Anthemby Ayn Rand

Rand’s Background

• She was born in Russia in 1905

• Age 6 – taught herself to read – educated under communist rule

• Age 9 – decided to make writing fiction her life’s work.

• During teens, she witnessed the Kerensky and Bolshevik Revolutions and Lenin bring Totalitarianism

Rand’s Background

Rand experienced firsthand horrors of totalitarianism:

Form of government in which political authority has absolute and central control over all aspects of life. Individual thought, political and cultural expression is suppressed for the “good” of the government.

She “visited” America in 1926 and never went back to Russia

Development of Her Writing

• Due to life under Bolshevik rule, she is radically pro-capitalist and anti-Communist.

• She worked in Hollywood for a few years, sold a screenplay, and published her first novel, We the Living, in 1934. It is the most autobiographical of her works.

• Other works include Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged (considered by many to be her finest work) as well as many others.

• The Randian hero is one whose ability and independence cause conflict within the masses but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand views this as the ideal.

Rand’s Beliefs

• Man’s “self” is his mind or conceptual faculty…ability to reason

• All man’s spiritually distinctive attributes derive from this faculty

• It is reason (man’s value judgments) that leads to man’s emotions.

• It is reason which possesses volition, the ability to make choices.

• Reason is a property of the individual.

• There is no such thing as a collective brain.

• From these beliefs she developed a philosophy called Objectivism

ObjectivismVs

Collectivism

Objectivism

Regards every man as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.

•Man must exist for his own sake

•Politics: Laissez-Faire CapitalismFree market economy without the interference of the government in any way

•Reason is man’s basic means of survival

Collectivism

• Developed from ideas from Karl Marx who wrote the Communist Manifesto

• Opposes individuality and diversity; focuses on interdependence, groups and collectives

“From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs.” - Marx

Collectivist Principles

•The subjugation of the individual to a group

•Man must be committed to a collective action and collective thought for the common good

•Individual, not an end to himself

•Group is primary and standard of moral value

•Collective is an entity: cultureHas ideas, can think, has goalsIs the most important even at the sacrifice of the individual

EgoismVs

Altruism

Egoism

•Each man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare or self-interest

•One’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind

•Man should be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

Altruism

•Man has no right to exist for his own sake

•Service to others is the only justification of man’s existence

•Self-sacrifice is man’s highest moral duty

•The self is the standard of evil; the selfless is the standard of good.

Free Will vs. Determinism

• Free will means people can make choices, make up their own minds, make decisions, and direct their own lives by the ideas and values they adopt

• Determinism is that people are by nature in the grip of forces beyond their control

Dystopian/Anti-Utopian Literature

This type of literature presents the world as it should NOT be.