Perhaps Rand’s biggest error was the totalism of her philosophy. Having rightly concluded that the values of the free market were moral, she went on to make the sweeping assertion that those values were the only moral ones, and that all human relations must be based on the principles of “trade.” Yet there is nothing unreasonable and nothing anti-market or anti-individualist to the belief that individualistic and market-based values need something to complement them. (...)

Politically, too, Rand’s insistence on de-emphasizing, or even denigrating, family, community, and private charity is not a particularly clever tactic for capitalism’s defenders. These are the very institutions that can be expected, in the absence of a massive welfare state, to meet those human needs that people prove unable to satisfy through the market. Rand did claim to be in favor of “benevolence,” in contrast to altruism; but it would be fruitless to look for providers of private charitable aid among her “good guys,” except for those who lend a helping hand to a friend. When charity is mentioned in Rand’s fiction, it is nearly always in a negative context. (...)

Family fares even worse in Rand’s universe. The virtual absence of children in her work has been noted by many critics, starting with Whittaker Chambers in his infamous roasting of Atlas Shrugged in National Review. (...) In her 1964 Playboy interview Rand flatly declared that it was “immoral” to place family ties and friendship above productive work; in her fiction, family life is depicted as a stifling, soul-killing, mainly feminine swamp. (...)

In its pure form, Rand’s philosophy would work very well indeed if human beings were never helpless and dependent through no fault of their own. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that so many people become infatuated with Objectivism as teenagers and “grow out of it” later, when concerns of family, children, and old age—their own and their families’—make that fantasy seem more and more impossible. (...)

Still more troubling is an earlier passage in Atlas in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a terrible train wreck. Many would say, Rand wryly notes, that the people who died in the accident “were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.” Then, in a series of brief portraits, Rand endeavors to show that the passengers were guilty indeed: All of them had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Rand does not advocate their murder, of course (though she sympathetically depicts a trainmaster who chooses not to avert the disaster, partly in revenge against the regulators); but she does suggest that they had it coming. In Atlas and the nonfiction essays she turned to in her final decades, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders, and the dehumanization of “the enemy” reaches levels reminiscent of communist or fascist propaganda.(...)

Rand herself was a creature of paradox. She was a prophet of freedom and individualism who tolerated no disobedience or independent thought in her acolytes, a rationalist who refused to debate her views. She was an atheist whose worship of Man led her to see the human mind as a godlike entity, impervious to the failings of the body or to environmental influences. (Nathaniel Branden reports that she even disliked the idea of evolution.) She was a strong woman who created independent heroines yet saw sexual submission as the essence of femininity and argued that no healthy woman would want to be president of the United States because it would put her above all men.

This is perhaps how Rand is best appreciated: as a figure of great achievement and great contradictions, a visionary whose vision is one among many, whose truths are important but by no means exclusive. Rand, it is safe to say, would have regarded such appreciation as far worse than outright rejection. But that’s just another paradox of life.

1. Roderick T. Long - Ayn Rand's Contribution to the Cause of Freedom
2. Chris Matthew Sciabarra - Ayn Rand: A Centennial Appreciation (The Freeman, PDF version)
3. Chris Matthew Sciabarra - Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary (díl I., díl II., díl III.)
4. Chris Matthew Sciabarra - The Illustrated Rand (The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, PDF version)
5. David Boaz - Ayn Rand at 100
6. Jiří Kinkor - Proč potřebujeme filozofii Ayn Randové (Podklad pro vystoupení na semináři CEP „100 let od narození Ayn Randové, obhájkyně individualismu a kapitalismu“, konaném 17.1. 2005)
7. A konečně, pár poznámek na téma Ayn Rand učinili i kupř. Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Bryan Caplan a Russell Roberts.

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”