Honoring Rand: What Ayn Rand Knew

It is  Ayn Rand 's awareness of rightful justice and liberty that goes to the core of things. I disagree with her psychology, her analysis of the corporation, and her assessment of the etiology and nature of ethical judgment.

I disagree with her conclusion that the ethics of the family and of smaller, intimate circles should be the same as the ethics of the extended order—I suspect that Hayek was correct, in the end, that much of human tragedy lies in the dissonance between our evolutionary hard-wiring for intimate life and the essential, life-enhancing rules of an impersonal world of voluntary markets.

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Rand understood, before almost anyone, the nature and stakes of the catastrophe befalling higher education in America.Disagreement with the particulars (or with the fact itself) of Rand's vaster philosophical project, however, does not diminish her stunning clarity and force on the issues that define the very possibility of human dignity in our age. No one articulated more compellingly than she the justice of self-ownership, writ large, and of property, writ large, acquired by voluntary exchange. No one articulated more compellingly the perverse injustice of the theft and violence of involuntary redistribution, of the initiation of force, and of the obscene nominal substitution of one's "men in Washington" for one's criminal thugs and enforcers. She understood that the "givers" were, in fact, the productive, the creative, the risk-takers, and the self-sufficient, and that the "takers," however loud their cries of victimhood from the fact of unequal outcomes, were free-riders upon the minds, risk, capital, work, and success of others. Her statement of it was unparalleled: The value of labor was one iron bar after days and days of work; that was what the blacksmith brought to it. The tons of rail for a day's efforts, and all the rewards attached to that, were a gift of the Hank Reardens. Indeed.

Rand also understood, before almost anyone, the nature and stakes of the catastrophe befalling higher education in America. In 1957, she presciently decried "those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior." How will the unjust, the parasites, and the thieves seek to bring about their world? "Walk into any college classroom," she wrote, "and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing…that he's incapable of knowing an objective reality." She understood that pseudo-philosophies of the social construction of reality were, at their essence, self-serving denials of reality itself that sought to provide a rationale for the theft and expropriation of the property, talent, and work of others. We are there now, unmistakably. What Rand described as the "intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors" now run the subsidized centers of education. When students read her, they should recognize truths about both the extended order and the cultural world that is closest to them. In the current age, from the perspective of the betrayed academy, there is no more transgressive author than she.

Alan Charles Kors is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

This article originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of Navigator magazine, The Atlas Society precursor to The New Individualist.

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