Objectivism

OBJECTIVISM

OBJECTIVISM, the philosophy based on writings of novelist and ideologue Ayn Rand (1905–1982), has generated controversy since its organized emergence in the 1950s. Rand, born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, passed her childhood in volatile St. Petersburg, Russia, where Bolshevik revolutionaries nationalized her family's small business in 1917. After studying history and philosophy at the University of Leningrad, Alissa Rosenbaum obtained a Soviet passport in 1926 and arrived in Chicago for a "visit" with sponsoring relatives. By 1927 she had changed her name to Ayn Rand and found work as a Hollywood scriptwriter. Throughout her life Rand would identify publicly with the self-made geniuses celebrated in her popular though critically censured works.

Beginning with We the Living in 1936, Rand's fiction—including Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead (1943), and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—depicts ideal protagonists who refuse to compromise their core principles of egotism, atheism, and rationality to placate religious and socialist opponents. Rand's works of nonfiction—including The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), and The Romantic Manifesto (1969)—elaborated these core principles, which show the combined influence of (among others) Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rand held that both facts and values were "objective" realities, extrinsic and independent of the preferences of the thinker, who can grasp them through a disciplined application of reason. According to Rand, perceptions were truthful if sanctioned by logic, and actions were ethical if they aimed to fulfill the agent's needs as a rational being. Reason, then, was the only correct basis for intellectual and moral judgments: Rand rejected faith, divine revelation, and subjective feeling as false epistemologies. Conscious and individual life, she believed, formed the standard of all values, and "rational selfishness" was a living being's appropriate motive. In addition, Rand advocated laissez-faire capitalism as the only truly moral economic system and argued that art and literature instantiated the deepest values of their creator.

In 1952, Rand's followers, including the psychology student Nathaniel Branden (formerly Nathan Blumenthal) and philosophy student Leonard Peikoff, formed a study group that adopted Rand as its teacher and personal ideal. In 1958, Branden established the Nathaniel Bran-den Institute, where for ten years he and Rand lectured on objectivist dogma to enthusiastic audiences, mainly of young adults. However, in 1968 the movement divided as Branden—also Rand's lover, by permission of her spouse, Frank O'Connor—revealed his attachment to another woman, prompting Rand to permanently ostracize him from her official circle. After Rand's death in 1982 the objectivist movement split again due to a dispute between Peikoff and the philosopher David Kelley over the boundaries of objectivist doctrine. Today the Ayn Rand Institute, founded by Peikoff in 1985, maintains that the objectivist system is complete as stated by Rand, while neoobjectivists at David Kelley's Objectivist Center (founded in 1990) distance themselves from Rand's "cult of personality," arguing for continued inquiry and reinterpretation. Both groups have yet to establish themselves among academics, who generally are skeptical of objectivists' claims to freethinking and original insight. Meanwhile, the works of Rand and other objectivists continue to sell roughly 400,000 copies each year and inspire equally passionate support and opposition. The Libertarian political movement shows objectivist influence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kelley, David. The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Objectivist Center, 2000.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Walker, Jeff. The Ayn Rand Cult. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.

Rae Sikula Bielakowski