce from the facts that everyone has reproductive organs and that reproduction is a part of life. Fundamentally, what ethics has to say about sex is simply that one should be rational about it; this rationality includes creativity in the formation of values that can meet our physiological and psychological needs and can be achieved through the use of our faculties.

There are many more detailed questions, of course, about what sorts of sex lives can be good for us. Some of these questions (e.g., those involving issues of consent) are straightforwardly ethical and come under some of the moral principles alluded to earlier. But others lie near the border that separates ethics from psychology and they require the empirical research methods of that field. There are many such questions concerning sexual practices that have been derided (by various parties) as “unnatural”: homosexuality, polyamory, polygamy, monogamy, masturbation, incest, relationships between (consenting) people distant in age, fantasizing about abusive forms of sex. Most of us think that at least some of these practices are bad for us, and few of us think that all are. If any one of these practices is bad for us, it must be because it runs contrary to human nature in some way other than its merely being atypical or different from the function that our sexual capacity evolved to serve. This could be because the practice stems from and reinforces a psychological state, such as low self-esteem, which saps our ability and motivation to engage in other vital activities. Or it could be because the sexual practice is incompatible with our using our sexual faculties to satisfy some crucial (physiological or psychological need) that we cannot otherwise meet.

Rand thought that promiscuity and homosexuality were immoral for reasons of the two sorts indicated above.⁴⁹ I think she was wrong about homosexuality and right about promiscuity. Settling either question would take us beyond the scope of this paper; I mention them here to indicate how Rand’s conception of Man’s Life sets up a standard by which such practices could be established as moral or immoral. The application of this standard will require identifying the actual causal relations in which these practices stand to the essential activities by which human beings sustain ourselves.

This takes us back to the general issue of the objectivity of the moral standard and of how we can differentiate between ways of living that are second nature to us simply because we’re accustomed to them and those that are grounded in our biological nature. A given practice or norm could turn out to be required by the standard of Man’s Life, or to represent one possible way (among others) of satisfying this standard, or to be contrary to this standard (and, therefore, immoral). Aristotelian ethics is not objective, because it lacks the means to distinguish among these three categories; and it is the integration with biological fact that enables Rand’s ethics to do so.

In some cases, the data we need to establish the relevant biological facts are available in ordinary experience. I have in mind facts such as that reason is our means of survival. This fact is biological in the broad sense that it is a fact about living things and how they live. But our knowledge of it doesn’t depend on the science of biology. For it doesn’t require the specialized methods of collecting and analyzing data that distinguish natural science from ordinary rational thinking and from philosophy. Indeed, it is only on the basis of a great deal of such nonspecialized knowledge about various types of living things that a science of biology could get off the ground.

But to settle the sorts of questions of sexual ethics we were just discussing, we need additional knowledge about human nature — and especially about the nature of the human mind. The same is true for a host of other questions pertaining to whether and when one should or can change or resist various desires or emotions — for example, questions concerning addiction (or putative addiction) or concerning states that may be mental illnesses. Most of our moral opinions on issues of these sorts reflect assumptions about these psychological questions. These assumptions are generally informed by our experience, which we can (and sometimes should) critically evaluate and work to enlarge. But they are assumptions of the sort that could be (and, in some cases, have been) confirmed, refuted, or modified by empirical research in psychology and allied fields.

The straightforwardly moral questions — the ones belonging to philosophy — are those that can be answered well without reliance on this specialized research. I think of questions that require research as involving distinguishable philosophical and scientific components. But even if this perspective on these issues is correct, the interplay of philosophical and scientific matters is complex and there are many borderline cases. Much of the subject matter of Aristotelian ethics — or at least of many of the characterological virtues — falls in this complex area at the border of philosophy and psychology. Rand had things to say about such questions as well. Indeed, as a novelist, she couldn’t have avoided issues of psychology (as well as issues on the borderline between it and philosophy), since novel-writing requires projecting characters with complete personalities. But the issues she emphasizes when writing as a moral philosopher are more abstract and structural, and I can find few parallels to them in Aristotle’s ethics.

When she writes about virtues, for example, she focuses not on characterological states but on abstract principles that she argues one must recognize in order to live as a human being — for example, the principle that the unreal is unreal and can be of no value. Of course, to recognize such principles in one’s thinking and conduct, one must apply them contextually, and they must factor centrally into one’s motivation. For this to happen over time, recognition of the principles must be automatized into a perspective on the world and a characteristic form of motivation that we can think of as a characterological virtue. But, for Rand, the concept “virtue” primarily refers to the abstract principle rather than to the form it takes in an individual’s psychology. There is much to explore about how such principles are realized psychologically. Rand addresses some of these in various contexts, and comparison to Aristotle’s accounts of characterological virtue and phronēsis might be illuminating in exploring her views.⁵⁰ But I see such comparisons as matters of detail when relating Rand’s ethics to Aristotle’s.

The central point of comparison is that each philosopher is recommending to us a certain way of living on the grounds that it is the one for which we are naturally suited as human beings — as rational animals. Each urges us to take Man’s Life as our standard of value, but they differ in their understanding of this life and of how it can serve as a standard. For Aristotle, Man’s Life is the distinctive manner of functioning that is characteristic of human beings and enabled by human nature. Rand adds that it is the process by which human beings survive. This means that, on Rand’s view, to qualify as part of Man’s Life, something must make a vital contribution to that process by which a human being sustains his existence across a human life span.

The moral content that follows from Rand’s conception of Man’s Life is more abstract than the subject matter of the Aristotelian virtues, and because of this, the moral guidance she offers can be objective and precise. For, as Aristotle noted, “the universal is honorable because it reveals the cause” (APo. 88a5–6). Because Rand’s ethics identifies Man’s Life at the right level of abstraction, this ethics can reveal to an individual the causal role played in his own life by each of his chosen values. Thus it enables him to harmonize these values into a life by which he can sustain himself without compromise and experience the profound, “non-contradictory joy” (Atlas 1022) that is the concomitant of living rationally, “in accordance with virtue” (EN 1098a17).

"Chapter 7: ""Man's Life" as the Standard of Value in the Ethics of Aristotle and Ayn Rand" by Greg Salmieri from Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand by James G. Lennox and Gregor Salmieri, © 2026. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

1. Her two expositions of the moral philosophy as a systematic whole occur in John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (starting with this sentence at Atlas 1014), and in her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” (VOS, ch. 1).

2. I will use the phrase “Man’s Life” (with capitals) to refer to the specifically human form of life, when discussing Rand and Aristotle’s respective views of it. The phrase itself comes from Rand, but (as I have indicated) captures an idea of Aristotle’s. “Man” as Rand used the word in this and related locutions is (of course) intended to refer generically to all members of the human species. Such gender-neutral usages of the word “man” are now widely disfavored, because they treat adult males as the paradigms of the human species (see Miller and Swift 1976, Moulton 1981, and Warren 1986).

   Aristotle himself certainly treated adult males as paradigms. His view of males as the paradigmatic members of a species stems from his view of male superiority (on which see note 12, below), and he views adults as paradigmatic because actuality is explanatorily prior to potentiality, so that children’s distinctive features are to be understood in terms of their role in the developmental process that culminates in adulthood. Rand likely would have accepted this view of the paradigmatic status of adults (as I do). She differs sharply from Aristotle in holding that women are equal to men in all the distinctively human abilities, but I doubt she would have been sympathetic to the idea that treating men as paradigmatic is somehow unjust to women, for she subscribed to an asymmetric view of sexual psychology according to which femininity is to be understood in relation to masculinity. (On this aspect of Rands’ thought, see “About a Woman President” [VOR], Answers 106. See also Lewis and Salmieri 2016, 372–73, 395n83, and the additional sources cited therein.) We can think of this as licensing a symbolic or aesthetic reason for preferring gender-neutral masculine language.

   In any case, for most purposes, a gender-neutral alternative to “Man’s Life” would be preferable, but the alternative formulations have their own problems: “the human form of life” is too wordy; “human life” is ambiguous between singular and plural; and “Human’s Life” isn’t idiomatic English. So, for the purposes of this paper, I use “Man’s Life,” capitalizing it to reflect the quote that serves as our epigraph and to indicate that the term is being used in a specialized sense.

3. The precise relation between these two best sorts of human life and the extent to which the activity that characterizes each is involved in the other are matters of some scholarly controversy. I am most persuaded by the accounts given in Lear 2004 and Cooper 2012.

4. The Greek noun chrēma can refer to a thing, to business, or specifically to money. The suffix -istēs designates a person involved with something, and -istikē designates the activity or discipline practiced by such a person. So a chrēmatistēs is someone involved with business or money — a businessman, tradesman, or moneymaker. (Note, however, that the word is not built from verbs for producing or exchanging.) And chrematistikē, which Aristotle discusses in Pol. I.8–11, would be the art or discipline of commerce (or trade, or moneymaking, etc.). In the present passage from EN I.5 Aristotle contrasts the life of the chrēmatistēs to three other lives that he thinks are “most favored” and from which people draw their conceptions of the good. These are the life of gratification (apolaustikon) and the lives of the statesman (politikos) and contemplator (theorētikos) (1095b14–19). He rejects the life of gratification as one “for grazing animals,” and (eventually) concludes that the other two lives do embody the human good, though not equally so.

5. The quote is from a speech by Francisco d’Anconia. That he is speaking here for Rand is confirmed by her inclusion of this speech in her book For the New Intellectual, under the title “The Meaning of Money.” Immediately before the quoted passage, Francisco credits Americans with coining the phrase “to make money”: “No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.” Rand doesn’t give a source for Francisco’s claim about the origins of the phrase, and taken literally, the claim is untrue. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest attestation of the phrase “to make money” predates Columbus’s 1492 voyage (see usage P.2.a.i. in the OED’s entry on “money”), and Cicero wrote of “making wealth” (pecuniam facere) (Cicero, De Divinatione 1.49.111, cited in this connection by Liberman 2006). However (an n-gram search on “make money” and related phrases in Google’s English 2019 corpus reveals that) the phrase only started appearing regularly in print around the turn of the nineteenth century and was more prevalent in American than British publications. This reflects the unprecedented embrace of commerce in the early United States (on which see Wood 1991, 325–47) and so supports the spirit if not the letter of Francisco’s claim.

   The claim itself had enough curreny in the nineteenth century that the author of a book on Americanisms found it necessary to refute it: “It is equally unjust to charge Americans with the invention of the phrase, to make money, much as they may be addicted to the practice. Dr. Johnson already rebuked Boswell sharply for using it, and said: ‘Don’t you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you should say, to get money’” (de Vere 1871, 296; cited by Freeman 2011). Notice that Johnson’s rebuke reflects the attitude that Francisco says Americans displaced. Interestingly, just prior to this passage, de Vare addresses the claim, also considered in Atlas Shrugged (683), that the dollar sign is based on the initials of the United States. It’s unlikely that da Vare is Rand’s source for these two philological claims (since he refutes the claim Franciso endorses), but it may be that he’s responding to some earlier source that she also read.

6. I borrow the phrase “leisurely ideal” from “Aristotelian Practical Wisdom as a Leisurely Ideal,” a talk that Gabriel Richardson Lear presented at several conferences in the 2010s.

7. The word I’m translating as “characterological” is ēthikē. It is sometimes translated as “moral” or with the phrase “of character.” I prefer “characterological” because it avoids some potentially misleading connotations of “moral” and preserves the link to the noun ēthos (character), while being a single adjective (rather than a propositional phrase).

8. I will leave sophia and phronēsis untranslated throughout. The traditional translations are “wisdom” and “prudence,” respectively. This is somewhat unfortunate as “wisdom” in contemporary English is more naturally associated with what Aristotle means by phronēsis than what he means by sophia. Some translators have thus used wisdom for phronēsis, and found another word for sophia, but there’s no obvious alternative, and the presence of “sophia” as a root in the word “philosophy,” which is well-known to mean the “love of wisdom,” makes translating it differently awkward. Sometimes the distinction between the two words is marked by translating them “theoretical wisdom” and “practical wisdom.” This plausibly captures their meanings, but it creates the false impression that Aristotle regards them as two variants of a single thing, wisdom.

9. The contemplative life, too, will presumably include some exercise of phronēsis and the characterological virtues, since they’re needed to arrange one’s life to make contemplation possible. However, the contemplator will exercise these virtues primarily within the scope of his personal life and in the management of his own estate. He may exercise them also on a civic scale as a voter or in discharging some other temporary office, which he deems it prudent for him to accept, but this will not be his central occupation (or else he would be living the life of a statesman).

10. For the tradition that extolls the technai as virtues, see Nederman 2008, 25–26. Aristotle is particularly critical of the banausoi (or, “vulgar craftsmen”) whose lives he sees as improperly focused on work for trade. For instance, see Pol. VIII.2 1337b5–15, where Aristotle writes that “any work, art, or learning should be considered banauson if it renders the body or mind of free people useless for the practices and activities of virtue. That is why the arts that put the body into a worse condition and work done for wages are called banauson, for they debase the mind and deprive it of leisure.” Although the banausoi perform work that is necessary such as farming, building, weaving, and such, they are likened by Aristotle to slaves (Pol. I.12 1259b41, III.5 1278a13).

11. See Pol. III.4 1277b3, III.5 1277b34–36, 1278a7, VII.9 1328b39, VIII.2 1337b8–13.

12. Aristotle’s devaluing of production is also a motivation for his view of women as inferior to men. Reproduction is a plantlike function, and animals are divided into sexes in order to concentrate as much as is possible of this lower activity in the inferior members of the species, thereby freeing their superiors for the higher activities that are distinctive to the species. On this view, females are nature’s equivalent of factory seconds, which have been segregated early in the reproductive process and adapted to perform a lower function.

13. On Aristotle’s God, see especially Met. Λ.6–10.

14. Gross 2018 is a fanciful interview in which “Aristotle’s ghost” makes this point.

15. See Øversveen 2022 for a summary of the revival of Marx’s critique on the basis of alienation. See Deci 1995, 135, 204, for a critique of the way in which society imposes an instrumental motivation on us through capitalism. Other critiques come from egalitarian (e.g., Sandel 2013), feminist (Fraser 2013), and black studies (Robinson 2019) perspectives. For a recent, related defense of the ideal of the contemplative life, see Hitz 2020.

16. See Huemer 1996, §5; 2002; 2019.

17. For example, Rasmussen (2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b) interprets Rand as holding what amounts to the eudaimonist position. Mack (1984, 2003), Badhwar (1999), and Long (2000, 2010, 2016, 2020) interpret her view as ambiguous between a survival-focused consequentialism (which they find implausible) and a value-infused eudaimonism (which they regard as preferable). For reasons that these interpretations are untenable, see Gotthelf 2016, 78–79; Salmieri 2016b, 134–36, and 2019, 168–76.

18. On this distinction in Rand’s early work, see Wright 2005 and Salmieri 2016a, 49–53.

19. The translation is misleading, however. The passage in Hugo’s (1864a) French begins “C’est par le réel qu’on vit; c’est par l’idéal qu’on existe” (397). Throughout the translator used “live” for Hugo’s “existe” and “exist” for Hugo’s “vit,” effectively reversing his terminology. A second nineteenth-century translator who made the same curious choice adds: “Perhaps it should be noted that, in the original, existence is made the higher, more absolute mode of being; e.g., ‘Les animaux vivent, l’homme existe’” (Hugo 1887, 295). That similar distinctions could be made in opposite language shows that there is terminological optionality here (as is generally the case when distinctions are drawn), but the fact that two early English translators chose to reverse Hugo’s words suggests that it was more natural in English to use “living” for (what the latter translator calls) “the higher, more absolute mode of being.” This is the English usage we see in the (later) passages by Wilde, Burnett, and Lewis.

20. These sentences come from what is sometimes called London’s Credo: “I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than that it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to LIVE, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
    
    The Credo seems to have first been published by Ernest J. Hopkins in the San Francisco Bulletin on December 2, 1916. Hopkins describes it as a “striking summary of his personal philosophy” that London enunciated “not two months before his death, to a group of friends,” by whom it was “recalled with emotion” when London died. Hopkins may himself have been among those friends. In an article in the November 23 issue of the same paper, he describes how he had visited London at the Glen Ellen Ranch a week earlier and mentions a prior visit during which London discussed “his view of life.”
    
    Hopkins published London’s Credo as a quotation in a prefatory blurb for the Bulletin’s reprinting of London’s 1905 essay “What Life Means to Me.” In the essay, London writes that many in the upper classes are “not alive” but “merely the unburied dead,” and that, of those who were alive, most were “alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life” (London 2015, 6492). He looks forward to a day when a worker’s revolution will “topple over” the current order “with all its rotten life and unburied dead” and build a “new habitation for mankind” in which “the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.” In this future society, “man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of today, which is the incentive of the stomach” (6493).
    
    The Credo later appeared as an epigraph to Irving Shepard’s introduction to Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, where it is followed by the sentence “Only the brilliant, restless personality who was Jack London could have conceived of such a dynamic and challenging credo as this” (London 1956, vii). Shepard was the son of London’s stepsister and was raised on Glen Ellen Ranch, so he may have had firsthand knowledge of the occasion on which Hopkins reports that London spoke the Credo. However, apart from its opening sentence, no copy of the Credo survives in London’s published work or in his handwriting, so scholars are skeptical about whether and in what form he authored it (cf. Stasz 1999).

21. I quote (here and below) from the first edition of the novel, published in 1936, and provide references to the corresponding text in the revised 1959 edition. On the nature of Rand’s revisions, see Mayhew 2004.

22. On the development in Rand’s thinking on these issues, see Wright 2005 and 2009 and Salmieri 2016a.

23. Timoshenko twice says that he and Tagonov “made a revolution” (WTL36 391, 455; WTL 304, 352). In both cases he speaks of their motivations in exalted spiritual terms and extols the will with which they acted but bemoans the sordid horror of the world that resulted. Tagonov tells Kira that his goal is “to bring [most men] up to my level” (WTL36, 94; WTL 74) and “to raise men to our own level” (WTL36, 408; WTL, 316).

24. This at least is the impression conveyed in Metaphysics A.1, and the passages from the Politics mentioned earlier.

25. On Rand’s theory, see Ghate 2016, 107–14; Rheins 2016, 260–65; Binswanger 2014, 321–61; and Peikoff 1991, 55–72.

26. Rand evoked the same Aristotelian idea (in a different translation) by titling Part I, Chapter IV of Atlas Shrugged “The Immovable Movers.” On the significance of that title, see Ghate 2009 7–9, and on the novel’s use of the immovable mover imagery, see Salmieri 2007, Lecture 1 0:55:00–1:00:30.

27. In the scene where Roark first explains that he seeks clients in order to build, rather than the reverse, he explains that “nothing can be reasonable or beautiful” unless it’s integrated around a single central idea and that the central idea for a building is the solution devised by the architect to a unique problem set by the building’s purpose, site, and materials (Fountainhead 12). The purpose is determined by the client’s needs. Thus Roark needs clients to build not only because he’d lack the material resources to build without them but because their needs create the context for the work itself. Thus he comments: “I need people to give me work. I’m not building mausoleums” (158). Later, explaining the difference between himself and a friend who is a sculptor, he observes: “He can work without clients. I can’t” (399).

28. On the progression of this character’s thoughts, see Salmieri 2005. It is true that early on, he thinks that great inventions (such as the candle) can come from “the science of things,” but the goal of creating such inventions is no part of his motive when he begins his clandestine research.

29. Hardie (1965) introduced this idea into the literature. See Ackrill 1974 and Kenny 1977 for some of the early debate about whether Aristotle regards eudaimonia as an “inclusive” end. And see Lear 2004, 2–3 (esp. 3n2) for a useful summary of the positions taken in this literature.

30. On whether even the ultimate value of life is “intrinsic,” see Letters 561, where Rand (writing in 1961) comments to John Hospers on the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values. Provisionally accepting the distinction as Hospers (1961, 104–38) draws it, she says that only life is an intrinsic value. But she calls doubt on the distinction. In “What Is Capitalism” (CUI 13–15) from 1965, she rejects the idea of “intrinsic” goods altogether. The sense in which she uses the term here is broader than that in which intrinsic goods (or values) are generally contrasted with instrumental ones, but it includes this sense (though she doesn’t say so in as many words). On this issue, see Salmieri 2016b, 135–36.

31. Notice that Aristotle’s advice is directed specifically to those “who are able to live by their own choice.” This category clearly excludes young children, whose reason is not yet developed, and enslaved persons, who aren’t at liberty to live by their own choice. Aristotle likely also means it to exclude people without enough wealth to live leisured lives, and those people (such as women and “natural slaves”) whom he thought were congenitally incapable of directing their lives by their own reasoning.

32. Reputation and wealth are rejected as the constituents of “living well” a few Bekker pages later (1215a20–33). Honor and reputation approximate to virtue and contemplation, respectively, but these are only valuable assuming those conferring honor and reputation themselves have virtue and practical wisdom; since otherwise the human good is not up to oneself and can easily be taken away by another (1095b28–37).

33. Or, perhaps, Rough Collie’s Life, if what is good for dogs varies with their breed.

34. In a discussion of nonfiction writing (AON 48, 163), Rand discusses how authors are sometimes stultified by a “Platonic” view of writing along the lines of the view from which I’ve differentiated our poet’s task.

35. On the concept of a “central idea” or “core combination” in art and Rand’s concept of “plot-theme” (which is the version of this idea specific to literature), see Fountainhead 12–13; “Basic Principles of Literature” (RM 84); AOF 17; Boeckmann (2007a, 123–24; 2008; 2016, 438–40); and Salmieri 2016a, 55–59.

36. Indeed, even in the Rhetoric and Poetics, which are about literary composition, there is less emphasis on individual creativity than one might expect.

37. On the relation between Romanticism’s method of literary integration and its projection of personal values, see Boeckman 2016, 440–47.

38. See “Philosophy and Sense of Life” and “Art and Sense of Life” (both in RM). Rand describes art and romantic love as the “two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life” (RM 21).

39. God’s life qualifies as a paradigm instance of Man’s Life insofar as a man is most of all his reason and God’s life is just the life of reason.

40. In Atlas (517, 633–37, 640–41, 812), Francisco and Dagny sometimes describe their dedication to ideals in terms of their “serving” Galt. Francisco does this thinking of Galt concretely; Dagny initially thinks of an idealized image of a man at the end of the railroad tracks, and then of the inventor of the motor she discovers, but she comes to identify both figures with Galt. Rand’s early notes on what Galt represents for several other characters (Journals 505) also connect him to their ultimate motivations.

41. Thus, at the beginning of Roark’s career, his mentor, Henry Cameron, praises him as follows: “What you’re doing — it’s yours, not mine, I can only teach you to do it better. I can give you the means, but the aim — the aim’s your own. You won’t be a little disciple putting up anemic little things in early Jacobean or late Cameron” (Fountainhead 68).

42. Importantly, for Rand, each of these virtues is a principle — that is, a recognition of a fact that can be formulated abstractly, rather than a characterological disposition that can only be elucidated by reference to how paradigmatically virtuous individuals would behave in various situations. The respective facts recognized by independence and integrity are (1) that “nothing can help you escape” “the responsibility of judgment” and (2) that “you cannot fake your own consciousness” (Atlas 1019, cf. VOS 28). For elaboration, see Peikoff 1991, 251–67; Gotthelf 2016, 92–94; and Smith 2006, 106–13, 176–83.

43. See de Liège 2023 for an argument that Foot’s framework cannot realize this promise.

44. In this, these ethicists are following an interpretation advanced most influentially by John McDowell (1980 and 1998).

45. For instance, Broadie (1991, 212) argues that it is a mistake to think the phronimos model offers us an “explicit, comprehensive, substantial vision” of the human good. Moss (2011) argues that characterological virtues are wholly nonintellectual.

46. Moosavi (2019) voices this concern. To foreclose it, she suggests that we adopt an irreducibly normative understanding of human biological functioning, which conception would include much of what we antecedently suppose to be the content of ethics.

47. In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco D’Anconia tells Dagny Taggart: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong” (199). Rand’s advice to “check one’s premises” was a recurring appeal to epistemic integration that she would offer in discussions with friends and students.

48. For discussion of them, see Gotthelf 2016, 81–96; Smith 2006; and Peikoff 1991, 1998.

49. On promiscuity, see Rand Atlas 489–91. On homosexuality, see Lewis and Salmieri 2016, 396n87 and the sources cited therein.

50. Some of these issues concerning character are explored by Neera Badhwar and Ben Bayer in their chapters in this volume.

Essential resources:    

America's Failure to Confront Iran: Ayn Rand Comments

(Republished June 19, 2025; originally published, 1980)

What would be the proper course of action for the US during the 1979–81 Iranian hostage crisis? How should we have gone about getting the hostages back?

The U.S. Has Appeased Iran for Decades

(July 17, 2024)

A special collection of clips highlighting some of our analysts’ most compelling warnings and predictions.

‘End States Who Sponsor Terrorism’

(Republished November 7, 2023; originally published October 2, 2001)

Leonard Peikoff diagnosed the policy that made possible the September 11 attacks and warned of the consequences of continuing it: “If our appeasement has led to an escalation of disasters in the past, can it do otherwise in the future?”

‘Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech'

(Republished August 12, 2022; originally published in 1989)

Here is the Ayn Rand Institute’s statement, authored by Leonard Peikoff, upholding the principle of freedom of speech and denouncing the 1989 Iranian death-decree against Rushdie.

20 Years Since 9/11: ARI’s Distinctive Philosophic Analysis

(September 12, 2021)

A compilation of some of ARI’s distinctive commentary and analysis on foreign policy between 2001 and 2021.

ARI’s Uncompromising Voice for Reason Since 9/11

(September 8, 2021)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss the Institute’s analysis of 9/11, the U.S. response to the Islamist threat, and the repercussions today.

Preface to Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism

(August 6, 2021)

In Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, in which authors Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo evaluate the nature of the militant Islamic threat, the role of a proper foreign policy in defending citizens’ freedom, and the morality of a just war, among other issues. The second edition expands on the first edition’s argument that Islamism is alive and well — and that it cannot be defeated without first understanding it down to its philosophic roots. You can also download the book for free by subscribing to our email list.

Recent Podcasts, interviews and lectures:

Iranian Theocracy on the Brink? Why Protesters Deserve Our Moral Support

(January 14, 2026)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo examine why Iran’s ongoing uprising may be the regime’s most serious challenge yet — and why it deserves far more moral support from the free world.

Principles of a Proper Foreign Policy

(July 2, 2025)

Peter Schwartz argues that a nation’s foreign policy should be guided by the principle of individual rights and aimed at protecting the nation’s freedom. He discusses how to address threats from Iran and elsewhere.

Beyond the ‘Isolationist’-Neoconservative False Choice on Iran

(June 30, 2025)

Yaron Brook and Elan Journo unpack the main arguments surrounding Israel’s strikes on Iran, criticizing both anti-war “isolationists” and pro-war neoconservatives for failing to  adopt a rational, self-interested approach to the issue.

News Roundup: The Israel-Iran War

(June 20, 2025)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Israel’s war against Iran: why Israel’s war is a positive development and why a self-interested American foreign policy must break from the legacy of 9/11.

The New Iran Deal: Trump Recycles Obama Amoralism

(May 5, 2025)

Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss the Trump administration’s move to restart nuclear talks with Iran by rehashing Obama’s failed deal.

A Year After October 7: What the Conflict Is Actually About

(October 7, 2024)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Western misconceptions around October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including why the war is really between Israel and Iran, how pragmatism effects the West’s inability to understand Iran, and how Palestinian grievances help pragmatists evade Iran’s ideology.

How America’s 9/11 Response Enabled October 7

(September 11, 2024)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss how the failure of American post-9/11 policy led to the October 7 attacks, including how religion and altruism undermined the response to Islamic totalitarianism.

Iran Attacks Israel

(April 13, 2024)

Elan Journo offers initial commentary on Iran’s strike on Israel.

Why Iran Fuels the Mideast War

(November 1, 2023)

Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo and Nikos Sotirakopoulos analyze Iran’s ideological aims and militant ambitions, in another episode of our mini-series on shedding light on the Middle East.

Ghate and Journo on What Went Wrong After 9/11

(September 11, 2023)

Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate argue that Biden’s U.S. prisoner swap with the Iranian regime is an example of the same kind of unprincipled appeasement of the Islamist threat that was pervasive before 9/11.

The U.S.-Iran Prisoner Swap: Biden’s Policy of Delusion

(April 31, 2023)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss the Biden administration’s prisoner swap with the Iranian regime and how it reflects the delusional attitudes and non-objective thinking that lead to America’s continuous foreign policy failures with regard to Islamic totalitarianism.

The Protests in Russia and Iran

(October 5, 2022)

Ben Bayer and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the recent protests against the authoritarian regimes of Iran and Russia. They analyze the common causes that animate these public demonstrations and offer a philosophical perspective on why they effectively undermine the moral legitimacy of these dictatorships.

The Sorry Legacy of Our Policy Toward Iran

(August 17, 2022)

Onkar Ghate, Agustina Vergara Cid and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss Iran’s recent attempts — on American soil — to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a journalist and critic of the Iranian regime, and John Bolton, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, as well as the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie, whose murder Iran has advocated for over 30 years. They discuss the philosophic nature of the Iranian regime and how decades of failed U.S. policy has emboldened Iran and other enemies.

The Charlie Hebdo Assassinations: Six Years Later

(January 6, 2021)

On the sixth anniversary of the murderous attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate discuss the attacks as a symptom of the erosion of free speech in the West.

9/11: Learning the Right Lessons

(September 9, 2020)

Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss the legacy of the U.S. response to 9/11 and the lessons we should have learned from it.

Recent articles:

What Iranian Protesters Deserve from Us

(October 26, 2022)

Elan Journo explains why we vastly underappreciate the power of America’s moral sanction.

Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton Paved the Road to 9/11 (Part 1, Part 2)

September 7 and 9, 2022)

Elan Journo argues that in the decades before 9/11, our political leaders failed to recognize that war had been launched against us and that the enemy is Islamic totalitarianism, inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran. They managed only to appease and encourage the enemy’s aggression.

Why U.S. Failed in Afghanistan. No, It’s Not What You Think.

(August 20, 2021)

Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate argue that we should blame our political and intellectual leaders, across two decades, for evading the ideological nature of the enemy and, consequently, miring U.S. forces in a “no-win” war.

Western Apathy Toward Iran’s Religious Dictatorship

(February 17, 2021)

Elan Journo discusses an interview with Iranian activist Shaparak Shajarizadeh.

Flemming Rose on Islamist Threats to Free Speech

(December 9, 2020)

Elan Journo discusses an interview with free speech activist Fleming Rose.

Sept. 11 and the Failure to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism

(September 11, 2019)

Preface to the first edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism.

Jihadists: Understanding the Nature of the Enemy

(April 16, 2018)

Elan Journo identifies the nature and goals of the jihadist threat, as led by the Iranian regime.
 

See also: ARI’s Resources on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East

Image Credit: Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran via Getty Images

ICE has now announced the end to its recent immigration enforcement “surge” in Minnesota, after its tactics resulted in the death of two people. As ICE tactics continue to undermine due process rights, the New York Times editorial board and kindred others have reflected on the role ICE plays in a broader challenge the Trump administration poses to democracy.¹

Trump’s immigration policies are dramatically unjust. But meaningful reflection on what’s wrong with them means recognizing an uncomfortable fact: they are not “undemocratic” but all too much a product of democracy.

It’s an uncomfortable fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not just in the electoral college but by two million in the popular vote. And he did it by loudly campaigning for his immigration policy. He promised to carry out “the largest deportation effort in American history,” and his running mate suggested starting with deporting one million people.^2,3

Remorseful Trump voters have no excuse for thinking they voted for something else.

The signs of Trump’s democratic roots are often hidden behind critics’ evasive relabeling: his “populism.” His immigration policy aims to scandalize a broad class of voting citizens by demonizing the non-citizen minority. “Populism” is just another name for the democracy that certain elites don’t happen to like. They go back to calling it “democracy” when the majority targets the rights of minorities they happen to despise, like businessmen.

In its basic, original meaning, “democracy” just means majority rule, unconstrained by checks and balances that are designed to protect individual rights.

Remember: the Athenian democracy voted to put Socrates to death. The governments of southern U.S. states — and of the Confederacy — elected politicians and passed popular laws that enslaved millions of African Americans. Even abolition didn’t stop southern majorities from restricting their rights and tolerating lynch mobs under Jim Crow. Majority rule unconstrained by the rights of individuals is majority tyranny.

Many have characterized Trump’s policies and ICE’s tactics as autocratic or even fascistic. They have a point. But democratic fascism is no contradiction. The Nazi party first rose to power in Germany after being freely elected in 1932.⁴

Trump is not the only one to blame for the rise of fascistic immigration policies. The laws that classify 10 to 15 million people in the U.S. as “illegal” have been on the books for decades. They were passed by duly elected representatives — including the Democrats. It’s these laws that mandate treating immigrants as having no right to travel, work, or live peacefully among us.

The current labyrinthine set of foreign worker quotas that dispenses jobs by permission of the government was first adopted in 1952 by a Democrat-controlled Congress and finalized in 1965 during the heyday of LBJ’s Great Society. Even when “progressive” Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2021, they didn’t prioritize changing the laws.

Democrats have evaded their responsibility for these laws by choosing not to enforce them, as in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But lax enforcement only played into the hands of “law and order” politicians. When Republicans decided to enforce the laws on the books, of course it required massive fascistic intrusion into and destruction of the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should recall that the Founders themselves warned us against unconstrained majority rule (see Madison’s Federalist #10).⁵ They gave us a system in which our elected officials are constrained by law with checks and balances designed to limit their ability to violate individual rights.

This is sometimes what people mean by our “democracy,” but that’s a misnomer. The Founders gave us not a democracy, but a constitutional republic, a system premised on limiting government’s function solely to protecting the individual’s rights.

The laws Trump is enforcing are not “undemocratic.” But they do violate constitutional rights. Even non-citizens have a right to liberty. Laws restricting immigrant labor violate the freedom to work and engage in trade. But these are freedoms Democrats long ago sold down the river when they sought ever-increasing regulations on the freedom of businessmen.

If Trump’s ICE now assaults procedural rights such as due process, it’s because like so many other presidents, he has habituated action by executive order. This is enabled by a Congress that has delegated so much power to the executive through laws (like immigration laws) aimed at achieving collectivist policy goals that ignore individual rights. Such laws require the oversight of a massive and intrusive administrative state. And the Supreme Court tolerates it all because it is unwilling to apply “strict scrutiny” to any but the most blatantly anti-liberty laws. It recently described the concept of “liberty” as too “capacious” to define clearly, treating with deference any laws adopted through . . . the “democratic process.”⁶

When a president enforces popular laws passed by Congress and is unconstrained by a docile Supreme Court — the chaotic, tyrannical presence of ICE thugs on our streets “is what democracy looks like.”

Voters made this possible. They need to reflect on the consequences of their past decisions and try to reverse course. Paradoxically, they need to vote for politicians and policies who commit to protect individual rights as sacrosanct — even in the face of what voters demand.

1. The Editorial Board, “Trump’s Stifling of Dissent Reaches a New Level,” New York Times, February 8, 2026.

2. Laura Strickler, Didi Martinez, Chloe Atkins and Julia Ainsley, “How Would Mass Deportation of Migrants under Trump Actually Work?,” NBC News, July 17, 2024.

3. “JD Vance Says Mass Deportations Should ‘start With 1 Million,’” ABC News YouTube channel, August 12, 2024.

4. Wikipedia contributors, “July 1932 German Federal Election,” Wikipedia, accessed January 16, 2026.

5. James Madison, “Research Guides: Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History: Federalist Nos. 1-10,” November 23, 1787.

6. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. (June 24, 2022).

Rand turned to him and answered: “That’s right. I chose to be an American. What did you do, besides having been born?”¹

The crowd cheered, and the heckler retreated.

There’s a rich history behind Rand’s choice to be an American, resulting from years of philosophical reverence for America’s history, art, and values.

February 19, 2026, marks the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s immigration to America. Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and the rest of her work would not have existed if she hadn’t been able to immigrate. The story of her challenging journey highlights how that almost didn’t happen.

Rand fled her native Russia in 1926 because she could not live under the brutally oppressive policies of the Soviet regime. Evidence housed in the Ayn Rand Archives, and from her own work and interviews, reveals that she didn’t want to go just anywhere to escape her home country — she specifically wanted to come to America. She would later refer to America as “the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”²

Soviet Russia was precisely the opposite.

Soviet Russia: No Home for an Ambitious Writer

Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, to Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum and Zinovy Zakarovitch Rosenbaum (she adopted the name “Ayn Rand” after arriving in America).³ Rand later described her family as “middle to upper-middle class.”⁴ Her father was a successful pharmacist and businessman who owned both the pharmacy and the building it occupied.⁵

The Rosenbaum family, ca. 1912; from left to right: Zinovy, Alisa (Ayn Rand), Natasha, Anna, and Nora (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

The Rosenbaums’ comfortable lives were destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Anticipating upheaval, Zinovy withdrew what savings he could and sold the family’s jewelry, enabling them to survive through the difficult years ahead.⁶ His pharmacy was confiscated and closed when private businesses were abolished by the new Soviet government.⁷ With the nationalization of banks, members of their extended family had assets seized.⁸

In 1918, the family fled St. Petersburg — now Petrograd — enduring banditry on their journey to Crimea, a refuge of anti-Soviet Russians during the ensuing civil war.⁹ Even there, they experienced periods of hunger and disease as the town they lived in changed hands multiple times during the conflict.¹⁰ When the Soviets emerged victorious a few years later, the family returned to a Petrograd filled with ration cards, political informers, and university purges.¹¹

Before all this, at the age of nine, Rand had decided to become a fiction writer, seeking to dramatize life as it “might be and ought to be”: not mediocrity, but the exceptional — not the average, but the heroic.¹² She summarized this attitude in a 1945 letter to her readers: “I could summon no interest or enthusiasm for ‘people as they are’ — when I had in my mind a blinding picture of people as they could be.”¹³

In a 1960 biographical interview, Rand recalled that her stories in the years immediately after the revolution were political in nature, noting that they focused on individualistic, idealistic heroes “fighting either against communists or against some king.”¹⁴ Such stories about revolutions against oppressive regimes could be perceived as seditious.¹⁵ The Soviet state, historians have noted, enforced strict censorship and ideological control over literature, theater, and film.¹⁶ Looking back, Rand estimated that if she had remained in Soviet Russia writing such stories, she would likely “be dead within a year.”¹⁷

With every passing year of her young life, Rand better understood the condition of Soviet Russia. Even prior to the revolution, she regarded the country as “a cesspool of civilization” — hardly a climate where her art could thrive.¹⁸ But as she realized the depressing state of Russia, she also began discovering a bright faraway country that would stand in her mind in stark contrast with Soviet Russia: the United States of America.

“Like Going to Mars:” Discovering Freedom Abroad

Even before the Russian Revolution, Rand recalled having the impression that her future lay abroad, expressing an admiration for England and Switzerland from an early age.¹⁹ She had grown up reading French literature and had learned to speak the language from her governess.²⁰ Rand could also read German and had a cousin living in Berlin.²¹ She could have tried to move elsewhere on the European continent and might have lived a decent life if she had done so. But for someone like Rand, who sought the exceptional, there was only one choice that made sense: coming to America.

The Rosenbaum sisters, ca. 1915; from left to right: Nora, Alisa (Ayn Rand), and Natasha (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

Rand was introduced to American history in high school, and learned about the country’s history, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.²² At that time, however, she didn’t regard immigrating to America as a “serious possibility.”²³ It was a country on the other side of the world, so far removed from a Russian’s context, she recalled, that it was “like going to Mars.”²⁴

The turning point came between 1923 and 1925 when she began to regularly consume American movies.²⁵

As a student at the Russian Cinema Institute, she recalled, “I remember there were some American movies where you could see New York, just shots, usually long shots, and I would sit through two shows just to catch it. . . . It seemed completely incredible.”²⁶

New York represented America, and America became, in Rand’s mind, the only place where she could live the life she wanted. She conceived of the American skyscraper as “the symbol of achievement and of life on Earth,” in stark contrast with Soviet Russia.²⁷ Over the next two years, Rand sought anything that would serve as a window to America — particularly the films of Cecil B. DeMille and Milton Sills.²⁸

The fiction that Rand wrote in this period reflected her increasing love for the U.S. In one story, written approximately in 1923, she envisioned a scenario where the greatest minds of Europe all fled from the rise of collectivism, seeking refuge in America.²⁹

This admiration also extended to Rand’s first published nonfiction work. In 1925, she wrote a pamphlet about the Polish actress Pola Negri, who had immigrated to Hollywood in 1921, becoming one of the biggest silent film stars of her day. For Rand, Negri likely served as a living example of the kind of success and happiness that was possible for artists in the United States.³⁰

The pamphlet young Ayn Rand wrote about actress Pola Negri (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

By 1925, Rand was fully determined to leave Russia behind forever and make a new life for herself on the other side of the world.³¹

The Journey Across the Ocean

Zinovy had reservations about Rand traveling alone to a country where she couldn’t even speak the language (she would not become fully fluent until she moved to America).³² Still, her family supported the decision to leave.³³ They knew of her admiration for the United States and her ambition to live there someday. That support took many forms: Rand’s parents paid her travel expenses and sent money to her while she was in America.³⁴ Throughout the documented family correspondence, they affectionately referred to Rand as “the American resident,” and a family cat was named “Los Angeles.”³⁵

Leaving the USSR was laborious and unpredictable because permission to leave was dispensed so arbitrarily.³⁶ Rand recalled that it was nearly impossible to know what forces were at play in the minds of Soviet officials, as approvals to exit the country were granted seemingly at random, and sometimes the doors would completely slam shut.³⁷

Her mother, Anna, corresponded with relatives in Chicago, in the hopes that they’d host her daughter so she could receive a travel visa to see her relatives.³⁸ According to Rand, the Soviets granted her a six-month passport to do this.³⁹ At a farewell party, a family acquaintance was once purported to have told her: “If they ask you, in America — tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying slowly.”⁴⁰

Ayn Rand's Soviet passport (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

If Russian authorities hadn’t granted Rand permission to leave, she recalled in the 1960s, she might have tried to escape illegally.⁴¹ But, Rand said, “I’m not too sure I would have tried illegally,” given its challenges.⁴² In those 1960–61 interviews, Rand stated that if forced to stay, she might have tried writing subtly anti-Soviet movie scenarios with double meanings, but “I would have been dead within a year, that’s for sure.”⁴³ 

Immigrant stories often begin with goodbyes, and Rand’s was no exception. She left her home city on January 17, 1926, and bid farewell to her mother and father.⁴⁴ Anna later wrote to her in a letter: “You are gone. When you were standing on the balcony of the train, and the train’s commandant separated you from us, you were so miniature, slim, young and pretty. . . . You loudly called out to us, ― by the time I return, I’ll be famous.”⁴⁵

Anna would tell her in the same missive that when Zinovy got home, he said, between sobs: “Alisa will show the world who she is.”⁴⁶ 

Although she now had a Soviet passport, Rand still faced a daunting challenge: obtaining permission from American immigration authorities.

The challenge came from the passage in 1924 of the first wide-reaching federal immigration law: the Johnson-Reed Act. It imposed national-origins quotas — generally 2 percent of each nationality’s U.S. population in 1890 (the Western Hemisphere was exempt).⁴⁷ It also created visa requirements: immigrants and visitors could not enter America without a U.S. consular visa.⁴⁸

Procuring a visa was arduous. The U.S. did not recognize the USSR until November 16, 1933, so immigrant visas for Soviet visitors were handled through posts in neighboring countries.⁴⁹ Russia’s immigrant visa quota was tight (2,248 per year), so Rand could be rejected even if she fit the requirements.⁵⁰

On or around January 27, 1926, Rand interviewed at the U.S. embassy in Riga, Latvia, to apply for her visa.⁵¹ She recalled that if she didn’t receive the visa, she was told she would be “arrested immediately and shipped back” to Russia.⁵²

In order for her visitor visa to be approved, Rand needed to convince the American embassy official that she didn’t plan on staying in the U.S.⁵³ Just as she was willing to break Soviet law to get out, she also misrepresented the facts to the official: she claimed that she did not intend to stay in the United States because there was a young Russian man that she would “probably marry.” There was no such engagement.⁵⁴ The official told her that he was about to reject her application, but this information swayed his decision, and he granted her permission to enter the United States.⁵⁵ A bureaucrat’s whim could have dramatically changed the course of Rand’s life. 

After years of admiring America and dreaming of the New York City skyline, Rand finally had in her hands what was one of the most important pieces for solving the puzzle of her immigration to America: her visa.

She would later describe walking out of the embassy with the American visa as “the great moment of my life,” in which she felt like she was “walking on air.”⁵⁶

Rand’s luggage stub used aboard the S.S. De Grasse, the French ocean liner that brought her to America (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

“Tears of Splendor:" The Arrival in New York

From there, she traveled westward to Berlin, staying briefly with a cousin before continuing to Paris, and, finally, to Le Havre, France, where she embarked for America.⁵⁷

Rand arrived in New York on February 19, 1926, after nine days crossing the ocean.⁵⁸ She would recall that she saw her first lighted skyscrapers while walking off the pier from her ship: “It was snowing, very faintly, and I think I began to cry, because I remember feeling the snowflakes and the tears sort of together, not really crying, but, you know, just strictly emotion.”⁵⁹

Mary Ann Sures, a close friend of Rand, later recalled talking to Rand and her husband about this moment: “I asked what those tears were for. Her husband, Frank O’Connor, answered: ‘They were tears of splendor.’ And Ayn nodded in agreement.”⁶⁰ Rand had dreamed of someday going to America, but getting there was “a distant ideal.”⁶¹ She would later relate that “going to America . . . was literally for all of us [her family] like going to Mars.”⁶²

Leaving one’s birthplace, no matter how oppressive, often weighs heavily on immigrants and their families, and this was the case for the Rosenbaums, too. Letters from her mother soon after her departure revealed their agony at being apart and the uncertainty of whether they would ever see each other again. In this case, they never would.

In a letter mailed February 21, 1926, Anna wrote:

This is the first letter that I am writing in a non-panicky state since you left. In all your letters you write that you wished you could have been here so as to see our reactions to your news of the consul’s giving you permission to go. But if you had wanted to see real joy, an undiluted joy, you should have seen us yesterday when your telegram arrived.⁶³

She was referencing the fact that she didn’t know whether Rand had survived the long trip across the ocean, and was ecstatic upon hearing from her daughter again over a week later.

Despite their pain over Rand’s absence, the family supported her ambition to seek a new life in America. Her mother wrote to Rand shortly after departing: “When you are in America . . . don’t hide from people, be lively, learn dances, and don’t forget that the whole of Leningrad is looking at you. Be gay always, remember that America has been your dream that had seemed forever unattainable.”⁶⁴

Rand lived with her relatives in Chicago for six months before continuing on to the mecca of American movie-making: Hollywood.⁶⁵ She arrived in Los Angeles on September 3, 1926. ⁶⁶ 

Ayn Rand in Chicago, 1926 (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

She wanted to meet Cecil B. DeMille, one of the most successful American directors.⁶⁷ According to her movie diary, she first began watching DeMille’s films in 1924 while she was living in Russia, and later referred to him as “my particular idol of the American screen.”⁶⁸

Rand eventually secured an interview with the publicity department at DeMille’s studio in Culver City, but was told that there weren’t any jobs for her at the moment.⁶⁹ As she was leaving the studio lot, she randomly encountered DeMille himself.⁷⁰ She told the director of her ambition to work as a writer, and he invited her to work as an extra on his current film: The King of Kings.⁷¹ Several months later, he hired her as a junior screenwriter and tasked her with developing scenarios for films.⁷²

The job with DeMille didn’t last, so Rand struggled to make ends meet for some time. Throughout her early career, which was full of ebbs and flows, she still found opportunities for work and held various odd jobs. She even tried waitressing, but was fired on day one; at a different restaurant, she later recalled, she managed to last “a whole week.”⁷³

She eventually worked stuffing envelopes, selling magazine subscriptions (of which she sold one, as she later recalled), and the first “real job” she got was as a filing clerk in the wardrobe department at the RKO movie studio.⁷⁴ Rand was slowly achieving what she had set out to do in America: rise as far as her hard work and ambition would take her. Her brush with fame would eventually help her forge the career path she dreamed of: as a writer.

Ayn Rand with girls from the Hollywood Studio Club on “Clean Up Hollywood Day,” ca. April 1927 (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

Another consequential outcome of her early Hollywood years was meeting actor Frank O’Connor on the set of The King of Kings — the start of a love story that would last for more than fifty years.⁷⁵

Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor, ca. 1930 (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

Becoming an American

In early 1929, about two years after meeting O’Connor, Rand’s final visa renewal was nearing expiration, per her own account.⁷⁶ Though she and Frank had decided at some point earlier that they would get married, to remain in the United States she would have to take immediate legal steps.

Years later, Rand recalled that she did not want to stay illegally in the U.S. and had decided against advice to circumvent the immigration laws: “I was far-sighted enough to say: ‘Someday I will be famous, and it will matter, and it will be discovered, and I don’t want to stay here illegally,’” she stated.⁷⁷ She would also explain that her visitor visa had been renewed three times between 1926 and 1929.⁷⁸

Other than Rand’s testimony in the biographical interviews, there is no documented evidence in the Ayn Rand Archives of her visa renewals. The immigration regulations at the time make it implausible that an extension would have been granted for a total of three years — from 1926 to 1929, when she married Frank O’Connor and obtained legal permanent residency.⁷⁹ However, immigration enforcement was scattered and arbitrary at the time, and the lack of paperwork in the Archives of the renewal she recalled years later doesn’t mean it never existed. Therefore, it is unclear whether Rand fell out of immigration status.

But Rand did work at numerous jobs — such as movie extra, junior screenwriter, and waitress — without obtaining government permission. Her visa did not permit her to work in America. Although in the 1920s the government was expanding its power to decide who is permitted to work, the legal landscape and enforcement were significantly different from today. Employers now are expected to ask about an individual’s employment eligibility and to document it (e.g.: millions are required to use E-Verify), with financial and other penalties for hiring ineligible individuals. But unlike today, employers in the 1920s were not expected to check an individual's permission to work. So there’s little reason to think this issue came up in the many jobs Rand held prior to becoming formally eligible to work. Moreover, given her moral and political ideals, she would have repudiated such a government prohibition on engaging in voluntary, productive work — and the requirement to disclose employment in a visa renewal.⁸⁰

Immigration regulations forced Ayn and Frank to move forward their wedding date in order to qualify for permanent residency. Rand expressed years later that she didn’t remember when or if Frank had made a formal marriage proposal, but they had taken for granted that they “would have been married anyway.”⁸¹ As she put it, Frank simply said: “Well, we’ll get married.”⁸²

On April 15, 1929, Ayn Rand married Frank O’Connor, an act that she later described as a shotgun wedding, “with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun.”⁸³

Rand was required to leave the United States and reenter under her new legal classification as the wife of an American citizen. The couple traveled together to Mexicali, Mexico, stayed overnight, and reentered the U.S.⁸⁴ Rand applied for her permanent residence, based on marriage on June 28, 1929, as shown in an affidavit accompanying her application.⁸⁵ It contained a statement saying: “my purpose in going to the United States is to live.”⁸⁶ Though this was standard bureaucratic phrasing, it was poetic in the context of the life of the woman who would later write We the Living (about a Russian young woman’s quest to live free from Soviet tyranny). 

Rand’s affidavit accompanying her immigration application (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

Ayn Rand’s immigrant identity card — a precursor of today’s permanent resident card (“green card”) (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

Approval notice of Ayn Rand’s immigrant visa (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

In 1931, at twenty-six years old, Rand became a U.S. citizen. In her petition for citizenship, filed in the District Court of the United States at Los Angeles, California, she listed her last foreign home as Petrograd, Russia, and that she entered as a legal permanent resident through Calexico, California.⁸⁷

The affidavit of witnesses, signed by Dorothy Carter (whose identity we haven’t been able to ascertain) and Walter Plunkett (a former boss), stated a few formalities that were nonetheless meaningful and true: that she had behaved as a person of “good moral character,” that she was “attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States,” and that she was “well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.”⁸⁸

Ayn Rand’s naturalization certificate (courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives).

A Philosophical Understanding of America

Rand’s naturalization in 1931 would formalize her status as an American. As a novelist and philosopher, she would go on to develop a deep understanding of the view that attracted her to America: that it was an exceptional country.

America was unique and moral, Rand explained in a 1973 essay, because it was the first country to see man as an individual, not as a member of a collective:

America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more — and nothing less. The rest — everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything “noble and just,” and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history — was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.⁸⁹

More than any other philosopher, Rand saw the wide-reaching implications of the individualism that America had achieved. Precisely because of this, she was critical of the instances when the country didn’t live up to it. She was a fierce critic of American politics, criticizing legislation, politicians, intellectuals, and other public figures who didn’t honor America’s promise of protecting individual rights.

Notably, Rand left Soviet Russia to escape communism, only to see it starting to take hold in America. She witnessed the growing popularity of communism in intellectual circles during the “Red Decade.” In 1936, she published We the Living, her semiautobiographical account of life in Soviet Russia. She was a vocal anticommunist, even testifying before Congress on communist influence in the film industry.

Rand also opposed policies enacted by “liberal” American politicians who shared the collectivistic premises of the communists. She denounced President Roosevelt’s New Deal and even condemned President Kennedy’s signature New Frontier program as fascistic, as it implied the “subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the collective,” in stark contrast to the values this country was founded on.⁹⁰

Despite her popularity in conservative circles, Rand criticized conservatives too. As an advocate of the secular Constitution and an atheist, she denounced conservatives’ injection of religion into politics. She denounced, among other things, their unprincipled defense of capitalism stemming from their reliance on the moral premises of religion.

Overall, Rand saw much of America’s politics as antithetical to its founding principles. She valued America profoundly — and that’s why she fought to defend the essence of what made it the place she admired from afar, and what allowed her the freedom to pursue her ambition. She openly and persuasively pushed this country to live up to (and improve on) its founding principles and understood that, if America continued to deviate from these principles, it would fall victim to authoritarianism.

Ayn Rand on the set of the NBC television program The Today Show in New York, March 23, 1961. (Photo by Raimondo Borea/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images)

A Quintessential American Story

Despite being Russian-born, Ayn Rand was profoundly American. She deliberately chose this country — above other options — because she revered its founding principles.

Her immigration story speaks of Rand’s commitment to her own happiness, her determination, and her deep appreciation of America. It is the story of a woman who would not settle for the mediocre or the “good enough” but valued her own life enough to seek the best, even if it took her away from home and meant starting her life over again in a foreign land.

Her belief that she would thrive in the freedom America offered was proven right — she achieved immense success. Through her time working to become an American citizen, she refined her craft of writing, which would pay off greatly in the ensuing decades. Through the lean years of the Great Depression, she took jobs in the film industry and kept writing when she could, treating each new project as another step toward the career she had crossed an ocean to build.

That long climb began to yield tangible results in 1932 when Rand sold her first screenplay, “Red Pawn,” to Universal Studios. Afterward, Rand sent DeMille a synopsis of the film along with a letter of gratitude, recalling that when he first helped her, she had been “a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia.”⁹¹

In the years that followed, Rand published her first novel, We the Living, and found success on Broadway with her play Night of January 16th.⁹² But it was the nationwide success of her second novel, The Fountainhead, that transformed her from a struggling immigrant into a nationally recognized author — followed by Atlas Shrugged in 1957, one of the most widely read and debated novels of the twentieth century. Her philosophical and literary work continues to inspire readers to this day.

Rand’s journey is also the story of America’s fraught relationship with immigration. A productive, ambitious individual like Rand ended up having to work illegally to pursue her aspirations, like millions of other individuals who are American in every way but on paper. But this is also the story of America’s power to attract — by means of its basic values — an ambitious mind from more than five thousand miles away — a mind that sought the best for itself. 

Ultimately, America delivered on its promise to Ayn Rand. In 1926, shortly after arriving, she wrote to a friend in Russia:

As you can see, not only have I reached Riga, I [have] reached further still. The only thing that remains for me is to rise, which I am doing with my characteristic straight-line decisiveness. I hope you will be impressed once more when you hear that I didn’t back down from a much harder path.⁹³

From a Soviet escapee to a waitress to one of the most famous and influential writers and philosophers in American history, Rand rose thanks to her own ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the freedom of a country that was hospitable to people like her.

1. Barbara Branden, “Who Is Ayn Rand?,” in Who Is Ayn Rand?, ed. Nathaniel Branden (New York: Random House, 1962), 199.

2. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 10.

3. Rand’s sister Natasha refers to her as “Lil Rand” in a letter dated February 26, 1926 (Natasha Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, February 26, 1926, 062_016_001, Ayn Rand Archives). Over a month later, Rand’s sister Nora addresses her as “Ayn Rand” in a letter dated April 11, 1926. This is the first time the name appears in their documented correspondence (Eleonora Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, April 11, 1926, 062_024_001, Ayn Rand Archives).

4. Between December 1960 and May 1961, Ayn Rand recorded approximately forty hours of audio interviews with Barbara and Nathaniel Branden. These interviews were part of the Brandens’ research for the biographical essay published in Who Is Ayn Rand? (1962). The following footnotes cite the page numbers of the unpublished transcript. Factual details drawn from these interviews depend upon the accuracy of Rand’s later recollection. While many such details are likely reliable (especially basic family and biographical facts), memory is fallible. The interviews are not, by themselves, independent documentary corroboration (Ayn Rand, Biographical Interview #1 by Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, December 18, 1960, transcript, 10, Ayn Rand Archives).

5. Biographical Interview #4, December 28, 1960, 133.

6. Biographical Interview #4, 134.

7. Soviet of People’s Commissars, “Abolition of Private Trade,” November 21, 1918, in James Bunyan, ed., Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April–December 1918 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1936), 435–39; Biographical Interview #4, 133–35.

8. Central Executive Committee, “Decree on Nationalization of Banks,” December 14/27, 1917, trans. Emanuel Aronsberg, Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2017 ; Biographical Interview #4, 134.

9. Biographical Interview #2, December 19, 1960, 54; Biographical Interview #4, 139–40; for more on the family’s journey to Crimea, see Brandon Lisi, “‘The Importance of Fiction’: Ayn Rand’s Escape from Petrograd,” New Ideal, October 9, 2024.

10. Biographical Interview #4, 142–43.

11. For more on the evolving system of rationing under the “New Economic Policy,” see Paul Ashin, “Wage Policy in the Transition to NEP,” The Russian Review 47, no. 3 (1988): 293–313; for more on political surveillance in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, see Vladimir Makarov, “Cheka: The First Five Years,” Rodina, December 20, 2025; for a brief overview of university purges in the early history of the Soviet Union, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Bolsheviks’ Dilemma: Class, Culture, and Politics in the Early Soviet Years,” Slavic Review 47, no. 4 (1988): 599–613, 603–04.

12. Biographical Interview #2, 82, 85.

13. Ayn Rand, “To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” (Bobbs-Merrill, 1945), 083_24B_005, Ayn Rand Archives.

14. Biographical Interview #4, 108.

15. Biographical Interview #7, January 15, 1961, 220.

16. For more on intellectual and artistic censorship in the Soviet Union during the mid-1920s, see Michael S. Fox, “Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922–28,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 6 (1992): 1045–68.

17. Biographical Interview #7, 220.

18. Biographical Interview #1, December 18, 1960, 48.

19. Rand referred to England as “the America of my childhood” (Biographical Interview #1, 35); also, it was during a family vacation to England in 1914 that Rand decided to become a fiction writer (Biographical Interview #2, December 19, 1960, 82). For more on how the fictional character Cyrus Paltons, a British officer stationed in colonial India, influenced some of Rand’s characters in her mature fiction, see Shoshana Milgram, “Three Inspirations for the Ideal Man: Cyrus Paltons, Enjolras, and Cyrano de Bergerac,” New Ideal, August 17, 2023; Rand had significantly less to say about Switzerland than England in the biographical interviews, but states that Switzerland was her “idea of heaven,” and that her memories of the family’s trip to Switzerland in 1914 served as the “springboard” for projecting the childhood setting of the fifth chapter of Atlas Shrugged, “The Climax of the d’Anconias” (Biographical Interview #1, 26).

20. Biographical Interview #1, 35, 38; Biographical Interview #2, 74; Biographical Interview #3, December 1960, 97–98.

21. Biographical Interview #5, December 30, 1960, 171; Biographical Interview #7, 243.

22. Biographical Interview #1, 35; Biographical Interview #3, 109.

23. Biographical Interview #1, 35.

24. Biographical Interview #1, 13.

25. Biographical Interview #6, January 2, 1961, 207; Ayn Rand, “movie diary notebook,” 168_05x_001, Ayn Rand Archives.

26. Biographical Interview #6, January 2, 1961, 207.

27. Biographical Interview #11, February 15, 1961, 354.

28. Biographical Interview #6, 207; Biographical Interview #8, 252; For more on Rand’s admiration for American film, see Brandon Lisi, “How Cinema Saved Ayn Rand’s Life — and Sparked Her Career,” New Ideal, June 25, 2025.

29. Biographical Interview #6, 209–15; for more on this early story, see Brandon Lisi, “The Lost Precursor to Atlas Shrugged,” New Ideal, September 2, 2025.

30. Ayn Rand, “Pola Negri” (Moscow and Leningrad: 1925), 166_17x_002, Ayn Rand Archives. To read the translations of Rand’s earliest published works, see Ayn Rand, Russian Writings on Hollywood, ed. Michael S. Berliner, trans. Dina Schein Federman (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999).

31. Biographical Interview #7, 239–40.

32. Biographical Interview #7, 239.

33. Biographical Interview #1, 15; Biographical Interview #7, 239.

34. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, ca. January 18, 1926, 062_005_001, Ayn Rand Archives; Ayn Rand, “List of amounts (and dates) of money sent to her by her parents,” December 13, 1932–May 15, 1935,” 136_01B_005, Ayn Rand Archives.

35. The nickname “American resident” appears throughout Rand’s documented correspondence with her family, first appearing in a letter dated March 12, 1926 (Eleonora Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, March 12, 1926, 062_19C_001, Ayn Rand Archives); the correspondence also contains many mentions of their cat “Los Angeles,” nicknamed “Lossy,” first named in a letter approximately dated January 20, 1926 (Eleonora Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, ca. January 20, 1926, 062_007_001, Ayn Rand Archives).

36. Biographical Interview #7, 239.

37. Biographical Interview #6, 189; Biographical Interview #7, 239–40.

38. Harry Portnoy, affidavit inviting Ayn Rand to America, June 29, 1925, 166_02x_008, Ayn Rand Archives; Biographical Interview #7, 239–40.

39. Soviet passport issued to Alisa Rosenbaum, October 29, 1925, 168_06x_002, Ayn Rand Archives; Biographical Interview #7, 240.

40. B. Branden, Who is Ayn Rand?, 171.

41. Biographical Interview #6, 220, Biographical Interview #7, 240.

42. Biographical Interview #6, 220.

43. Biographical Interview #7, 240–41.

44. Rand’s mother states that the day of Rand’s departure was January 17, 1926 (Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, February 21, 1926, 062_015_001, Ayn Rand Archives).

45. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, February 21, 1926.

46. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, February 21, 1926.

47. Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), Pub. L. No. 68-139, §§ 4, 11(a), 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

48. Immigration Act of 1924, § 2.

49. Asgar M. Asgarov, “Reporting from the Frontlines of the First Cold War: American Diplomatic Despatches about the Internal Conditions in the Soviet Union, 1917–1933” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2007), 2; Biographical Interview #7, 241.

50. Migration Policy Institute, “The 1924 U.S. Immigration Act: History and Impact,” Migration Policy Institute, accessed February 10, 2026; Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), Pub. L. No. 68-139, §§ 2, 9, 13, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

51. Although Rand stated that she visited the U.S. “consulate” in Riga, she likely meant to say “embassy,” as the consulate in Riga had been upgraded to embassy status in 1922 (Asgarov, “Reporting from the Frontlines of the First Cold War,” 2). Because the letters Rand sent to her family are lost, one has to rely on contextual evidence from the letters Rand received to accurately date these events. Wednesday January 27, 1926, is the estimated date of Rand’s interview with the American embassy, based on the following clues: Anna Borisovna says that she received a letter from Rand from Moscow on “Thursday evening” (January 21) (Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, letter, ca. January 23, 1926, 062_009_001, Ayn Rand Archives). In a later letter, Anna describes a gap of “a week or eight days” between the Moscow letter and Rand’s letter in which she describes her interview at the embassy in Riga (Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, February 21, 1926). If Rand’s family received the letter from Riga on January 29, one can presume that Rand sent it about two days earlier, possibly on January 27.

52. Biographical Interview #7, 241–42.

53. Biographical Interview #7, 242.

54. Reflecting years later, Rand stated that given the circumstances, she did not consider this an act of dishonesty. (Biographical Interview #7, 242). In her distinctive ethical theory, honesty is not a proscription against telling lies, but a commitment to reality in all of one’s choices. It is “recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value … The virtue of honesty is “not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), 1019) In ordinary contexts, this means telling the truth, because human beings do not create values through dependence on the ignorance or stupidity of others. But since it is not a self-sacrificial virtue, it does not demand telling the truth to those who would use personal information in the attempt to destroy your values, especially anyone threatening the initiation of force (e.g. agents of the Soviet Union’s a dictatorial regime; or embassy officials wielding capricious power). 

55. Biographical Interview #7, 242.

56. Biographical Interview #7, 242–43.

57. For more on Ayn Rand’s time spent in Berlin, see “Birthday in Berlin: Ayn Rand’s Journey to America,” YouTube video, Ayn Rand Institute, February 2, 2026.

58. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, February 21, 1926.

59. Biographical Interview #7, 248.

60. Charles Sures and Mary Ann Sures, “Facets of Ayn Rand (Part 6),” New Ideal, July 6, 2022, originally published in Facets of Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2001).

61. Biographical Interview #1, 13.

62. Biographical Interview #1, 13.

63. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, February 21, 1926.

64. Anna Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, ca. January 23, 1926.

65. Biographical Interview #8, 250.

66. September 3, 1926, is the estimated date of Rand’s arrival based on the fact that Rand’s studio pass for DeMille Pictures Corporation is dated September 4, 1926 (studio pass, September 4, 1926, 166_10x_003, Ayn Rand Archives). Rand says that she received this pass on her “second day, after my arrival” (Biographical Interview #8, 252).

67. Biographical Interview #8, 251.

68. Ayn Rand, “movie diary notebook,” Biographical Interview #8, 252.

69. Biographical Interview #8, 253–54.

70. Biographical Interview #8, 254.

71. Biographical Interview #8, 254–55.

72. For more on one notable example of a film scenario Rand wrote for DeMille, see Brandon Lisi, “Ayn Rand and The Skyscraper,” New Ideal, April 17, 2024.

73. Biographical Interview #5, 165.

74. Biographical Interview #5, 165.

75. Biographical Interview #5, 163-64.

76. Biographical Interview #5, 162–64.

77. Biographical Interview #5, 162–63.

78. Biographical Interview #5, 163.

79. The regulations at the time stated that: “in no instance. . . shall the stay of an alien, admitted for a temporary visit, be extended by the officer in charge of the port of entry for a period in excess of one year from the date of original entry.” The regulation also states that, for a period longer than one year or if there are other issues with the application, the application would be forwarded to the district head for determination, with a potential for the request of a bond. Extensions beyond two years would go to the central office, triggering a lengthier process. Extension applications were exceptional, per the letter of the regulation.

    Given these restrictions, and based on the spirit of the law to limit visitors’ time in America, the historical context (visitors from Soviet Russia were looked at with skepticism by American authorities), it is unlikely Rand was granted many renewals for a total of three years. (United States Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws, 1924–1925, 1927, 1930 + Amendments (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1937), 191, par. 3, HathiTrust Digital Library.

80. For more on Rand’s view of immigration laws, see Ayn Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” Q&A, Ford Hall Forum, October 21, 1973.

81. Biographical Interview #5, 164.

82. Biographical Interview #5, 164.

83. Biographical Interview #5, 164.

84. Biographical Interview #5, 164.

85. “Application for Immigration Visa (Nonquota),” (Mexicali, Mexico), June 29, 1929, Special Collections 01-03-01, Ayn Rand Archives.

86. “Application for Immigration Visa (Nonquota),” June 29, 1929.

87. “Petition for Citizenship,” ca. 1931, Special Collections 1-03-01, Ayn Rand Archives.

88. “Petition for Citizenship,” ca. 1931.

89. Ayn Rand, “A Preview,” Ayn Rand Letter 1, no. 24 (1973): 5.

90. Ayn Rand, “The Fascist New Frontier,” radio broadcast, WKCR, New York, March 12, 1963, originally delivered at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 16, 1962.

91. Ayn Rand to Cecil B. DeMille, letter, July 3, 1934, 100_12C_015, Ayn Rand Archives.

92. For more on Rand’s challenges during the production of Night of January 16th, see Brandon Lisi, “‘The Most Miserable Experience’ Ayn Rand Ever Had: The Battle over Night of January 16th,” New Ideal, October 8, 2025.

93. Ayn Rand to Lyolya Bekkerman, letter, August 28, 1926, 166_08x_001, Ayn Rand Archives.

Some have already capitulated. Columbia, Brown and UPenn agreed to nine-figure settlements and conditions, such as excluding transgender athletes from women’s sports and allowing external oversight over admissions data. Columbia even accepted scrutiny over its Middle East studies curricula and a mandate to hire professors to create intellectual diversity. Others, like MIT, have refused similar compacts. Still others, like Harvard, are locked in battles over blocked funding.

But universities and their supporters shouldn’t simply resist Trump’s pressure. They should advocate phasing out altogether the source of that pressure: federal funding. Although radical, only this step would safeguard intellectual freedom.

Private universities have long maintained that they can take government money without compromising their independence. If the funding doesn’t come with restrictions on teaching or research, how could it hurt?

But federal funding has always brought forms of control. Some controls seemed necessary to prevent manifest injustice: institutions receiving federal funds could not discriminate against racial minorities. This established a precedent that would be used to justify more contentious controls.

For example, the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter demanded that universities handle sexual assault accusations by strongly favoring accusers, even when the evidence was weak. Advocates wanted to protect sexual assault victims from sexual violence, which the letter characterizes as a form of discrimination. But others reasonably objected to forcing the universities to unfairly presume the guilt of the accused.

Now the Trump administration claims that allowing transgender women into women-only spaces discriminates against biological women. Critics argue that the Trump demand discriminates against the transgendered.

So administrations from both parties have used federal funding as leverage to get universities to adopt highly contentious policies.

There are also subtler forms of control inherent in federal research funding. The government funds only certain initiatives, and universities deprioritize research topics that don’t bring in funding. So when Katalin Karikó has her grant applications rejected repeatedly, UPenn may deny her promotions and refuse her supplies. Karikó has gone on to become one of the pioneers of mRNA vaccines, but the federal grant process substantially delayed this achievement.

The government doesn’t compel private universities to research anything or forbid them from privately funded research. But incentivizing research with tax dollars is still a mechanism of control. It compromises intellectual freedom by creating an inevitable conflict between universities and the taxpayers who are compelled to foot the bill. Here’s why.

Universities would prefer that the government attach as few strings as possible to its funding. But then taxpayers would be unjustly compelled to “donate” to universities without the intellectual freedom that private donors have to judge which ones are worth supporting.

Attaching strings to government funding gives taxpayers a voice. It might prevent their having to fund universities with highly controversial policies, curricula or research topics. This would reduce how much taxpayers were forced to violate their own convictions. Reduce — but not eliminate. Taxpayers who disagree with majority preferences would still be compelled to contribute.

Government funding also deprives taxpayers of funds that could otherwise support less popular research rejected by the government — like Karikó’s mRNA research.

As long as government funding is in place, we can’t protect everyone’s intellectual freedom.

To undo this conflict, a radical solution is needed. Private universities and their allies should advocate the phasing out of all federal funding — gradually, so that institutions are able to adopt new funding models

Institutions that could immediately lose funding may still have reasons to take a deal. But they should not take it without speaking out about the importance of eventually eliminating government funding to safeguard intellectual freedom.

Well-funded universities, however, should consider taking a stand now to dramatize that federal money is not worth their independence. Harvard, for example, has an endowment of more than $50 billion and one of the most prestigious names in higher education. Imagine the impact they could make by flatly rejecting the deals.

Full private funding is more feasible than one might expect. Some universities already do it. Hillsdale College has never accepted federal funding, relying instead on supporters of its conservative orientation. The new University of Austin just received a $100 million donation from Jeff Yass on the condition that it refuse all government funding. And many distinguished liberal-leaning institutions might garner support from wealthy liberal donors by taking a stand against Trump.

It’s worth taking a stand for intellectual freedom in higher education. But to do so, we must challenge the long-standing federal funding system that undermines it.

Image credit: Steve Rosenbach / iStock Editorial / via Getty Images

If these events sound strange and unfamiliar to readers of The Fountainhead, that is understandable; none of them occur in Ayn Rand’s novel. What readers may not know is that these are all events that Rand was considering for Part II of the novel in early outlines of the story. In fact, she considered three different versions of the later events of Part II, with the third, final version, as the one that we know from the published book.

Interestingly, we do not find this many different outlines for any other single part of The Fountainhead in Rand’s papers, suggesting there was something especially challenging in the planning of Part II. In future articles, I will review changes to other parts of the book. But a review of these early outlines from Part II, and some short additional notes related to them, reveals the drastic changes that Rand was willing to make to her own masterwork in order to perfect it. She had high standards for literary work, and made the effort to integrate theme, plot, and characterization in her novels, including The Fountainhead.

The Blueprints

In The Fountainhead as published, Part II opens with Dominique Francon meeting and having her first antagonistic encounters with Roark in Connecticut where he works in her family’s granite quarry. She returns to New York without knowing who he is, learning his identity only when they are formally introduced in public at a party.

Realizing that the man she has fallen in love with is not an anonymous quarry worker but a brilliant architect whose name is becoming known, Dominique sets out to try and prevent Roark from creating more of his work for a world that — as she believes — doesn’t deserve it. She wins architectural commissions away from Roark and writes negative-sounding articles about him in her newspaper column, all while carrying on a love affair with him in secret. Dominique agrees, at Roark’s request, to model for the Stoddard Temple statue. After Roark’s loss at the following Stoddard trial, Dominique fulfills a promise from earlier in the story, and marries Peter Keating to punish herself, ending her affair with Roark.

What we know from Ayn Rand’s “blueprints” for the novel, her outlines, is that this was not her original plan for this part of the story. Rand considered two other possibilities before deciding on this one.

Version 1: The Libel Lawsuit

Version One of the later Part II events comes from an outline dated June 1938, one of a set of detailed outlines for all four parts of the novel that Rand made just before she started writing the first draft.¹ The early events of Part II are like the published book up to the point when Dominique learns that Roark is an architect and decides to prevent him from getting commissions.

At this point in Version One, however, events proceed quite differently from the final novel. Roark gets the commission for the Aquitania Hotel, but something goes wrong; the outline states that the contractor working on the hotel project “escapes.” Rand does not include additional details in the outline, but the implication is that the contractor committed some crime, perhaps fraud or embezzlement, and gets away with it. This gives Dominique an opening in her campaign against Roark. Manipulated and encouraged by Ellsworth Toohey, she writes and prints a libelous article about Roark in her column.

The libelous article about Roark forces him to sue Dominique. Rand does not describe the article anywhere but notes that “unsafety of construction” would be the type of libel that would really be “dangerous” for an architect’s career. Her next point in this outline is “lawsuit and love affair,” setting up the dramatic tension of Roark and Dominique continuing their affair in private even as this lawsuit plays out between them in public.

Roark wins the lawsuit against Dominique, proving that her article about him and the Aquitania project was libelous. However, the article had its intended effect despite Roark’s efforts, and work on the Aquitania Hotel halts the day after his victory in court. At this point in Version One, Dominique marries Peter Keating. This follows up on a promise she made to Keating in Part I of the novel, that if she ever wanted to “punish [herself] for something terrible,” that she would marry him (Part I, Chapter 14).

Roark’s Stoddard Temple commission and the subsequent trial then come after Dominque’s marriage to Keating (a reversal of the timing in the final novel). The outline conveys interesting points in relation to this sequence of events as well. Rand planned a scene in which Roark would visit Dominique and Keating in their married home to convince them that Dominique should model for the statue he envisioned for the Stoddard Temple. Evidently Roark was to succeed at this, though, unfortunately, Rand left no notes or drafts indicating how she planned that conversation would go.

Rand also planned for a different outcome in Roark’s loss of the Stoddard trial. In Version One, unlike in the final novel, Roark was to lose everything, not just money but also his office and apartment. Rand saw this version of Part II closing with Roark forced to live in the uncompleted Aquitania Hotel building.

Version 2: The Shareholder Vote

Not quite two years later, in March 1940, Rand wrote a different outline for this later section of Part II.² The early chapters, up through Roark and Dominique’s formal introduction at Kiki Holcombe’s party, are unchanged, but events once again differ from there.

Rand had already decided that the libel lawsuit between Roark and Dominique did not work; as dramatic as it was, something about it wasn’t right for the story. Instead, she envisioned a greater role for Dominique in events surrounding the cancellation of the Aquitania Hotel project. This began with a public campaign against Roark’s design of the Aquitania Hotel building. The outline does not indicate whether this is a spontaneous outcry, or if one of the characters (such as Toohey or Dominique) is fomenting it in some way.

Although Dominique was unable to prevent Roark from getting the Aquitania commission, she sees an opportunity as this campaign against the hotel progresses. This time, she successfully influences one of the shareholders funding the Aquitania project. As both construction and the public campaign against the hotel progress, the shareholders must eventually come together and vote: will they continue trying to build the hotel despite this public opposition? The outline implies that the shares Dominique has influence over are the deciding factor in the vote being “No.”

Work on the Aquitania halts with construction only partly complete, making it Roark’s “Unfinished Symphony” in this second version as well. This is not quite the tipping point for Dominique’s marriage to Peter Keating in Version Two; instead, just after the construction halts, Dominique visits the site of the incomplete hotel and sees an example of disgusting human behavior or advertising (Rand was undecided on the specifics). It is witnessing this reaction to Roark’s work and knowing that such reactions will continue that pushes Dominique into marrying Keating. Then, as in Version One, the Stoddard Temple and trial proceed after the marriage, once again including Roark’s visit to Keating and Dominique, and Roark’s losing everything in his courtroom loss.

Version 3 (the Close-to-Final Version): The Stoddard Temple

Finally, we come to Rand’s third outline for Part II, which is dated December 1941.³ She created this outline just after signing a contract with a publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, to publish The Fountainhead. Her advance from the publisher allowed her to finish writing the book. With that goal in mind, and only a year to do it, Rand reviewed her existing outlines and made what she thought were needed changes.

Version Three contains some minor differences (later crossed out) from the final novel, including the “escape” of the corrupt Aquitania contractor following an unspecified crime. Aside from that, this Version Three outline gives essentially the sequence of events for Part II that we read in The Fountainhead.

After their formal introduction at the Holcombe party, Dominique works to win commissions away from Roark even as they continue their love affair in private. She writes many articles in her column about Roark, using clever wording that simultaneously praises and criticizes his architecture (his architecture is too good to share with people who do not deserve it), but none of these articles are libelous.

Roark gets the Aquitania Hotel commission, and work does halt partway through construction, but due primarily to fallout from the 1929 stock market crash, not due to any interference on Dominique’s part.

Thus, in Version Three, Dominique is not directly involved in any of Roark’s projects until she agrees to model for the sculpture in the Stoddard Temple at Roark’s request.

Due to Toohey’s manipulations behind the scenes, Roark is sued over the Stoddard Temple after the building is completed. Toohey also provokes public outrage against the building, aiming to further damage Roark. The lawsuit goes to trial, which Roark loses. Notably, in this version of events, he does not lose everything; he keeps both his firm and his apartment and does not have to live in the uncompleted Aquitania Hotel building.

Dominique marries Peter Keating after Roark’s loss in the Stoddard trial.

In summary: Version One contains the libel lawsuit between Roark and Dominique, Dominique’s marriage to Keating immediately after Roark wins that lawsuit, and Roark losing everything in the Stoddard trial. Version Two drops the libel lawsuit, replacing it with a campaign against the Aquitania Hotel, Dominique’s interference in a subsequent shareholder vote to stop the project, and with her marriage to Keating after the shareholder vote, but retains Roark’s loss of everything in the Stoddard trial. Version Three gives the events as we read them in the novel, dropping the Aquitania campaign and shareholder vote, shifting Dominique’s marriage to Keating to follow the Stoddard Temple and trial, and having Roark lose money in the Stoddard trial but not his office or apartment.

What the Blueprints Tell Us

The changes between these three different versions of events for Part II of The Fountainhead are drastic. Why did Ayn Rand make them?

Rand did not leave any explicit comments on these changes, and the only documentary evidence we have of Versions One and Two comes from the relevant outlines and some brief notes. Thus, we cannot know her reasons for the changes.

What we do know for certain is that Ayn Rand had very high standards for what constituted great literature, which she spoke and wrote about extensively later in her life (The Romantic Manifesto, The Art of Fiction). Her planning material for The Fountainhead provides evidence of the concrete ways that Rand held herself to those very high standards. That a certain part of the story had a dramatic and interesting sequence of events and actions was not sufficient for her — they had to be the right events and actions to achieve the tight integration of theme, plot, and characterization that Rand considered necessary for a great novel.

What we see in her planning material, both about Part II and about other parts of the novel, is that Rand kept thinking about and working on the story until she achieved that integration — not that it came automatically to her. Because Rand didn’t settle for something “good enough,” she achieved a great novel in The Fountainhead that not only became a bestseller in her lifetime but has remained one even decades after Rand passed away.

To view most of the outlines and notes discussed in this article, please visit the online exhibit Blueprints for The Fountainhead.

Image Credit: © Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

1. Ayn Rand, “First Draft of Chapter Plan,” June 5, 1938, Ayn Rand Archives, Ayn Rand Papers, 097_56A_002.

2. Ayn Rand, “Revised Schedule of Chapters,” March 4, 1940, Ayn Rand Archives, Ayn Rand Papers, 167_03B_004; Rand, “Continued Schedule of Chapters,” March 6, 1940, 167_03B_006.

3. Ayn Rand, “Partial Outline of Chapters,” December 17, 1941, Ayn Rand Archives, Ayn Rand Papers, 097_56B_020.

One major highlight is the launch of the Intellectual Incubator, a new program built on an explicitly entrepreneurial model of intellectual training. Designed for self-driven, early-career Objectivists, the Incubator combines intensive philosophical study with mentorship and professional guidance, tailored to each participant’s goals. Rather than postponing public engagement, participants are expected to write, speak, and build platforms from the outset, learning while doing with expert guidance along the way.

Another milestone is the announcement of the Ayn Rand Center in Austin, Texas, a permanent home for ARI’s educational and cultural activities. Projected to open in 2028, the Center will serve as a hub for teaching, events, community, and exhibitions drawn from the Ayn Rand Archives. As ARI CEO Tal Tsfany explains, “the Center will be more than a building; it will be a launchpad for an intellectual movement, drawing bright minds from around the world to explore and advance Objectivism.” The project reflects ARI’s commitment to long-term cultural investment, by creating an enduring home where Ayn Rand’s ideas can be preserved and studied across generations.

Taken together, the launch of an entrepreneurial intellectual program and the creation of a cultural center point to a unifying theme running through the Annual Report: the conviction that good ideas transform lives and culture, and that defending them requires a long-awaited alliance between intellectuals and producers.

Onkar Ghate, chief philosophy officer, develops this theme in connection with ARI’s Atlas Circle initiative, which aims to empower business leaders to stand up for the moral value of their work. In his introduction to Profit Without Apology, reprinted in the Annual Report, Ghate reminds us how Ayn Rand warned that “as a group, businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield.” Ghate argues that this retreat has allowed anti-business ideas to flourish unchecked.

That same desire to empower business leaders animates longtime ARI donor Michael Williams, who is also interviewed in the Report. Williams credits his life’s work in business and education to “a simple yet radical conviction” he learned from Rand: ideas matter, and when they are taken seriously and acted upon, they make cultural progress possible.

Donors will receive a printed copy of the 2025 Annual Report this month. Readers are invited to explore it to learn more about the Intellectual Incubator’s educational offerings, recent milestones, and the progress toward building the Ayn Rand Center. The Report also features news from the Ayn Rand Archives about efforts to restore audio recordings of Rand’s voice, a reprint of part two of her 1974 essay “From My ‘Future File’,” and other updates on ARI’s ongoing cultural impact.  

If you are interested in supporting this work, see the Report for ways to contribute directly to these initiatives, or consider becoming a member.

Image Credit: © 2011 Theo Westenberger Archives, 1974-2008, Autry Museum of the American West

Articles

Open Letter to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Team
(February 3, 2025)

The first project of ARI’s Atlas Circle initiative, this open letter responds to the unjust antitrust persecution of Google, urging its leaders to speak up in defense of the moral rightness of their business success and to stop appeasing and apologizing for their work and success.

How Christianity Polluted the Moral Atmosphere of the West by Ben Bayer
(February 5, 2025)

In this essay, Ben Bayer traces how Christianity reshaped Western ethics by elevating humility, self-denial, and duty to strangers — values largely foreign to pre-Christian accounts of human flourishing. He argues that today’s secular moral mainstream often assumes this Christian framework without noticing it, mistaking a cultural inheritance for an innate moral instinct. Consequently, secular thinkers must examine their moral premises, not just the existence of God.

Soviet Terror: Sponsored by American Humanitarians by Nikos Sotirakopoulos
(February 12, 2025)

How could a regime built on mass terror win the sympathy of Western humanitarians? Nikos Sotirakopoulos examines how altruism and political affinity among American intellectuals provided moral cover for the Soviet Union by rationalizing its crimes.

Ending TPS for Venezuelans Whitewashes the Maduro Regime by Agustina Vergara Cid
(March 12, 2025)

In recent months, the Trump administration has increased pressure on Venezuela’s dictatorship. Yet earlier in the year, it moved to end the protected status for some Venezuelan immigrants, implying that conditions under Maduro’s regime had improved. Agustina Vergara Cid argues that the decision misrepresents the reality of life under Maduro and whitewashes the regime.

Trump vs. Harvard: Intellectual Freedom in the Crosshairs by Sam Weaver and Onkar Ghate
(June 4, 2025)

Sam Weaver and Onkar Ghate argue that both the Trump administration’s punitive pressure on elite universities and the federal funding system alike undermine intellectual freedom. The authors contend that rather than settling for restoring a flawed status quo, private universities should reject government subsidies altogether to protect true freedom of thought and inquiry.

Freedom to Launch: How Deregulation Created a Space Renaissance by Mike Mazza
(June 18, 2025)

How did space exploration shift from a stagnant, government-controlled sector to a flourishing arena of private innovation? Mike Mazza examines how deregulation and the rollback of bureaucratic controls made possible today’s commercial space renaissance, highlighting the crucial role of economic freedom in unleashing entrepreneurial ambition beyond Earth.

“Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up for Business” by Don Watkins
(July 30, 2025)

In the titular essay of the Atlas Circle’s first book release, Don Watkins makes the moral case for business, defending it against a culture that views profit and productive success with suspicion. He traces this hostility to the ethics of altruism, which treats self-interest as morally suspect, and urges entrepreneurs to reject moral appeasement and openly defend the nobility of their profession.

“The Most Miserable Experience” Ayn Rand Ever Had: The Battle Over Night of January 16th by Brandon Lisi
(October 8, 2025)

Drawing on material from the Ayn Rand Archives, Brandon Lisi revisits Ayn Rand’s behind-the-scenes struggle over her play Night of January 16th, an episode she described as “the most miserable experience” of her life. The essay shows how the conflict tested — and ultimately affirmed — Rand’s commitment to the principle of integrity and the practice of her convictions.

Don’t Elevate Suffering by Tristan de Liège
(December 17, 2025)

Tristan de Liège challenges the popular idea that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness, showing how this view distorts the inspiration we draw from remarkable lives. Drawing from figures like Oprah Winfrey, Steph Curry, and Miles Davis, he argues that dedication to values, rather than suffering itself, is the true driver of achievement.  

Podcasts

Trump’s Display of Arbitrary Immigration Power
(May 14, 2025)

In this podcast episode, Onkar Ghate and Agustina Vergara Cid argue that President Trump’s immigration agenda is an expression of arbitrary executive power. They show that policies ranging from mass deportations to restrictions on legal immigration are not driven by any coherent principle, but by a show of power that threatens to override the rule of law.

Patrick Deneen and the Right’s War On Freedom
(October 2, 2025)

Elan Journo, Nikos Sotirakopoulos, and Tristan de Liège argue that Patrick Deneen’s attack on “liberalism” and individual rights reflects a growing authoritarian turn in the New Right, rejecting America’s founding ideals in the name of tradition and conformity.

Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?
(October 7, 2025)

In this podcast episode, Ben Bayer and Tristan de Liège challenge the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. They clarify what a valid, rational concept of genocide means and argue that the accusation misrepresents both the nature of the conflict and Israel’s actions.

Understanding “Woke” Ideology: Books by Yascha Mounk and Chris Rufo
(October 10, 2025)

In this ARI Bookshelf episode, Ben Bayer, Sam Weaver, Nikos Sotirakopoulos, and Ibis Slade analyze two recent critiques of “woke” ideology: Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap and Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of each book, raising concerns about Mounk’s egalitarian framework and Rufo’s tribalistic approach.

ARI/ARU Press

Ayn Rand Periodicals (Paperback Editions)

From 1962 to 1976, Ayn Rand published three periodicals — The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter — in which she applied her philosophy to analyze the major events and ideas shaping the culture. Long available only in hardcover and difficult to obtain, these periodicals are now in print in paperback for the first time, allowing readers to appreciate the continuing relevance of Rand’s thought.

Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up for Business

Profit Without Apology brings together a wide range of essays defending the moral case for business against today’s culture of suspicion toward profit and productive success. The first book of the Atlas Circle, it challenges readers to rethink conventional assumptions about capitalism and to recognize the moral virtue of wealth creation.

Image Credit: Oleksandra Yagello / Moment / via Getty Images

A breakthrough came with the search for Ayn Rand’s missing appearances on The Mike Wallace Interview. The 1959 broadcast is well-known — now boasting over 2.2 million YouTube views — but her 1960 and 1961 appearances were thought lost. For years, ARI’s Archives held only a degraded, partially unintelligible audio copy of the 1960 show, likely taped off a television speaker.

Determined to find better versions, ARI archivists traced leads to the Mike Wallace Papers at Syracuse University, where they uncovered several undated reels labeled “The Mike Wallace Interview: Ayn Rand.” One might have assumed these to be duplicates of Rand’s 1959 interview, but because they knew of the two missing interviews (thanks to Rand’s calendars and contemporary TV listings from the New York Times), ARI immediately requested the digital files. The Archives team was astonished to discover that the files contained high-quality recordings of both the 1960 and long-missing 1961 recordings.

A clip from the 1961 interview was debuted publicly during ARI CEO Tal Tsfany’s keynote, “Spreading Objectivism: A Vision for ARI’s Future,” at the 2025 Objectivist Conference — its first known airing since April 14, 1961.

The year also saw other archival successes. On February 2 — Rand’s 120th birthday — ARI released her 1980 interview with radio host Raymond Newman, one of her final public conversations before her death. Previously available only in low fidelity, unauthorized copies, ARI brought the hour-long exchange to YouTube for its first officially licensed online release.

Then on September 2nd (a date of recurring significance in Atlas Shrugged), ARI held another online event to debut a rare, newly acquired recording of Rand’s 1964 Ford Hall Forum talk, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” Between 1961 and 1981, Rand appeared at the Forum nineteen times, engaging audiences with lectures and impassioned Q&As. Until recently, only a poor-quality recording of this particular talk was available to the public. This version was also missing the opening minutes of Rand’s presentation. But ARI archivists discovered a complete, high-fidelity recording from the Boston Public Library, allowing Rand’s 1964 talk to be heard clearly for the first time in sixty years.

According to Don Watkins, ARI’s vice president of Fundraising and Marketing, what makes these releases especially powerful is their ability to connect with new audiences in a way that no secondhand account ever could. “Rand herself is the best introduction to her philosophy. This audiovisual content showcases Rand’s direct and uncompromising philosophical views, her sharp wit, and her intellectual clarity, all of which come through as vividly now as they did decades ago.”

But the Ayn Rand Archives is not stopping here. They are actively chasing down leads on more than fifty of Rand’s radio appearances, as well as additional Ford Hall Forum audio to supplement what has already been found at the Boston Public Library. As of this writing, several of Rand’s Q&As at the Forum, as well as talks at various universities have yet to be uncovered and published. Each new find requires months of work — locating, licensing, restoring, and preparing the recordings for public release — and is made possible by ARI’s donors. Supporters also enjoy early access through private donor roundtables or screenings at OCON. Their contributions not only preserve Rand’s voice but ensure it continues to speak powerfully to generations ahead.

In the upcoming ARI Live winter 2026 course Communicating Ideas: Public Speaking, Yaron Brook draws on decades of experience as an internationally sought-after speaker to teach students how to communicate ideas clearly and persuasively. As ARI’s chairman of the board and a longtime advocate of Ayn Rand’s ideas, Brook has traveled the world challenging deeply held philosophic views in lectures, debates, and media appearances — often before skeptical or openly hostile audiences.

The course teaches the principles of objective communication in public speaking. Students will practice the skills they are learning by delivering short talks on intellectual topics of their choice, and receive live, in-depth feedback from Brook.

To take this course as a graded student and receive instructor feedback, participants must have previously passed Introduction to Writing or Communicating Ideas: Writing I. The course is ideal for anyone ready to take their ideas out of their head and learn how to present them clearly, confidently, and persuasively to an audience.

The course begins January 13, 2026, and runs for eight weeks. Live classes meet on Tuesdays, 12-2 pm ET. Registration is now open.

Image Credit: MirageC / Moment / via Getty Images

We’re thrilled to announce that Steven Pinker will join leading Objectivist thinkers for a panel discussion at OCON 2026!

Pinker is a Harvard professor, experimental psychologist, and the best-selling author of Enlightenment Now; Rationality; and When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…. Hear him in dialogue with Objectivist intellectuals as they discuss reason, progress, and Enlightenment values — ideals that urgently need defending as America celebrates its 250th anniversary.

If you care about ideas, freedom, and the future — this is a session you don’t want to miss. And the only way to hear it is to attend OCON; video of the event will not be made publicly available.

Join us for an unforgettable OCON. Secure your spot today.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Samantha Watkins interviews Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, about the alarming trend of anti-vaccine irrationality coming from government leaders.

Topics include:

• The state of vaccine science

• Hepatitis B vaccine

• Covid vaccine

• The cause of conspiracism

• The real-world impact of conspiracism

• A healthy culture’s approach to vaccine science

Resources: 

• “A Pro-Freedom Approach to Infectious Disease” by Onkar Ghate, in which he shares ARI’s view of the role of government with respect to infectious disease

This episode was recorded on December 15, 2025, and posted on December 18, 2025.

Image Credit: Alex Wong / via Getty Images

Ayn Rand’s long-time student and intellectual heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, received this question frequently. His original answer was “Read her novels; she was everything their creator would have to be.” After the first edition of Letters of Ayn Rand was published in 1995, Peikoff was able to add to his answer, “Read her letters.”

More than twenty years later, editor Michael S. Berliner decided that it was time to revisit the Letters project. Archival work on Rand’s papers had unearthed additional correspondence, and he saw an opportunity to expand both the selection of letters and the commentary that situates them.

We are pleased to announce that the result of this effort, an expanded second edition of Letters of Ayn Rand, is now available as an eBook from Penguin Random House. This edition presents the complete transcripts, including more than fifty newly added letters, restored passages previously cut for space, and extensive new commentary by Berliner. Altogether, the added material expands the book by roughly thirty percent.

Rand’s letters cover a wide range of subjects: extended philosophical discussion, publishing and business matters, answers to fan letters, and accounts of her daily life shared with friends and family. For readers seeking a deeper understanding of Ayn Rand in her own words, the expanded Letters of Ayn Rand offers a uniquely comprehensive resource.