Ayn Rand

From Libertarian Wiki

Ayn Rand is a writer, born as Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, who died in New York in 1982.

She wrote Atlas Shrugged, a number of other novels and non-fiction works. She was the founder of the Objectivist movement, which advocates a minarchist social system and egoist ethical system.

Her first published novel was We The Living, set in Russia after the Russian Revolution, a harsh portrayal of life under the new totalitarian regime of Leninism.

Her novel Anthem was written as the account of a person living within a future totalitarian society in which singular first-person pronouns such as "I" had been banned. The society had attempted to stamp out individualism in this way. The novel is the story of his escape from this society and his rediscovery of the concept of the individual.

The Fountainhead, published in 1943, was her first major commercial success. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 was also a major success, and was Rand's last major work of fiction. Atlas Shrugged is considered by many to be her magnum opus.

She subsequently concentrated on non-fiction writings on philosophical and economic subjects and on the Objectivist movement. Her non-fiction writings include Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness, The Romantic Manifesto, and For the New Intellectual.

Rand's works were influential in the development of libertarian political thought in the mid to late 20th century, but Rand did not consider herself a libertarian, or at least disclaimed the label. She held that the ideal and most moral economic system is laissez-faire capitalism and rejected any belief in a higher power or the supernatural. Early students of her Objectivism movement included Alan Greenspan, later to become chairman of the Federal Reserve. Noted libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard was briefly associated with Rand's group also.