>Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 07:45:05 -0500 (CDT) >From: Tibor R Machan [the following was published in the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ECONOMICS, Vol. 21, 2/3/4 (1994):] Ayn Rand versus Karl Marx Tibor R. Machan A unique feature of Ayn Rand's antipathy toward communism is that she never considered Marx's vision in the slightest degree appealing, unlike so many have who ultimately found fault with it. Rand wrote several novels and philosophical and political essays throughout her life outside the walls of academe, only recently gaining some recognition from within those walls. She was, most importantly, an unabashed champion of individualist capitalism, indeed, the only modern defender of that system of political economy on explicitly moral grounds. One may even safely suggest that Rand's project is best construed as establishing a rapprochement between the ancient and the modern philosophical world views, that is, showing that the modern achievements in science do not defeat the Greek conception of human nature involving a telos or specific objective, namely, to live rationally.1 Perhaps before anything else we should identify what few matters unite Rand and Marx. Both were friends of science and technology. Both, also, saw productive work as an essential element of the life of a human being. But Rand saw this fact from the viewpoint of someone who rejected metaphysical materialism and identified the faculty of reason as having the central role in guiding human conduct, while Marx believed that productivity is prompted by the environment in which we live -- specifically the tools of production, which shape consciousness. So Rand saw the Marxian version is turning the truth on its head, ascribing achievement not to persons, in the last analysis, but to impersonal forces in nature.2 The most important element of Marxism to remember for purposes of understanding Ayn Rand's anti-communism is Marx's claim that "The human essence is the true collectivity of man."3 Even earlier than this remark from the 1844 Manuscripts is Marx's frank exclamation, in his high school departure essay, that the greatest moral merit should befall those who devote themselves to humanity, not to any artistic, scientific or similar specialized achievement: When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited egoistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.4 Marxian humanism is through and through collectivist. Human beings are not just essentially, a la Aristotle, but exclusively social -- they are specie beings. Their very identity is being part of the larger "organic whole" of humanity.5 While, no doubt - as some will readily point out - Marx hoped for and predicted the ultimate emancipation of the human individual,6 the new human being for Marx was to be a collective being, one who lived through and for humanity itself, not for his own welfare or excellence. It is to this Marxism that Rand was thoroughly opposed. It was to Marxism as an implicit and repugnant value theory and morality that Rand's Objectivism may be compared with profit. There might be other candidates - for example, Marx's economic determinism and scientism; his historicism and amoralism; his socialism and communism. But these are not the most basic aspects of Marxism with which Rand found fault. Rand could appreciate someone who is intent upon solving problems, even if those problems did not get solved in the last analysis. What was unforgivable is Marx's deep seated, reactionary, albeit often only implicit, altruism and collectivist politics. It is when the individual human being got short shrifted that Rand found the theory beyond redemption.7 And clearly Marx demeaned the human individual when he projected that a good society would consist of members who have renounced their own happiness in favor of the collective welfare, their individuality in favor of their specie being, their love of self for the love of humanity as a sort of concrete universal to the welfare of which individuals may be sacrificed. Of course, it may be opposed to the above that Marx, as he understood human nature, was a champion of the human individual, rightly understood. He had hoped for the human individual's emancipation or development into a fully mature versions of what he is now. The specie being - or the political nature - of every person is what, ever since Aristotle pointed it out, had been thought to be part of human nature. In other words, one could claim that Marx simply modernized or rendered scientifically comprehensible the ancient Greek notion that man is a political, communal being. But there are problems with this suggestion. For Marx, the "scientific" socialist, the development of the social-political nature of the human species is a historical process and ultimate necessity8 . For Aristotle that development is in large measure an individual accomplishment.9 The social nature of any person would have to be realized as a matter of right reason, choice, virtue. It is not something that will come about in time, as the development of fruit bearing comes about for a fruit tree or the development of old age comes about for each of us. Moreover, the social nature of a human being is to be realized for the sake of that human being, for his or her eudamonia or happiness in life, not for the sake of humanity at large.10 Because of the economic and historical determinism in Marx's philosophy, the role of individuality in human social and political life has to be seen as minimal.11 Marx contrasted his humanism to the atomic individualism that he linked to the classical liberal tradition of political economy.12 This neo-Hobbesian conception of the human individual was deterministic and embraced a purely subjective theory of values. In our own time, too, this is the most prominently advanced and focused upon defense of the kind of society that is the most welcoming host to capitalist economic arrangements - e.g., free trade, freedom of contract, competition, in short, laissez-faire economics.13 It is also notable that both the classical liberal supporters and the Marxist critics of capitalist society embraced, implicitly at least, utilitarianism. Adam Smith, for example, did not defend the free market system because it expressed the importance of the individual and his or her prospect for happiness. Mill, although not oblivious to individual concerns, defended liberalism on grounds that it was the most effective way to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Even Herbert Spencer argued for a kind of rational utilitarianism. And since the heyday of classical liberal ideas this basic element of the support for its tenets has not changed significantly. Ludwig von Mises advanced a subjective theory of value; F. A. Hayek was a sort of Humean utilitarian, who stressed how the free market place would be best at generating progress; Milton Friedman is essentially a neoclassical value subjectivist or skeptic who defends liberty because he prefers it and considers it most supportive of political freedom; and Robert Nozick, though in some respects a Kantian, argued for his version of libertarianism on grounds that a system of Lockean rights is most congruent with our moral intuitions that favor personal autonomy and with the pursuit of essentially subjective personal goals.14 None but Ayn Rand has ever defended the free market system on grounds that it is an essential feature of a just system of community life, one that is suitable to the achievement of the objectively understandable and specifiable happiness of the human individual. Rand was an out and out ethical egoist, not a subjectivist or hedonist or psychological egoist. It is this insistence on her part that what counts for most in life is one's own happiness as a human individual - not some kind of general welfare or public interest or global human progress or service to others - that makes her a distinct and unique opponent of Marxism. It is, of course, not all that interesting to make note of Rand's distinctive point of view without considering whether it has merit. One can assert all sorts of propositions against Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or anyone else but fail to come up with sufficient support, not to mention a better alternative, to make it worth considering. Rand's radicalism - in that she is perhaps the only major author in the modern age who does defend a robust ethical egoism - would be just an oddity if it had little more going for it beside her fierce and passionately utilized linguistic powers. Her novels, The Fountainhead (Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), Atlas Shrugged (Random House, 1957) and, to start her literary career, Anthem (New American Library, 1946), and We the Living (Macmillan, 1936; revised Random House, 1959), are eloquent and forceful affirmations of her form of individualism, no doubt. They have found a resonance with millions of readers and continue to do so even while many authors who have been critically acclaimed have fallen by the wayside.15 But there is much more to her ideas than just their radical voice. We will see in a moment that they have considerable philosophical merit. But first we need to mention some aspects of the history of Rand's anti-Communism, one that would itself make a fascinating topic of a book length treatment.16 We the Living is the one novel that has Rand speaking directly about the Soviet manifestation of communism. It is not deeply philosophical, although it touches on the crucial features of Marxian social, economic and political thought. Interestingly, one of the most appealing characters in the work begins as a committed, loyal communist whose virtue of honesty and sincerity Rand identifies in the novel and builds upon in her plot. Yet, the main character, Kira, is a fierce and natural individualist who speaks some of the early renditions of Ayn Rand's ethics and politics. It is remarkable that this book, published in 1936 when Rand was only a young woman struggling with the English language, as well as to establish herself as a novelist, gained Rand nothing but scorn and derision in the Western literary world.17 And even to date no one within the prominent literary establishment has said anything about how wrong it was to have paid Rand no attention when she was delineating, in fictional form, the horrors that are now commonly acknowledged about the former Soviet Union. It would be too much to ask, one may suppose, to have some member of the cultural elite express genuine regret about the lack of respect accorded Rand when nearly everyone at that echelon of society was beaming with enthusiasm about the New World. It is worth recalling here, also, that on the literary front Rand was unique in a very specific respect. If one contrasts her with the two major novelists who addressed the problems of totalitarian collectivist community life, namely, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, one notices a vital point of departure. Both Huxley and Orwell at least implicitly credit such systems with the ability to develop and maintain a highly advanced form of technology and industrialization. Rand, however, refuses to be so inconsistent. She denies that one can have both massive oppression of human individuality and the creativity needed for a prospering scientific society. Of course, the mere repetition of past technologies is not impossible in an oppressive society, yet even that would require some organization inventiveness, something that totalitarian societies would lack and fictional renditions of them ought to take note of. This clear awareness of the connection between human individuality and creativity alone indicates that Rand's depth of understanding of the flaws of totalitarian collectivism. It was without much doubt far greater than those of other literary figures who addressed the topic in their fictional works. Rand realized from the beginning of her career that one of the main failings of such systems is that they squash human creativity, something that is necessarily linked to human individual liberty.18 Rand, in short, sees that slavery is bad in part because it undermines the will to innovate, to build, to advance. Her novella Anthem is a beautiful testament to the link between individual liberty and a community life that enjoys the fruits of human creativity by showing that totalitarian collectivism is not only cruel, harsh, nasty, brutish but, alas, bland and boring. It is fair, I think, to recall in this connection that one of the major characteristics of Soviet society was its backwardness in simple technology, excepting only those parts of it which were stolen from the West or produced by the small class of extremely pampered scientists and artists. (Rand at one time noted that although she is a fierce anti-Communist, she didn't believe that the USSR needed to be feared all that much militarily since one cannot really expect a slave society to keep up a technology that would make its military competitive with societies that enjoyed substantial individual liberty.) Yet Rand didn't indicate her understanding of the nature of human community life only by means of the action of her literary creations. She went on to produce a body of work that explicated her ideas and ideals about human life. She explained this by noting, in her essay "The Goal of my Writing,"19 that in view of the absence of a comprehensive philosophy of human life that made heroes possible, she had to undertake to produce such a philosophy. And she did offer, at least a substantial outline we she called Objectivism. It will not be possible to do more here that indicate some of the salient features of Objectivism.20 I will focus on those that have the promise of giving Marxism a powerful challenge where other philosophies, especially within the classical liberal tradition, have failed to do so. To begin with, Objectivism takes the existence of reality as axiomatic - an undeniable fact, one the challenge of which only reaffirms it. Existence exists - which is a very wide but comprehensive axiomatic piece of knowledge we may all rely on to start with in any investigation. As a foundationalist philosophy, Objectivism provides us with what I have called a minimalist or very thin metaphysics.21 But this approach saves it from the relentless objections of anti-foundationalists, from Kant to Richard Rorty. In epistemology Objectivism rests the power to grasp reality in the hands of individual rational beings, such as ourselves, who possess the kind of faculty that has the capacity to think, to form general ideas based on the information that the sensory organs can provide. While this faculty of thinking is in need of being put into active form - one must choose to think, it isn't automatic - its kind of activity, we can be confident, need not distort what one sets out to grasp. (Here the German word Begriffen might be kept in mind so as to appreciate what conceptual knowledge can amount to, namely, the unimpeded understanding of what there is, somewhat as when we grasp or grab some object, this need by no means involved changing what it is.22 ) The Kantian and subsequent worries about objectivity are fended off, essentially, by understanding knowledge itself as requiring contextual completeness and consistency in rendering the object of knowledge for the human mind. (Knowing is not mirroring or representing or describing, although it can involve those. It is sui generis, a way of relating to the world for human beings that brings the world as it actually is to be present as something known in their consciousness.) The skepticism so rampant in our last three centuries stems, in large part, from the conceptualization of knowledge itself as having to be the same kind as what is known. So that, for example, of course I then cannot know what it is to be a black slave or an abused wife, since to know it would have to involve being it and, needless to say, most of us wanting to know what it is to be a slave or an abused wife are not slaves and abused wives. But if knowledge is seen as coming to be aware of reality, not to be identical with it, then skepticism no longer looms large on the horizon. For Objectivism logic is a tool of knowing, derived from the axiomatic facts of reality. Logic involves the widest necessary means to knowing and bona fide violation of logic must misguide us in our efforts to know. Logic stands in no way opposed to emotions - emotions being psycho physiological responses to the world, to what we have learned about it, to our experiences of it, etc. Emotions are not actual tools of knowing, although they are themselves often clues to some of the facts of reality - e.g., how well one is doing in one's marriage, work, friendships, and other relationships to reality. Ethics for Objectivism identifies what it takes to do well at living the kind of life that we are, that is, human life. It answer the question, "How should I live?" It is explained as something required for human life in view of certain features of human nature and reality. Ethics arises because we are unique among the living things we know of in the world in not possessing instinctual means for guiding our lives to success. We, unlike other living beings, need to take the initiative - exercise our free till - so as to learn how to do well at living. To begin this inquiry, we must first grasp that we ourselves have to discover a standard for acting successfully in our lives. This is where Rand's ethical (what I like to call "classical") egoism first makes its appearance, at the level of explaining the need for ethics or morality.23 Next we need to identify what sort of beings human beings are, what is our nature, so that we can use this as the standard for successful conduct. Obstacles to this naturalism lie mainly in the field of epistemology, where it has been concluded by many skeptically minded thinkers that knowledge of the nature of something is impossible since it would involve knowing something timeless, unchanging, perfect. But the Objectivist theory of knowledge shows what is wrong with that conception of knowledge. So knowing human nature does not require knowing a kind of Platonic form of human being. Rather it requires getting an essential grasp of what justifies the classification of human beings into a distinctive group. Human nature, in turn, comes to being a volitionally rational animal, a biological entity that needs to activate its form of consciousness in order to succeed at living its form of life. The ought, thus, is an aspect of what human nature is. Human nature (because we are alive) is inherently normative and a purely descriptive account of it must be false. That is to say, the account of human goodness, based on the understanding we can obtain of the objective reality of human nature, implies that every human being ought to act so as to live his or her life in accordance with rational principles. These principles are derived from what one learns about oneself - what kind of being one is, as well as what attributes, opportunities, history, location, etc., constitute who one is. From this approach to answering the question or ethics one can begin the journey of learning the rights and wrongs of living one's life. Of course, the answer one will discover will include some very general principles - virtues - one ought to practice along with everyone else (honesty, justice, prudence, courage, honor, generosity, moderation), as well as distinct guidelines or imperatives that pertain to special and individual attributes some of which are shared with many others, some with a few and some with none. This ethical egoism that Rand identifies is based on an understanding of human nature and indicates that ethics is a objective discipline, even though it can yield extremely diverse, often non-universalizable, answers. When we turn to politics, we also see that Rand's Objectivism departs from the traditional approaches to arguing for classical liberalism or libertarianism.24 Unlike classical liberals of the subjectivist bent, whose support of their own preferred system cannot be defended as a objective sound, rational choice but must remain a subjective, personal preference, Rand's position aims to secure objective grounds for choosing certain constitutive elements of a human community. Ironically, just as the neoclassical economists, including some major Austrians, have no objective normative grounds that they can adduce to support the free society, so some recent opponents of capitalism find themselves unable to offer any foundations to support their opposition. One such critic, Richard Rorty, notes that all we can do in support of our values is to stand up for them. What this leaves us with is the tragic prospect that concerning the most vital aspect of our lives, namely, how we ought to live, including how we ought to organize our communities, we can't call into use our reasoning, cognitive faculty. In any case, although I will not try here to fully establish the objectivity of any particular moral or political judgment, value or principle, it will help to sketch the case for the free society that emerges from Rand's philosophy. By Rand's account, the institution of the right to liberty is an objective value for human beings in their community existence. Earlier it was noted that human nature can be identified because there is objective evidence of similarities and differences in reality and human beings are capable of identifying these by means of their reasoning faculties - their senses and their minds.25 Reality gives evidence of certain facts about human beings and a process of analysis - via logic and the material of perceptual knowledge - leads to the conclusion that what makes them human is their being reasoning animals, or, as Rand puts it, "beings of volitional consciousness."26 But their reasoning is an activity that must be initiated, started by them, at least in their adult years. The process of thinking is not something that can be understood without appreciating that it is volitional - without this factor, the impossible prospect of being rational automatically, determined by forces outside of us, would face us. It is impossible since a hallmark of reasoning or thinking is the possibility of making a mistake, of failing to do it right, in short, of malpractice.27 Human beings are rational but must actualize this capacity by their own initiative, lest the very idea of thinking be rendered incoherent. For thinking is a normative process - there are right and wrong ways of doing it. One ought to be consistent and ought not to entertain contradictions; one ought to follow logic and not be illogical; one ought to argue properly and avoid arguing fallaciously. But if one ought to do something, it follows, also, that one is free to fail to do it. For example, one is free to fail to think rationally, to observe the principles of sound thinking. If one were determined to think as one does, there would be nothing wrong with thinking badly, nothing right with thinking well. And that is obviously an intellectual dead end - no discussion on any topic could make progress if that were the case, since anything said about anything would simply had to have been said about it, including whether a fallacy was committed or not.28 It is, then, an objective fact of human nature that people (who are not crucially incapacitated, i.e., essentially deficient) are choosing thinking biological entities. This means, in part, that they are best off when their nature is enhanced, when they flourish as the kind of beings they are. This is simply an application of the general truth that it is by fulfilling its nature that any living being flourishes - whether it be a tomato, zebra, heart, onion, or tennis match. By achieving consistency and completeness - i.e., full integrity - as the kind of being it is, it does the best it can do, it achieves its excellence. And when it comes to human beings, whose excellence involves their own choice to do well at being human, this excellence takes on the added dimension of having moral significance - involving self-responsibility for doing or failing to do well. We know this to be so29 from experience and from the fact that no alternative account of what it is to be good makes as much sense. We know it when we shop for a home, when we look for flowers or a race horse, when we judge the functioning of the kidneys or heart of any living being, when we appraise the quality of a redwood tree or a certain kind of endangered animal. In judging human beings and their conduct, we need also to consider, first, their nature and then assess how well a given person or some given conduct accords with human nature - whether it is rational. But since human beings are (also) unique individuals, not carbon copies of one another, what will be rational for one may not be rational for another. Both the fact that a person is a human being and that he or she is a given individual must be considered in evaluating that person and his or her conduct. And the same applies to human institutions. Yet, because of the fundamentality of rationality in human life, and because rationality presupposes freedom of thought, it is evident that the right to freedom is proper for human beings in a social context.30 Since others are free to intrude or abstain from intrusion, they ought to abstain and the community ought to be so organized that such abstention is secured to the highest possible degree. The objectivity of the value of the right to liberty is, then, established by reference to the place of reason and freedom in human life. Given that these are essential, indispensable for the functioning of anyone's life as a human being, they are proper to secure for them in a community. They are just. Now, because of the essential role their individuality plays in the determination of what is objectively good for human beings, and because of the essential role that his or her sovereignty in selecting what is to be done has for the moral goodness of any person, the market economy is just right for human community life. And this also indicates why the analytic approach of neoclassical and Austrian economics, which invokes the essential individuality of most values to be realized in commercial exchanges, is perfectly consistent with the basic principles of a just society. Although it is not the task of analytical economics to establish that the economic system it invokes as its model for understanding commerce is compatible with justice, it is good to know that it is. Just as it is well for an engineer to know that the structure he or she is constructing not only will hold up but ought to be constructed, so the economic analyst benefits from knowing that the mode of understanding it uses to understanding economic affairs is helpful toward the appreciation of the nature and constitution of a just human community. Let us now make note of some of the central differences between Rand and Marx, as well as of why the position Rand developed is so potent in showing Marxism to be wrong. To start with, Rand's metaphysics does not owe much to Hegel but to Aristotle. She embraces very few ontological laws - only those of the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-contradiction. These are implicit in the fundamental axiom she identified, existence exists, existence is identity, and consciousness is identification. Marx's metaphysics, to the extent that one may hold that he embraced at least some of what Engels said in this field, commits him to a substantive ontology of dialectical materialism. This is the best way to make sense of Marx's claim that history develops toward maturation - that the "organic body [or whole]"31 that humankind is must develop toward communism (which is not some ideal but a real development). Although some claim this view is empirically based, that is highly doubtful - no one could observe evidence that is best organized to indicate such a historical materialism. It is the result of a certain kind of analysis based on the ontological status of the dialectic. Secondly, Marx proposes an epistemology of reflectivism. (It was developed in some detail by Lenin. But the basics are there in Marx's works.) The human mind, as he argues, reflects reality. The phantoms that reach the brain implant in our consciousness a picture of reality. As a result what we believe is imprinted upon us and will vary depending on when this imprinting occurs and the circumstances to which we are exposed. Thus, by Marx's account, the consciousness of human beings is determined by their economic class membership, since it is that class membership that places them in certain material environments. Accordingly, also, members of classes, as a general rule, must have the beliefs they have and no argument, only revolution, can alter their relationship to members of other classes. (This is where Marx's dialectics enters the realm of political economy - the clash of outlooks eventually leads to major, unavoidable social upheavals that propel us to a new development of humanity.) For Marx, thus, the individualist-capitalist way of understanding human social life reflects a given phase of historical development. It isn't that Locke, Smith, Ricardo, et al. were all wrong in what they thought in connection with economic and political life. They were mistaken to have generalized it, but then they could not really help themselves. Capitalism is true - for a given time in human history - but it will be overthrown, abolished, superseded, just as adolescence in an individual's biological-psychological life is superseded by young adulthood, which itself leads, necessarily, to maturity. By Marx's account, humanity proceeds along similar lines.32 Rand, in contrast, sees the mind as actively engaging the world, reaching out to grasp it, not passively responding to it. So human beings as such - not just communists, as in Marx - can escape their limited, historically conditioned understanding or reality. They can grasp fundamental, stable principles in various disciplines of the study of different spheres of reality, including in the sphere of political economy. As long as human nature exists - as long as there are bona fide human beings, something that is ascertainable by studying the world - certain ethical and political principles will be applicable to their lives; we can gradually, in good time, grasp these principles and implement them; but we might not - sometimes we may do it well, at others we might miss a great deal (so that the Ancient Greeks and the American Founders grasp it more or less well enough, while others failed to do so). For Rand, ironically again, one can be genuinely politically correct, while for Marxists and their philosophical brethren that is really impossible, since for all we can tell there will always be some new ones that will supersede the currently "true" principles of political life. In general terms, then, Ayn Rand has been perhaps the one major critic of Marxism who affirmed (against it) what Marx himself directly rejected and wanted the world to reject, namely, the individualist capitalist order. Yet Rand was not as hostile to Marx as some might believe. She found Marx more congenial, because of his secularism and naturalism, than another one of Marx's critics whose prominence and anti-communism is praised both on the left and the right, namely, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Rand has criticized Solzhenitsyn for wanting to lead Russia into a period of anti-modernism, one that would rekindle the era of serfdom and mindlessness one associates with some of the most deeply religions epochs of human history. In contrast to that, one might suppose Rand thought, Marx was a liberator. What Ayn Rand should be remembered for in connection with communism is her profoundly philosophical answer to Marx's ideas. If Marx is secularism's greatest defender of collectivism, Ayn Rand is its greatest champion of individualism. And this individualism, unlike those heretofore, is not plagued by narrowness and severe paradox, such as the one we were provided by Hobbes and his followers. Whether the reigning intelligentsia will ever honor Rand for her achievement remains a question. Too many today would have to eat their earlier words in favor for one type of collectivism or another. Too many are still hard at work resurrecting some version of the collectivist dream - via "market socialism," "democratic socialism," or "communitarianism."33 Rand still stands as the most serious radical thinker who, maybe with a little help from her philosophical supporters, could effectuate a lasting challenge of 2500 years of group think in our world, a kind of social philosophy that to our day hasn't stop producing some of the most vile, catastrophic results for human community life. It may be most appropriate, therefore, to have the last word in this comparison between her and Karl Marx, recent history's most often invoked political philosopher. Here is perhaps the essence of Rand's political thought: I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passerby who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned. I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold.34 Tibor R. Machan is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, Alabama. IN 1992-93 he was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. His books include The Pseudo Science of B. F. Skinner (1974), Individuals and Their Rights (1989), Liberty and Culture: Essays on the Idea of the Free Society (1989), and Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (1990). He is at work on three books, On Generosity, Business Bashing: Why Commerce is Maligned?, and the soon to be published Private Rights, Public Illusions. He lectures frequently in the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere in Europe. ENDNOTES: 1 The contrast between the ancient and modern viewpoints is discussed by, among many others, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 2 I thank David Kelley for reminding me of this point of similarity and difference between Rand and Marx. 3 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed., David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 126. 4 L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, eds. and trans., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 39. This passage must be kept clearly in mind as one assesses Marx's view of values, including his conception of the good society. Marx's position is, indeed, reactionary -- it is but a secular rendition of Western religions whereby we must be altruists through and through -- not just benevolent, generous and charitable on some occasions -- in order to fulfill our moral mission, and wherein dualism prevails between our biological and our species being, etc. See, in this connection, Tibor R. Machan, "Socialism as Reactionism," in K. Leube and A. Zlabinger, eds., The Political Economy of Freedom: Essays in Honor of F. A. Hayek (Munich, Germany: Philosophia Verlag, 1984), pp. 45-50. 5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New Yrok: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), p. 39. 6 H. B. Acton, What Marx Really Said (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1967). Marx says "The individual and the species-life of man are not different...." Op. cit., Selected Writings, p. 91. 7 While Rand was no nominalist individualist, such as Hobbes and his neoclassical followers in economic science, she did endorse a form of metaphysical individualism whereby what exists in the world are individual beings, not, ultimately, concrete universals. See the discussion of this in Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (LaSalle, IL: Open Court., 1989), Chapter 1. 8 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Chapter 1, fn. 15: "My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them." Op. cit., Selected Writings, p. 417. This "economic formation of society," it must be recalled, is the foundation of human life - the crux of Marx's economic determinism. 9 See, W. F. Hardie, "The Final Good in Aristotle's Ethics," Philosophy, Vol. 40 (1965), pp. 277-295. 10 This position is well developed in David L. Norton, Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Rand develops her ideas in this ethical realm in her The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961). See, also, Tibor R. Machan, "Reason, Individualism and Capitalism: The Moral Vision of Ayn Rand," in Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, eds., The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 206-223. 11 See note 6 above. 12 See Marx's famous essay "On the Jewish Question," op. cit., Selected Writings. Marxists have continued to link such atomism with some justification to the classical liberal social philosophy, at least if they focus only on the economic analysis of capitalism. 13 It is in the neoclassical economic tradition that this legacy is most evident, including the two public policy divisions of that tradition, the public choice and law and economics schools. For more, see Tibor R. Machan, Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument of the Free Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990). 14 See, Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949); F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (CHicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). (Nozick, in this work, joins utilitarians only in his subjectivism, whereby the meaning our life has must be given to it by us. In his later work, The Examined Life [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991], Nozick repudiates his radical liberatrianism.) 15 Rand's Atlas Shrugged was ranked second only to The Bible as the most popular book in the United States of American, in a 1990 survey by the Book of the Month Club. 16 Books on Rand have been authored mostly by admirers, past associates, and philosophical students of her thinking. The elite of the literary community have scoffed at her for her political views and have not bothered to analyze her writing, let alone her insightfulness about political matters. If there is anyone who has been uniformly politically incorrect during her life time, it has been Ayn Rand. It is not for nothing that Camille Paglia, the infant terrible of anti-feminism, is compared to Rand by Paglia's critics and friends alike. A good example of a pejorative work is James T. Baker, Ayn Rand (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987). 17 For biographical details on Rand, see Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986). For some of the philosophical and literary themes, see Ronald E. Merrill, The Ideas of Ayn Rand (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1991). 18 To link individual liberty - or, more precisely, the legal system that protects the right of every individual to liberty of thought and action - and human creativity is not to disparage cooperative creative efforts, contrary to what contemporary communitarians and socioeconomists have tended to maintain. (See, for example, Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., "The Limitations of Libertarianism," The Responsive Community [Winter and Spring 1992].) It is, however, to realize that such efforts will succeed if and only if the various participants individually choose to partake of and are not coerced into it. 19 Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 162-172. 20 Rand's most philosophically developed work is Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd edition (New York: New American Library, 1990). She has also written what should probably be called philosophical essays, collected in such works as, op. cit., The Virtue of Selfishness ,The Romantic Manifesto, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967), and Philosophy: Who Needs It (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982). 21 For details of this aspect of Rand's view, see Tibor R. Machan, "Evidence of Necessary Existence," Objectivity, Vol. 1 (1992), pp. 31-62. It should perhaps be noted that as with many other thinkers, scholars attending to their work and drawing from it are not in full accord as to how to understand it. Such followers of Rand - whom Rand herself said should be her intellectual executors - as Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger, claim the exclusive moral right to explain Rand's views. Others, such as David Kelley, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl and I find it more useful to participate in what might be called the natural market process of intellectual development and not aim for some kind of restriction on who may speak out on Rand's ideas, pro or con. The same kind of disputation surrounds, of course, the works of any major thinker - Karl Marx, especially! 22 Because conceptual knowledge is unique in the world, as far as we know, it will be nearly impossible to find an adequate analogy to it in the rest of nature. Grasping will only be a suggestive analogy - it pertains to the possibility of our contacting something as it is without the necessity of distorting it in the slightest. Of course, there is the risk of distortion - if one grasps too firmly or something that is too delicate, etc. That, too, can help us to appreciate the nature of knowledge: if we understand while in the grips of prejudice and some kind of emotional intrusion, our understanding can be distorted. Still, this does not give an account of the process of knowledge, of just what is going on as we know something. Arguably, such an account will need to be given by some branch of science, not philosophy per se. For a response to the widespread intersubjectivism in our post-Kantian era, see Tibor R. Machan, "Some Reflections on Richard Rorty's Philosophy," Metaphilosophy, Vol. 24 (January/April 1993), pp. 123-135. 23 Rand's version of egoism is very different from that of other egoists, such as Hobbes, Stirner, and, especially, those often caricatured in ethics text books, mainly in virtue of the fact that Rand's takes "to my benefit" to mean not, what I happen to wish for, but whatever is good and right for me as the kind of being I am. 24 Rand has always called herself a capitalist and has explicitly denounced libertarians. Yet it would be hard to dispute that the central tenet of libertarianism, namely, that the highest political principle in a human community is the right to individual liberty in all realms of human action, is exactly what her politics amounts to. 25 Rand's position on this is developed in considerable detail by David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). 26 As Rand puts it, in op. cit., The Virtue of Selfishness, "Man's particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional" (pp. 19-20). It needs to be noted here that what defines a human being, that is, human nature, is something more, namely, that such a being is a biological entity with volitional consciousness. Human nature includes both what links people to and what makes then distinctive among other living beings. It is because of her awareness of this crucial difference between the distinctive essence and the nature of something that Rand's ethics escapes the problems of Platonic/Aristotelian intellectualism. For more, see op. cit., Machan, Individuals and Their Rights. 27 It is notorious how such thinkers as Marx attempted to have it both ways - people can do things wrong in life - including, of course, all those who disagreed with him philosophically and as far as political or revolutionary policy were concerned - and they are also caught in a deterministic flow of historically necessitated events. Rand saw clearly that if one accepted the former, one had to reject the latter. She also avoided the error of Immanuel Kant, namely, to think that human moral responsibility requires a dualistic world of noumena and phenomena. For Rand the moral nature of human beings is a fact of nature proper. 28 For a detailed discussion of the nature of free will within the context of a naturalist account of the world (one that does not posit a supernatural realm and must be in full accord with science), see Tibor R. Machan, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974), and op. cit., Individuals and Their Rights. 29 But "knowing" does not mean having a final picture of it, so knowing it to be so does not foreclose future disclosures, further development, the possible need for modification. See, op. cit., Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 30 There has been a lot dispute as to just how we are to understand the claim that such a right exists. What is the ontological status of such a right, for example, and what is the scope of a purported natural right. I discuss these and related matters in op. cit., Individuals and Their Rights. At this point let me just dogmatically assert that having such a right means, in the Randian framework, that it is objectively warranted to hold that when human beings interact in a social context - where "politics is possible," to recall Locke's point - it is right for them to treat one another as ends in themselves, not as means to other's goals and purposes, unless they agree to being treated as such means (but waiting to obtain such agreement from others as a matter of principle is to treat them as ends). 31 "Organic whole" is McLellan's translation, while "organic body" is preferred by others. 32 I discuss these points of Marxism in more details in my Marxism: A Bourgeois Critique (Bradford, England: MCB University Press, 1988). 33 The current revisionist trend in the United States of America, of introducing collectivism via the benign sounding label "communitarianism," is lead by Amitai Etzioni. See, most recently, his book The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown Publ., 1993). For communitarianism to triumph as a social philosophy, however, it is evidently necessary to distort the true nature of individualism by caricaturing it in terms used mainly be positivist, neo-Hobbesian economists. See, op cit., Spragens, "The Limitations of Libertarianism," where in nearly all the claims made about the nature of classical liberal politics are false, most importantly the idea that this social philosophy "fails to 'see' the legitimate role that moral equality, fellow feeling, and obligation play in a good democratic society." In fact the classical liberal tradition, most notably Rand's works, points clearly to the view that only when community and fellow feeling are not coereced can they reap positive results instead of mostly tyrannize the citizenry. (The Responsive Community is edited by Amitai Etzioni.) 34. Op. cit., Anthem, p. 111. I wish to thank Mark Turiano and David Kelley for their criticisms of a previous draft of this paper.