Francisco Ferrer

That's precisely the question this thread is dealing with. How long were they in her mind? Clearly, Rand's views evolved over time. There were major changes in her thinking from 1936 to 1959--thus, the key revisions in We the Living discussed above in the Seddon review. The fact that Rand denied making any changes in the novel's philosophical content represents an attempt to portray all her works as fully compatible with the philosophy of Objectivism, circa 1960. The Brandens' hagiographic Who Is Ayn Rand? published in 1962 and since renounced by both authors, was also a part of this propaganda.

No one here has said that "government, capitalism etc." is "the base for ethics, epistemology and metaphysics.". It took Rand two years to write Galt's speech alone. If in his speech there were no fundamentally new ideas to her, they certainly do not appear in her work before this period. If, as you claim, Rand could have written The Virtue of Selfishness 50 years earlier than its publication date or at least before Atlas, all you have to do is show that Rand's major ideas in the book (expressed in "The Objectivist Ethics," Man's Rights," "The Nature of Government") were all intact and ready for the world to see years earlier. It should be a simple matter for you to provide references to these fully realized theories in Rand's papers written many years before the ideas were first published The Objectivist Newslatter, 1962-1965.

Rand originated Objectivism, which borrows heavily from other philosophers. She did not originate a comprehensive all-in-one intellectual framework. The Marxists beat her on that by about a century. Rand's rejection by the university elite is largely political--but not entirely. Part of being taken seriously in academia is following certain protocols, including presenting one's discoveries in the context of existing scholarship and going through a process of peer review. Rand's angry reaction in 1962 to having her views questioned by John Hospers at Harvard, where she gave a talk on "Art as Sense of Life" to the American Society for Aesthetics explains much about why Objectivism did not make headway in university philosophy departments.

Ayn Rand as Alisa Rosenbaum did not grow up in Soviet Russia. She grew up in Tsarist Saint Petersburg, the most culturally western city in Russia. The Russian Civil War ended in 1922, finally bringing nominal control of all state institutions to the Bolsheviks. That was December 1922. Read the detailed history if you care to. The Constitution of the USSR only dates from 1924. Moreover, the "New Economic Poilicy" of relaxed controls ran from 1921 to 1928. Ayn Rand was in America from 1926. I am sure that "the writings of Marx were abundantly available" but so was much else. Nothing in Rand's writing suggests any of Francisco Ferrer's assertion. She would not have been shy. If she found "egoism" in Marx, she would have "turned him on his head" and written The Virtue of Selfishness 50 years earlier than she did. More to the point, Marx's Jewish Question was published early in 1844; Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own appeared in October of that year. My evaluation is that ideas about egoism were common talk in the coffeehouses. Ayn Rand seems not to have "gotten" her ideas about egoism from either Marx or Stirner. Shoulders of giants and all, you still have to do your own seeing; and she did. She did not "get" her ideas from anyone else. She developed them for herself. Some people do that. First of all, she could not have written The Virtue of Selfishness until she had developed her theory of rights and government, something that did not happen until the writing of Atlas. That foundation-laying is what made the writing of the book so time-consuming. Secondly, the point is not that she was reared by Soviet educators but that all of Marx's writings would have been available to her from 1917 (when she was 12) onward. Finally, I am not asserting that Marx necessarily was the source for her logical sequencing of egoism and capitalism. I offered it only as a possibility, one of many intellectual currents in the air at the time. But on one point we can now be sure: Rand is not the originator of the philosophical relationship between egoism and capitalism.

Yes, Ayn Rand's journals and letters were edited by ARI hacks before publication. Should we take the very absence of any mention of Kant as proof that the bowdlerizers removed him? That strikes me as a theory in search of a reality. I admit that that I often write hurriedly and without due concern for the reader's ability to follow. But I hadn't realized that I left you with the impression that The Fountainhead was written after 1960. I used the word "fountainhead" only once and that was not in reference to Rand's book. It is true that Rand mentions Nietzsche in her introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition of the novel. But, while admitting that as a poet Nietzsche expresses "a magnificent feeling for mans greatness," Rand takes pains to emphasize her profound disagreement with the "mystic" and "irrationalist" (p. xii). That introduction was written in 1968. Thus we do not have to pre-suppose a time machine. Rand's decision to omit Nietzsche's soul quotation from the front pages of the book in 1943 does not contradict anything I wrote. The removal is consistent with other evidence that by the 1940's she was moving away from a sympathy for aristocracy and towards a more universal natural rights position. Her Textbook on Americanism (1946) is a part of this trend. We can also reasonably speculate that at the height of World War II Rand and her publisher would not want to be associated with a German philosopher that the the Nazis regarded as a spiritual founder. The essential question is, how does any of this amount to an intellectual debt to Nietzsche for his critique of Kant? If it is true that Rand "simply inherited her hatred of Kant from Nietzsche," where are the documents that demonstrate this? Specifically, if Enright is correct in claiming that "Nietzsche rejected Kant's attack on reason" and that "Rand adopted this view of Kant," then taking such a conclusion seriously would require reading in juxtaposition direct quotations from Rand and Nietzsche to show that their thinking on Kant was in close alignment. Perhaps Enright has done this. Perhaps someone with access to her book can post the relevant passage. I am not at all confident that we gain anything by reading ARI hirelings and then attempting to draw conclusions about what they must have read in Rand's unpublished papers. If Shoshana Milgram's "From Notebook to Novel" is a valuable work of scholarship, I'll have to take your word for it. "Google is your friend," but I could not find it online.

From Seddon's review: Kant is not mentioned in the published Journals or Letters entries until 1960. So we'd have to imagine a timeline wherein Rand embraces Nietzsche prior to writing the first version of We the Living in the 1930's, rejects him in order to remove his influences from WTL in 1959, and then re-embraces Nietzsche, at least in part, in order to pick up his critique of Kant, who is barely mentioned in her writings until 1960.

A remake is a terrible idea, not only because there is so little likelihood of it being done properly but also because the original is a masterpiece. King Vidor's stylized production and Rand's script gave us what is, so far, the best film representation of Rand's larger-than-life heroes and what I like to call her "Capitalist Realism." The Fountainhead online And, Michael Marotta, thank your for: "The people of that time lived through a great age when buildings had identities. If I say, 'Chrysler Building' you get a picture in your head. What happens when I say 'Trump Tower'?" This was the point I apparently failed to make a few weeks ago in my post criticizing most of modern architecture.

The source for Kant, "the most evil man": You may also find it hard to believe that anyone could advocate the things Kant is advocating. If you doubt it, I suggest that you look up the references given and read the original works. Do not seek to escape the subject by thinking: “Oh, Kant didn’t mean it!” He did. . . . Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history. --Ayn Rand, “Brief Summary,” The Objectivist, Sept. 1971, p. 4 I'm inclined to think that Rand got most of her notions about modern philosophy second-hand. That is the most charitable way of explaining her confused and spurious history of ideas in the essay "For the New Intellectual." Biographer Anne Heller calls the essay "a mixture of historical parable and madcap fairy tale." Jennifer Burns mentions Paterson but credits Leonard Peikoff as the fountainhead of Rand's hostility to Kant and modern thought in general.

Had those glands removed years ago.

So Rand may have lied about studying ancient philosophy in Leningrad under N.O. Lossky. Alas, it would not be her only public lie about her life and work. See, for example, here.

Try this: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1745 It works great!

And he would be worth quoting why? A... See here and here.

Decent people are entitled to keep the property they earned through their own labor and not have it seized by the IRS. Decent people ere entitled to grow herbs for their own use or to trade with others without being placed in a federal cage. Decent people are entitled to pay whatever wage they want for a job without being fined or imprisoned. Decent people are entitled to possess, trade, and sell weapons without being threatened by federal officers. Of course, your definition of "decent" may be anyone who bows to the will of government. Obama is not our enemy. He's our friend.

Economic historian Benjamin Anderson called the expansion of Federal Reserve credit under Coolidge "the beginning of the New Deal." Hoover's approach to fixing the Great Depression was the same as FDR's: raising prices and wages, expanding credit, saving companies "too big to fail," and increasing federal spending. All of those measures prolonged the Depression.

I'm amazed by the number of smart people I know who spend most of their leisure hours with a club, tapping a little white ball across a field.

Revealed by Barbara Branden in 1986: "Despite her doubts about the value of formal philosophy, she chose as an elective a course on the history of ancient philosophy. The course was taught by N.O. Losky [sic], a distinguished international authority on Plato." (The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 42.)

You may have something there. Question: what do her letters/journals show about her consideration of Aristotle prior to Atlas Shrugged?

No, the idea that rights are universal and derived from man's nature did not begin with Ayn Rand. It was an Enlightenment concept developed by Locke, Paine, Mason and Jefferson among others. The notion that Rand started with Aristotle's lessons in logic and somehow arrived at a theory of politics and government independently of any thinker since 322 B.C. is pure propaganda.

Mike Wallace once asked Rand where her philosophy came from. she answered, "Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me. I devised the rest of my philosophy myself." To accept that, we'd have to believe she learned nothing from her friend and fellow individualist writer, Isabel Paterson. And that her concept of rights came ex nihilo, with no debt to Locke or the Founders.

I say "gun." You say "frame." Let each man choose his own metaphorical weapon. Now, regarding the search for reality. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility/likelihood Rand did not derive the egoism-capitalism nexus from Marx. Of greater significance, however, is the datum that deriving capitalism from egoism did not begin with Ayn Rand

I do not dismiss the early Nietzschean influence, cavalierly or otherwise. But on one point we can be sure: nothing in Nietzsche's work can be construed as a defense of capitalism, which he described as dehumanizing. As I said before, I do not believe that we will uncover a a smoking gun, i.e. an open admission by Rand that she latched onto egoism in reaction to Marx. The significance of Dr. Gordon's discovery, as I indicated earlier, is that we now know that Rand is not the first philosopher to view egoism as the ethical foundation for capitalism.

Notice how weak and passive your thought processes are, Frank? You chose to reference the point in time after the fact... while ignoring what can happen before it occurs. That's how victims think... after the fact. They don't think preemptively. Greg Yeah, a victim would think after the fact and register his weapon with the government after it breaks bad. If you're smart like me and you, you think preemptively: "It's not a big problem to buy and legally register firearms" right now when the good guys are still in charge. The ones that treat us as decent as we are. They may have our names, addresses and gun serial numbers, but we have the freaking guns, baby! Yeah, that's what I meant.

". . . it's not a big problem to buy and legally register firearms." Gun registration is a problem only for criminals and terrorists. Decent citizens need not fear a government list of who has the weapons. We are a nation based on trust! And if government ever does seize our arms, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that we deserved it.

The vital point here is the connection between egoism and capitalism. That linkage did not come from the classical liberals (who were largely utilitarian) and certainly not from Nietzsche, who regarded the rise of the West as the triumph of slave morality. That Marx rejected egoism-capitalism does not negate the possibility that Rand embraced it in reaction to Marx.

There is no evidence that I'm aware of, and probably never will be. Intellectual historians point to currents in the air during a period of cultural or political upheaval. Much of it is only the suggestion of possibilities. No claims are made or implied in the use, or results by the use of the theory herein. However, it is interesting to observe that both Rand and Marx treated egoism as the ethical foundation of capitalism. We can no longer say that Rand is the first to have asserted that connection.