Happy birthday to the great Ayn Rand
Today marks the birthdate of one Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, best known to the world as Ayn Rand.
Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, witnessing the tremendous upheaval caused by war and communist revolution firsthand.
In 1926, she immigrated to the United States and pursued the classic American dream of becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood. Though she had limited success on the film and theatrical scene, she found her calling as a novelist.
In her early novels like “We The Living,” “Anthem” and “The Fountainhead,” she explored themes that would come to define her: The tyranny of the state against the individual, the menace of collectivistic philosophies and the will of individuals to triumph over oppression.
Her magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957. The more than 1,000page book tells the story of heroic, productive individuals and entrepreneurs suppressed by meddling bureaucrats. It was through this novel that Rand extensively spelled out her core philosophy celebrating rational self-interest, reason and individualism.
It's an approach perhaps best summarized by a key line in the novel, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
“Atlas Shrugged” would become an international success and a major influence on free market-minded conservatives and libertarians.
Until her death in 1982, Rand continued to write and appear on television programs valiantly defending individualism and capitalism, which she understood was essential to freeing individuals to put their creative energies to use.
“Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself,” she wrote in “Capitalism: The New Ideal.”
While Rand is certainly a polarizing figure, with collectivistic progressives who usually haven't read a single page of her work seemingly the most bothered by her, Rand's personal story and extensive intellectual contributions to the cause of liberty are worthy of respect and critical engagement.