Did Marx Teach Rand How to Think About Capitalism?

[anthony]

"A debt" is one thing, and above argument - standing on the shoulders of giants has come up here, recently.

Her singular expansions and deviations were all her own, evidently.

What is 'determined', and how much is not, is the question here.

First step after picking up Aristotle's (or anyone's) works, is being able to ~recognize~ their worth - matching and building on one's own thought and experiences. How possibly are one's lifelong thoughts and observations pre-determined up to that point in time?

Next step, is what one chooses to do with this opened avenue.

[Francisco Ferrer]

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.

[Brant Gaede]

Rand's philosophy started with her idea of her ideal man. Nietzsche lit her after-burners. I'd say the only thing she got from Marx was revulsion and contraritedness.

--Brant

that's also where I think she got a lot of her dialectical thinking--not from reading dialectical philosophers unless Nietzsche was one

I think "Aristotle" was after the fact and, frankly, name-dropping

[anthony]

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.

Yup. Simple formula: read the 'right' writers (and some wrong ones) - come up with Objectivism.

(But how do you know?)

Reverse engineering, FF.

[Francisco Ferrer]

I think "Aristotle" was after the fact and, frankly, name-dropping

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

[anthony]

There are 12 listings in the Index of 'Letters of Ayn Rand' of Aristotle, from 1945 to 1963.

The first is in a letter to Isabel Paterson:

To balance the ledger , I looked up references to Marx and Marxism in LoAR. There are five, between 1944 and 1950. A "Mr Loeb" got roasted in the first one.

"Don't let yourself fall for that awful nonsense of Karl Marx about economics determining human nature. They don't. Neither in general historical events--nor in specific human instances. Economic position affects only the form, the surface details of a person...NOT his essence as a human being".

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

How weird is that?

To think Rand studied Plato in college...

Michael

[Francisco Ferrer]

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.)

[Ellen Stuttle]

On Rand and Lossky from Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical

I think that the relevance of this material is self-explanatory.

Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical

1995, The Pennsylvania State University Press

pp. 85-86

[bold emphasis added]

The authenticity of Rand's reminiscences has been challenged in some respects by at least four scholars, three of whom are relatives of Lossky [and have] objected to the characterization of N.O. Lossky as contemptuous of female philosophy students. [....] Andrew [one of Lossky's sons] recollects that his father demanded a basic competence in the subject matter of his courses from both men and women, making no distinctions between them. His examinations were forthright, neither tricky nor especially difficult. The distinguished philosopher George Kline was a regular auditor of two of Lossky's courses at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. He too vouches for the professor's fairness and nonsexist attitudes. [....]

As an expert in the history of Russian philosophy, Kline has also taken issue with the characterization of Lossky as a scholar of Plato. Lossky knew his Greek philosophy well and would have been more than qualified to teach a course on the ancients. But as a specialist in German philosophy from Kant to Husserl, N. O. Lossky published nearly three hundred works, and not one of them even mentions Plato in the title.

Regarding the relationship of Lossky's views to Platonism, Sciabarra writes:

Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical

1995, The Pennsylvania State University Press

pg. 48

[bold emphasis added]

[T]hough Lossky had much in common with Platonists, he argued that his "ideal-realism" was rooted in the "concrete ideal-realism" of Aristotle. For Lossky, Aristotle offered the first version of the concrete ideal-realist perspective. It is here that we can begin to appreciate Lossky's method of analysis, despite the explicitly mystical content of his formal philosophy.

[lengthy explication follows]

Another problem is that of whether or not Rand indeed had a course with Lossky. There's no documentation that she did and, as Sciabarra writes:

Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical

1995, The Pennsylvania State University Press

pg. 88

[...] How could Lossky have taught Rand if he was barred from teaching at the university, and if he was intermittently sick throughout the [relevant] period, only to be exiled by the end of 1922? Could it be that the relationship between Lossky and Alissa Rosenbaum was a product of Rand's imagination.

[sciabarra presents a scenario in which the young Rand could have had a course with Lossky at "the Institute of Scientific Research on the fringe of the university" (pg. 89) and concludes:]

pg. 91

Given the extenuating circumstances surrounding Lossky's annex activities, it is my conviction that Rand has accurately described an actual event. Though I cannot prove this judgment, I firmly believe that it is the best explanation of the facts.

Ellen

[Francisco Ferrer]

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.

[Brant Gaede]

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.

Apropos the link it would seem Rand never came to embrace the "millions." I do think she was influenced by utopian thinking and was one herself. It doesn't matter which or what utopia just which was the best utopia to break eggs for the omelet. Of course the worst came out on top in the totalitarian, genocidal way. I think Rand was the best, but politically has gone nowhere--for that reason. The power grabbers can't use her.

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

[....] See, for example, here.

The link goes to a review by Fred Seddon of Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living.

I'll excerpt some passages from the review - leaving aside the often-discussed substantive changes in Kira's remarks to Andrei and calling attention to several other issues.

~~~

First: When and how did Rand form her loathing of Kant?

Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, edited by Robert Mayhew

Book review by Fred Seddon

[seddon is discussing Mayhews essay "We The Living: 36 and 59."]

[....] One small word replacement that caught my eye was the following word change--Kant to Spinoza. The 36 sentence reads, When his young friends related, in whispers, the latest French stories, Leo quoted Kant and Nietzsche (156). Mayhew conjectures that Rand did not regard Kant as the most evil philosopher (actually she said man not philosopher) in history when she left Russia or first got to the United States. (192) For me this poses the question When did she start hating Kant? Some time between 36 and 59 else why the name change. I prefer the 36 version because of the balance between the French stories and the German philosophies. Leos friends are reading light French stories, while he is reading heavy German philosophy. The light/heavy and French/German switch is lost when Spinoza is substituted for Kant. Anyway, Kant is not mentioned in the published Journals or Letters entries until 1960. So they are no help in this issue. She had written some anti-Kantian lines for Galts speech that she ultimately cut, but she does not mention him by name. If you have an idea, let me know.

Did Rand's Kant-as-"anti-Christ"-antithesis theme start as a result of things Isabel Paterson said?

Also, where is the quote in which Rand said she considered Kant "the most evil man in history"? I remember that wording from someplace in Rand's non-fiction - I think from pre-spring 1963 (when I learned of the existence of NBI and "The Objectivist Newsletter"), but I couldn't find the reference when I searched a few years ago.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Second: Seddon on, What's left of Hegel in Marx?

Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, edited by Robert Mayhew

Book review by Fred Seddon

[seddon is discussing Ridpath's essay Russian Revolutionary Ideology and We The Living.]

[Ridpath] begins by noting that there are 70 seemingly disconnected and unsystematic fragments of ideology throughout WTL and by a wonderful feat of reduction he presents them as seven propositions (with the page numbers so you can check for yourself).

He follows this with five propositions that are specifically Marxist-Leninist in origin. Now it is obvious that Marx and Lenin are responsible for the five, but where do these seven come from? What thinkers and writers, in addition to Marx and Lenin, are responsible for the world Kira has to face?

To answer this question, Ridpath goes back to Russia before 1825. Russian history has been dominated for centuries by three institutions. First there is despotic autocracy; second, the Russian Orthodox Church; third, serfdom. All three come to a head in the person of Czar Nicholas I who openly suppressed universities, and drove the intellectuals underground where, like poisonous mushrooms in the cellar, the seeds of the Russian revolutionary movement were sown and nourished. (95)

After some more history, with a special focus on Chernyshevsky, Ridpath turns to the philosophers responsible for the ideas, i.e, the epistemological lice that were in the air Kira had to breathe. We find two of these thinkers in a section entitled RESPECTABILITY AND GUARANTEED SUCCESS: THE ROLE OF HEGEL AND MARX. Now normally at this point I would begin to discuss my disagreements with Ridpaths interpretation of Hegel. But for the purposes of this review, I want to grant, contrary to fact, that he gets Hegel right. Im more interested in the question of how much we can blame Hegel for the Russian revolutionary ideology and the atmosphere of WTL? And I want to say, precious little. And as evidence for this I simply want to quote Ridpath against himself. Let me concretize this.

After giving an extremely brief essentialized overview of Hegels philosophy (103) he goes on to tell us that after Hegels death there were actually two Hegels, two groups of followers who, of course, claimed they were following the real Hegel. The group that Marx was eventually to follow were known as the left or young Hegelians.

After this filtering through young Hegelian like Feuerbach and Strauss, Marx decided that the villain in alienation story is not God, ala Hegel, nor religion ala Feuerbach, but rather the economic conditions. Now transport Marx to Russia, making the inevitable adjustments by thinkers like Plekhanov and pass the whole thing off to Lenin who then adapts Marxism to his needs.

But what is really left of Hegel after all of this? Just like cocaine that isnt very effective if its been stepped on too many times, likewise Hegel.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Third: What about "plot, plot, plot"?

Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, edited by Robert Mayhew

Book review by Fred Seddon

The book is divided into two sections. Part I is entitled The History of We The Living; Part II, We the Living as Literature and Philosophy. I will comment on a few of the essays, the ones I liked the most, but before I do I must comment on two surprises. And remember how hard it is to surprise someone who has been around Objectivism for over forty years.

By now most old hands know and have often repeated Rands statement about the three most important elements in fiction writing, to wit, plot, plot, plot. But about We The Living, (hereafter WTL) she privileges background over plot. So much so that in a letter dated October 17, 1934 she wrote, the background is more essential than the plot itself. This was surprise number one.

The second surprise is related to the first. In essay after essay, the contributors emphasize one point repeatedly and that is the fact that when it comes to the background of WTL, Rand invents very little. Four essays are devoted to this theme as Mayhew points out on p. vii. Essays two through five stress what might tendentiously be called Rands naturalism vis-à-vis the background of Soviet reality in the mid-1920s. The very word appears in a biographical interview when she states that the opening scene, the train ride into Petrograd, is practically naturalistic autobiography. I mean the conditions and the trains and the bundles (50)

[....]

[in the essay Russian Revolutionary Ideology and We The Living," Ridpath] begins by telling us, as I mentioned above, that for Rand the background for the novel was true, true to the smallest detail, real, and exact. (87) Since Rand made the claim that the ideological background of WTL was true to the smallest detail, Ridpath sets out to demonstrate that she was correct.

Ellen

[Francisco Ferrer]

First: When and how did Rand form her loathing of Kant?

Did Rand's Kant-as-"anti-Christ"-antithesis theme start as a result of things Isabel Paterson said?

Also, where is the quote in which Rand said she considered ? I remember that wording from someplace in Rand's non-fiction - I think from pre-spring 1963 (when I learned of the existence of NBI and "The Objectivist Newsletter"), but I couldn't find the reference when I searched a few years ago.

Ellen

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.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Nobody likes to say this, but I think Rand simply inherited her hatred of Kant from Nietzsche.

Here is a quote from Ayn Rand Explained, Marsha Enright's reworking of The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ron Merrill (pp. 63-64):

Nietzsche viewed himself as leading the opposition to one of history's most influential philosophers, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche accused Kant of attempting to set limits to the validity of reason as a means of rescuing Christian, altruistic morality. He agreed with Kant that reason and altruism were incompatible. Unlike Kant, he was prepared to jettison religion and altruism, so Nietzsche rejected Kant's attack on reason. Rand adopted this view of Kant as her own and never abandoned it. Like Nietzsche, to the end of her life she considered Kant her intellectual arch-enemy.

I haven't read a lot of Nietzsche yet. I tried to digest Thus Spoke Zarathustra when I was in high-school, but that didn't work out too well.

I do trust Merrill and Enright, so I'm betting when I look into Nietzsche and actually read his works, I am going to find a lot about Kant that sounds like Rand.

Michael

[Francisco Ferrer]

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.

[syrakusos]

...Marx said that the essence of capitalism was egoism. Could awareness of this claim have influenced the young Ayn Rand, who after all grew up in Soviet Russia, where the writings of Marx were abundantly available in Russian translation?

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.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

FF,

Heh.

You mean the edited versions of Rand's Journals and Letters from the same folks who believe Rand only had one philosopher who she owed a debt to because she said so late in life?

So you like the year 1960? We can time-travel if you want and think she wrote The Fountainhead after 1960. She did mention she wanted to use quotes from Nietzsche in that book, but took them out. From what I remember, The Fountainhead was published before 1960.

So she was either time traveling or she actually was talking about a time before 1960 when she said that.

In your embrace Nietzsche, reject Nietzsche, re-embrace Nietzsche speculation, you are treating Rand's mind as an on-off switch for an entire body of ideas. That's not how the human mind works. It's not only plausible that she kept some of the stuff she liked from Nietzsche while rejecting other stuff, she even said so.

(But if you want to go whole hog, she couldn't embrace Nietzsche anyway because he was dead. )

Let's look at a quote from a charming little bio, Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting (p. 22). Jeff is the archivist of ARI. He's talking about Rand in her late teens:

Another major discovery was Nietzsche. Incited by her cousin, Vera Guzarchik, who claimed that Nietzsche had "beat me to all of my ideas." Rand eagerly read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, embracing Nietzsche's exaltation of the exceptional individual. But her enthusiasm diminished while reading his attacks on rationality in The Birth of Tragedy.

How did he know Rand embraced Nietzsche's "exaltation of the exceptional individual" in her late teens? Or that her enthusiasm waned?

It's obvious. Britting can look at letters and journals and other stuff we can't, including Barbara's interview tapes. And he can interpret them, too.

I think Britting's comment is just the tip if the iceberg about Nietzsche.

There's a lot of stuff on the Internet where you will get paths to follow. For example, here by one Rory at a place called Objecrtivist Answers.

... I can recommend Shoshana Milgram's paper, found in 'Essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead', entilted 'From Notebook to Novel'. It contains a section on Frederich Nietzsche, on the admiration Ayn Rand expressed for his ideas, early on in her life and around the time of writing The Fountainhead. It also shows how she came to reject his ideas, as inconsistent with her understanding of individualism and selfishness, and how this showed in the changes she made to 'The Fountainhead'.

What to do? Well, look up that essay by Shoshana and read it to see if she gives her sources. She's an ARI folk, so like Jeff Britting, she can see what we can't.

Seek and ye shall find. Google is your friend.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Rand: "I don't hate anybody."

I think there was one Nietzsche quote deleted from The Fountainhead at the beginning of the novel: "The noble soul has reverence for itself."

If Rand "hated" Kant she may have needed to buff up the cultural-intellectual power of philosophy as such by doing her Plato-Aristotle-Kant thing to in turn buff her and her philosophy up by implication. The problem here would be what she hung her own philosophy on: the impotence of evil. If Kant and Plato could get it up and rule the world so much for that--and why can't Objectivism get it up? Philosophy, thus naturally enough, is a man ("man worship") with a big, erect penis banging the cultural woman and the world the baby he they makes. So, why not Objectivism triumphant? "Sanction of the victim"? It might be well now to note how poorly educated Rand was respecting the liberal arts generally. There are significant other things besides philosophy that make the world we live in from biology to psychology, science and math and economics to how close to the equator a society is situated and whether the world would be significantly different if Hitler had been run over and killed by a cart as a little boy. No one really knows in the chicken or the egg scenario which one is philosophy or if the scenario is legitimate. However, without Rand's philosophical orientation and fixation and personal strength, power and ambition, we'd have not much to talk about today, so I don't begrudge her a bit of it. If Objectivism is a car it might need a new or better transmission to really go somewhere. We can leave Rand under the hood, a great V-8. (Me and Rand: "I had a V-8!")

--Brant

[Francisco Ferrer]

FF,

Heh.

You mean the edited versions of Rand's Journals and Letters from the same folks who believe Rand only had one philosopher who she owed a debt to because she said so late in life?

So you like the year 1960? We can time-travel if you want and think she wrote The Fountainhead after 1960. She did mention she wanted to use quotes from Nietzsche in that book, but took them out. From what I remember, The Fountainhead was published before 1960.

So she was either time traveling or she actually was talking about a time before 1960 when she said that.

In your embrace Nietzsche, reject Nietzsche, re-embrace Nietzsche speculation, you are treating Rand's mind as an on-off switch for an entire body of ideas. That's not how the human mind works. It's not only plausible that she kept some of the stuff she liked from Nietzsche while rejecting other stuff, she even said so.

* * *

It's obvious. Britting can look at letters and journals and other stuff we can't, including Barbara's interview tapes. And he can interpret them, too.

I think Britting's comment is just the tip if the iceberg about Nietzsche.

What to do? Well, look up that essay by Shoshana and read it to see if she gives her sources. She's an ARI folk, so like Jeff Britting, she can see what we can't.

Seek and ye shall find. Google is your friend.

Michael

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.

[anthony]

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.

Terrific, MEM!

Might I suggest - no, assert - you show what was "a volitional consciousness" at work?

[Brant Gaede]

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.

Terrific, MEM!

Might I suggest - no, assert - you show what was "a volitional consciousness" at work?

Yes, it's "terrific," but not terrifically right but something terrific to think about. Consider what Mike has done: what he claims Rand did. There is no support given for his stark asseveration so it's as atomistic as his claim for her. The problem is this isn't the Garden of Eden with Objectivism the apple.

--Brant

[Francisco Ferrer]

...Marx said that the essence of capitalism was egoism. Could awareness of this claim have influenced the young Ayn Rand, who after all grew up in Soviet Russia, where the writings of Marx were abundantly available in Russian translation?

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.

Edited October 9, 2014 by Francisco Ferrer

[Brant Gaede]

Original to Rand: a vertically integrated tried to be practical accessible for living on earth philosophy called Objectivism:

politics

ethics-morality

epistemology

metaphysics

All these as parts and pieces preceded her. She swept them up making some real general sense out of them. This put her completely outside academic philosophy and the academics had no toleration for her and her ideas as presented, which I suspect is why Sydney Hook blackballed Leonard Peikoff. You see, what the academics were about had nothing to do with hoi polloi, but brain elites bouncing their balls back and forth amongst themselves.

--Brant

when the universities and colleges get cut down to size, it will all come in a rush as current reality gets body-slammed by debt, economics and technology