• A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vaunting 
,
With very few exceptions, war fever swept the nation in September 2001. The entire Right, barring a few voices in the wilderness, reverted to full-blown jingoist nationalism. Most progressives were at the best ambivalent on the prospect of war against the Taliban. Even many libertarians clung to the state for protection. Prominent Objectivists demanded that the United States nuke 10 countries as a show of force.  

• • • Robert Bidinotto and the Objectivist Subculture 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  | Is making war really the best response to a terrorist attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001? So one would deduce from the public pronouncements of leading Objectivists over the past decade. One receives the definite impression that few if any of these leading Objectivists have ever met a war they didn’t like — or, at least believed, with the grim, firm-jawed determination they felt was appropriate to a Randian hero, was somehow “necessary.” A war is a campaign of mass destruction and mass murder carried out by governments. In what morally coherent sense could such a thing be deemed “necessary”?  

• • Robert Anton Wilson 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Leonard Peikoff  |Audio  | Wilson had [...] read Ayn Rand before he arrived in Brookville [Ohio, in 1962].  

• • • Is There a Psychology of Liberty? 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | “Oh, my God, what a revelation!” [social psychologist Sharon Presley] recalled thinking, discussing her memories of the event some 30 years later with interviewer Rebecca Klatch in A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. “What [Ayn Rand] did for me was get me thinking about … things in those kinds of philosophical terms that I never had … before.” For Presley, “it wasn’t until Rand that I had some kind of explicitly articulated theory or set of principles that made sense to me.” On the whole, reading Atlas Shrugged “was a major, major influence on my life.” According to Klatch, Presley “began attending Objectivist lectures [NBI lectures] in San Francisco and meeting other like-minded people.” But it wasn’t long before some of those “like-minded people” had led her away from Objectivism completely. “By 1967,” Klatch notes, scarcely five years after her ecstatic discovery of Atlas Shrugged, “Sharon identified as an anarchist.”  

• The Rise and Current Decline of the City 
,
Personal life  | Dating and working are not the only activities that cities foster. Interest in Austrian economics rose from Mises’s New York University seminar attended by Hans Sennholz, Israel Kirzner, George Reisman, Henry Hazlitt, and members of the Circle Bastiat — Murray Rothbard, Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, and Robert Hessen. At the same time, the Objectivist movement began in Ayn Rand’s New York apartment.  

• • The Anarchist Conscience 
,
Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology  | As [Gary] Chartier remembers it, “[....] By the end of the summer after I graduated from high school, ignoring the sightseeing opportunities on a European trip, I’d finished Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus. And soon after I’d read Atlas Shrugged.” Chartier “never warmed to Rand’s work,” however; he reports today that “it didn’t engage me emotionally, intellectually, and imaginatively as Shea and Wilson, Rothbard, and Hayek did.““  

• • Alan Bock: Libertarian Intellectual 
,
Los Angeles was a heady place for libertarians in the early ‘70s. Andrew J. Galambos was still offering his influential courses at his Free Enterprise Institute. Robert LeFevre was living locally, out in Orange County, and still lecturing and publishing actively. The Brandens, Nathaniel and Barbara, were there, too, marketing many of the old Nathaniel Branden Institute lectures from the 1960s as well as Nathaniel’s more recent, Objectivist-influenced variations on the otherwise familiar themes of Humanistic Psychology.  

• • • The Power of Persuasion 
,
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Capitalism  |Leonard Peikoff  |Personal life  | Sometime during the first year of the magazine’s publication, Rand let Joan [Kennedy Taylor] know that she admired her work on Persuasion. As Joan later recalled, “She told me, ‘You’re a good editor. … I can tell that because [an editor of a small publication like Persuasion] might have just one or maybe two good writers, but all of your writers are good and that means the editor’s good.’” But Rand had more than just praise for Joan. She also had a suggestion. “She said, ‘Take it out of the Young Republican Club — buy it from them or something like that. Set up a corporation, so that I can endorse you in The Objectivist.  

• • • Ayn Rand and Objectivism 
,
Capitalism  |Egoism  | In this course, I propose to examine some of [Ayn Rand’s] distinctive doctrines. What does she mean by the primacy of existence over consciousness? Are the far-reaching conclusions she draws from the law of identity about causality and the nature of necessity correct? Is she right that the law of identity mandates atheism? Her views about sense perception and how we acquire concepts will also receive attention.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: Sanitized and On the Fly 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Image  | For those familiar with Rand’s book, the movie looks like it was done on the fly and sanitized for the 21st century. For instance, Ayn Rand was a passionate smoker. “Smoking is a symbol of the fire in the mind.” And her characters constantly smoked. The dollar-sign cigarettes are an important plot device. In the book, Hugh Akston offers Dagny a cigarette that she accepts and smokes — a cigarette so good she saves the butt, which has a dollar sign on it. None of the principle characters in Atlas Shrugged: Part I smokes, except Hugh Akston (Michael O’Keefe), who looks like he’s nervously lighting up for the first time.  

• • • What is your plan for the day after tomorrow? 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Image  | Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s masterpiece celebrating capitalism and the individual, is a rare accomplishment. First published in 1957, it seems to have been written for today. Its villains stare up at us from our daily newspapers; its warnings are now headlines on the nightly news. Not only does Rand make the argument for free markets, sound money, and a minimal state, she lays out in gripping detail the corrupt logic of collectivism and the danger of a society whose motive powers are politics and “pull,” not choice and merit.  

• • • The story of Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949–1992) 
,
Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | Childs told Joan [Kennedy Taylor] that he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in 1965 and found it so disturbing in light of some of the religious ideas he had been taught that he burned his copy. “But,” Joan recalled in the early 1990s, shortly after Childs’s death, “he recovered, and went on to read Anthem and Atlas Shrugged. He reported he was “enthralled” by Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action the Christmas before he was seventeen, that Rose Wilder Lane’s Discovery of Freedom “more than any other book” made him a libertarian, and that the two predominant intellectual influences on him during these years were Ayn Rand and Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education.”  

• • • Joan Kennedy Taylor 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Personal life  | Joan [Kennedy Taylor’s] was only the second letter Rand had received from a reader about Atlas Shrugged. And, as Joan told Duncan Scott, “Rand was impressed with my letter, and she spoke to her publicity person at Random House, asking if she knew me — and she did — and so the next thing I knew I got a call from Jean Ennis, the publicity person at Random House, saying, “Ayn Rand got your letter, she liked it, and she wants to have lunch with you.” They had lunch. They talked for hours.  

• • • The left and right within libertarianism 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  | Reprint of 1971 article.
From the publication of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in 1958, the Randian movement developed into what seemed to be destined as a mighty force. For the emotional impact of Rand’s powerfully-plotted novels attracted a vast following of young people into her “Objectivist” movement. In addition to the emotional drawing power of the novels, Randianism provided the eager acolyte with an integrated philosophical system, a system grounded on Aristotelian epistemology, and blending it with Nietszchean egoism and hero worship, rationalist psychology, laissez-faire economics, and a natural-rights political philosophy, a political philosophy grounded on the libertarian axiom of never aggressing upon the person or property of another. Even at its peak, however, the effectiveness of the Randian movement was severely limited by two important factors.  

• • Ira levin and This Perfect Day 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  |Personal life  | [Ira] Levin seems to have read Ayn Rand’s classic individualist novel, The Fountainhead, sometime in the 1940s. Perhaps when he was in high school and it was first on the bestseller lists? Perhaps when he was in college, at the time the release of the film version, starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey, spurred another big surge in its popularity? Either way, whenever he read it, he liked The Fountainhead quite a lot, and when Rand’s next book, the classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged, came out in 1957, he bought it and read it and liked it, too.  

• • • Anarchy, state, and Robert Nozick 
,
Egoism  |Personal life  | The earliest issue [of The Personalist] I still own is dated Spring 1970, and it’s only necessary to scan the table of contents of that issue to figure out why I might have subscribed. There it is, right smack in the middle of that table of contents — an article called “Rational Egoism” by Nathaniel Branden. In 1970, I almost certainly still thought of myself as (and here’s a quaint phrase from yesteryear) a “student of Objectivism”; I was still in the process of changing my self-identification from “student of Objectivism” to “libertarian strongly influenced by Ayn Rand.” I had, however, rejected Ayn Rand’s demand two years earlier, in 1968, that I condemn Nathaniel Branden and refuse to deal with him in any way, purely on her say-so, with no clear explanation, much less evidence, of any supposed ethical transgressions by Branden.  

• • • Ideas are free: The case against intellectual property 
,
Individual Rights  | Speech transcript.
Ayn Rand incredibly said, “Patents are the heart and core of property rights.” That’s a joke [laughter]. It’s so positivist, for Ayn Rand. I suppose we had no property rights in existence until 1790, the first Patent Act, or perhaps in 1624 with England’s Statute of Monopolies.  

• • Henry Hazlitt and the rising libertarian generation 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Night of January 16th  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Personal life  | Hazlitt introduced Mises to a hotheaded young writer he had recently met, a Russian immigrant in her mid-30s who called herself Ayn Rand. At this point, Rand had published one unsuccessful novel about the crushing of individualism in the Soviet Union, We the Living, and had seen a play, The Night of January 16th, through a moderately successful run on Broadway. She had not yet written the classic individualist novel, The Fountainhead, or the classic libertarian novel, Atlas Shrugged — the books that would make her name, her reputation, and her fortune.  

• • Literary intoxication: Tucker’s bourbon for breakfast 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | Review of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo, by Jeffrey A. Tucker.
Tucker’s discussion on Garet Garrett’s novel The Driver got my undivided attention. The story features Henry Galt, a Wall Street financier who tries to wrest control of a failing railroad company. This might not seem like much, but it’s certainly more exciting than late 20th-century novels about public-housing projects. A motif in the book is, “Who is Henry Galt?” Tucker notes that many have speculated that Garrett’s novel inspired Ayn Rand’s character John Galt. I think that’s putting it mildly, or perhaps putting it in a way that will keep all concerned parties out of court.  

• • Il libertarismo arriva in Italia—Revolution comes to Italy 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | Reprint of 1978 article.
In mid-March I received in the mail a copy of a new magazine. It was entitled Claustrofobia[1] and was well made; I leafed through it. What immediately caught my eye were some very familiar faces: Murray Rothbard, Ed Crane at the 1977 Libertarian Party National Convention in San Francisco, Dave Bergland, John Hospers, Nathaniel Branden, Tibor Machan, Mary Louise Hanson (the secretary of the national party), others. Names leapt up at me from the text: Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Roy Childs, Thomas Szasz, Robert Heinlein. Then I noticed that the text was in Italian. What is this?