Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known by her nom de plume Ayn Rand, was born February 2, 1905. She entered the United States during the 1920s, became a citizen, and lived here the rest of her life. She died in March 1982. I mention her birth name because her Russian nativity and early years explain a lot of her thinking and themes.
Rand was born into late imperial Russia and spent her teen and early adult years during the Bolshevik revolution and the early Soviet Union. Born in Saint Petersburg, she was 12 years old when the Bolshevik revolution upended her life. Her father’s pharmacy business was expropriated by the revolutionaries and the family had to leave town. Alissa managed to obtain a secondary education in Crimea and later returned to Saint Petersburg (renamed Leningrad) where she graduated from the State university, after being purged as being “bourgeois” and later reinstated along with a few others at the insistence of scientists. She came to the United States on a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, remained in America, and became a citizen in 1929.
Rand’s writing in the 1930s through the late 1950s consisted primarily of fiction. Her notable works in that genre were Night of January 16th, a courtroom drama; We the Living, a dystopian short novel; The Fountainhead; and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, both novel.
In publishing the latter tome — it’s 1,084 pages in the 35th Anniversary edition – Rand stated that she was aware that she was challenging the cultural tradition of 2000 years. If that cultural tradition regards wealth and its pursuit as a vice and poverty as a virtue, denounces entrepreneurs as “robber barons” and portrays them in popular literature and media as villains, Atlas Shrugged certainly challenges it.
These works extol individual freedom and capitalism and are fiercely anti-Socialist and anti-all types of collectivist political and economic systems. After Atlas Shrugged, Rand spent the rest of her career as an essayist and an advocate of the philosophy expounded in her novels — individualism, rational self-interest and what she termed Objectivism. Collectivism is the ultimate evil according to Rand, as the basis of socialism, communism, and fascism. The identity politics of today would certainly draw her ire. 1
Ayn Rand’s promotion of capitalism and the free enterprise system is matched by several well-known economists, both classical and recent. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman have all extolled the virtues of free markets and the relationship of capitalism to individual freedom. None have supplied the emotional heft to promote that theory in the dismal science of economics that Rand provided in her novels. Or so observes Rainer Zitelmann, writing in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2025. 2
Ayn Rand’s condemnation of collectivism, that is, ascribing perceived group characteristics to all individuals in the perceive group, particularly when the group membership is involuntary, is salient. Her essay, published in 1963, in which she said racism was the worst form of collectivism in that it ascribed moral worth and characteristics of a collective of ancestors to individuals, is illuminating. An excerpt is worth repeating here.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” 3
A personal note. In the 1960s, and indeed even today, many so-called liberals have characterized capitalism and limited-government conservatism as racist and oppressive towards members of minority groups, at that time mainly black persons living under racial segregation, legal in much of the South, but also cultural and informal elsewhere. The 1964 Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, an outspoken free market and limited government conservative, was denounced as racist. Because I agreed with most (but not all) of his conservative principles, many of my then peers accused me of being inherently racist. Rand gave me the intellectual ammunition to refute such accusations.
- “Fascism” as well as “racism” and even “democracy”, among other words, have lost their meaning and have become all-purpose epithets. For more on this issue see George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” available in numerous sources in print and on line. ↩︎
- See https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ayn-rand-contradiction-reason-emotion-capitalism-economics-0c5b12b7? ↩︎
- The Objectivist Newsletter (September 1963) reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 176 (Signet Books 1964) ↩︎
