Book 1: Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy
Chapter 3 Internet Appendix
3.1 Epistemological Objectivism versus Economic Subjectivism
3.2 The Roots of Philosophical Subjectivism
3.3 Reality, Deceit, and Philosophical Fraud
3.4 Jeff Skilling as a Nietzschean Great Man
3.5 Selfishness versus Altruism Revisited
3.6 Critics of Objectivism
3.7 Objectivism in the History of Philosophy
Bibliography: Chapter 3 Appendices
3.1 Epistemological Objectivism versus Economic Subjectivism
Epistemological objectivism and economic subjectivism—doctrines in two very different realms—are complementary, not contradictory. The former is a theory of knowledge that posits a world of external, scientifically knowable entities existing independently of a person’s beliefs, values, and emotions. Sense perceptions are our veridical link to this reality, although interpretation of one’s perceptions can be right or wrong. In the words of one philosopher: “Perception serves as our primary causal link with reality, but it is up to the rational faculty to interpret, explain, and extrapolate from the data of perception” (Miller: 80).Economic subjectivism is a theory of economic valuation, including business valuation, which sees such estimation as dependent on an agent’s beliefs and felt needs. Because economic value arises from the mind of the acting person, it cannot be known or measured by outsiders—nor precisely, quantitatively known even by the person himself.
Economic value is demonstrated by voluntary exchange where the value of one good is what a person will trade for it. That value may be grounded in “objective” considerations (such as chemical composition, or, more complexly, a calculated net present value using known, replicable financial assumptions), or in “subjective” considerations (color preferences, or, more complexly, what one believes another buyer, even a “bigger fool,” may pay for it).
Objectivist philosophy can claim no special knowledge about what “should be” the value of a share of stock in a public company at any particular point in time. Objectivists were not selling Enron stock short in 2001, for example, although in retrospect it is remarkably clear how philosophically unhinged the company was in even public ways. An Objectivist view of business practice simply recognizes that there are underlying causal, reason-based principles that must be understood and respected for sustainable success.
3.2 The Roots of Philosophical Subjectivism
The philosopher most revered by Ayn Rand was Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), who first explicated the fundamental laws governing objective reality: the law of identity (A is A); the law of non-contradiction (A cannot have the characteristics B and not-B, at the same time and in the same respect); and the law of excluded middle (A has either the characteristic B or not-B). Rand praised Aristotle as follows:
| Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s firstintellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in Aristotle’s system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that he defined the basicprinciples of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any perceiver)—that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive, not to create reality—that abstractions are man’s method of integrating his sensory material—that man’s mind is his only tool of knowledge—that A is A (1961: 20). |
The most despicable philosopher in Rand’s estimation was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who rejected the ability of perception and reason to grasp an independent reality. Perception and reason in his system were faculties of the mind that created appearances. Philosopher W. T. Jones summarized the position of the notoriously recondite Kant:
| The concepts of substance, causality, and the rest are meaningless except as synthetical relationships within the spatiotemporal manifold. The very arguments that validate these concepts for experience limit them to experience. The result of their misapplication beyond experience is “transcendental illusion” (51). |
Romanticism concluded that since reason is incapable of identifying reality, man must discover truth by “‘the drowsy numbness’ of intoxication, in the innocence of childhood, ‘on the viewless wings of poesy,’ in silent communion with nature, or in the rapt contemplation of a beautiful work of art” (Jones: 105). In the Kantian aftermath, the Romantics deprecated reason as “a false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions’” (Jones: 102). Postmodernism is a recent variant in this tradition.
By contrast, the Age of Reason believed, “(1) that there is a rational order of eternal truths, (2) that man has a mind capable of understanding these truths, and (3) that he has a will capable of acting in accordance with them” (Jones: 100).
Subjectivist philosophy became newsworthy in the post-Enron period with the death of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the father of deconstructionism, a postmodernist practice that attempts to render every text unintelligible by showing that it is riddled with contradictions. In the New York Times, a page-one obituary and two opinion-page editorials, one ironically titled “What Derrida Really Meant” [Taylor]), described the “fashionable, slippery” doctrine and “murky” view of this philosopher, complete with this Derrida quotation: “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such as thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible” (Kandell: 1, 33). No doubt the architects of Enron’s demise wish this were the case.
Although the chaotic nature of his philosophy was often mocked, Derrida’s death was page-one news in the New York Times – a far cry from Rand’s obituary, which had appeared in the newspaper of record on page 36 twenty-two years before (Saxon).
3.3 Reality, Deceit, and Philosophical Fraud
The “A=A” that undergirds Objectivist philosophy and is at the heart of understanding the fall of Enron and conviction of Skilling and Lay begins with Aristotle. He posited three fundamental principles:
| Law of Identity: “Now, ‘why a thing is itself’ is doubtless a meaningless inquiry; for the fact or existence of the thing must already be evident, but the fact that a thing is itself is the single formula and the single cause to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musical musical, unless one were to say that each thing is inseparable from itself; and its being one just meant this. This, however, is common to all things and is a short and easy way with the question” Aristotle,Metaphysics, VII, 1041a15-20.
Law of Noncontradiction: “For a principle which every one must have who knows anything about being, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything, he must already have when he comes to a special study. Evidently, then, such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, we proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect” Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 1005b15-20. Law of the Excluded Middle: “But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate. This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are. To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false” Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 1011b23-29). |
Against the reality of reality and the truth of truth, various forms of unreality and falsity are identifiable. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fraud in this way:
| 1. The quality or disposition of being deceitful; faithlessness, insincerity. Now rare. . . . Hicks & Nelson J. Kettlewell II, xxvi, 128 A Person of Simplicity without Fraud . . .
2. Criminal deception; the using of false representations to obtain an unjust advantage or to injure the rights or interests of another. . . . 3. An act or instance of deception, an artifice by which the right or interest of another is injured, a dishonest trick or stratagem. . . . c.Pious fraud. A deception practiced for the furtherance of what is considered a good object, especially for the advancement of religion. . . . 4. A method or means of defrauding or deceiving; a fraudulent contrivance; in mod. colloq. use, a spurious or deceptive thing. . . . b. colloq. of a person: One who is not what he appears to be; an imposter; a humbug. spec. U.S. |
Roget’s Thesaurus (618. Deception) lists over fifty synonyms, some of which are italicized by the present author for emphasis regarding the Enron story:
| deception, calculated deception, deceptiveness, subterfuge, snow job, song and dance, trickiness; falseness; self-deception, fond illusion,wishful thinking, willful misconception; vision, hallucination, phantasm, mirage, will-o’-the-wisp, delusion, delusiveness, illusion;
deceiving, victimization, dupery; bamboozlement, hoodwinking; swindling, defrauding, conning, flim-flam; fooling, tricking, kidding, spoofery; bluffing; circumvention, overrreaching, outwitting; ensnarement, entrapment, enmeshment, entanglement. deceit, deceitfulness, guile, falseness, insidiousness, underhandedness; shiftiness, furtiveness, surreptitiousness, indirection; hypocrisy; falseheartedness, duplicity; treacherousness; artfulness, craft, cunning; sneakiness chicanery, skullduggery, trickery, pettifogging, artifice, machination; sharp practice, underhand dealing, foul play; connivery, connivance, collusion, conspiracy. fraud, dishonesty; imposture; imposition, cheat, cheating, cozenage, swindle, scam, flim-flam, gyp, racket |
Sincerity is a major antonym of the many forms of fraud. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling discusses the history of the word sincerity:
| The word itself enters the English language in the first third of the sixteenth century…. It derives from the Latin word sincerus and first meant exactly what the Latin word means in its literal use–clean, or sound, or pure…. One spoke of sincere wine, not in a metaphorical sense …but simply to mean that it had not been adulterated…. As used in the early sixteenth century in respect of persons, it is largely metaphorical–a man’s life is sincere in the sense of being sound, or pure, or whole; or consistent in its virtuousness. But it soon came to mean the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretence. Shakespeare uses the word only in the latter sense, with no apparent awareness of its ever having been used metaphorically (12–13).
The sixteenth century was preoccupied to an extreme degree with dissimulation, feigning, and pretence. Dante had assigned those whose ‘deeds were not of the lion but of the fox’ to the penultimate circle of the Inferno, but Machiavelli reversed the judgement. In doing so, he captivated the literary mind of England and became the master figure of its drama (12). |
As an applied philosopher, Ayn Rand sought to identify persons who acted in accordance with reality and those who did not. The former were the realists; the latter were deceivers, practicing what chapter 3 of Capitalism at Work calledphilosophical fraud. “The best way to study philosophy,” Rand stated in 1974 in words that apply to Enron, “is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue, and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer [deceiver] and who is a hero [realist]” (1974a: 9).
In a follow-up essay, Rand explained:
| A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual crime. A detective knows what to look for, what clues to regard as significant. A philosophical detective must remember that all human knowledge has a hierarchical structure; he must learn to distinguish the fundamentalfrom the derivative, and in judging a given philosopher’s system, he must look—first and above all else—at his fundamentals. If the foundations do not hold, neither will anything else (1974b: 12). |
She added:
| All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase—or any abstract statement—as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: ‘Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!’ and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean.
Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it—for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud. The old saying of plain con men holds true for intellectual ones: “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true…. It is particularly important to apply this test to any moral theory (1974b: 16–17). |
Book 3 on Enron, in particular, will detect business crimes against reality, whether philosophical or also prosecutable.
3.4 Jeff Skilling as a Nietzschean Great Man
Jeffrey K. Skilling was Enron’s chief operating officer from December 1996 to February 2001 and then chief executive officer from February 2001 until his resignation that August. As the employees knew best, Enron was really Skilling’s company from 1997 forward, a time when Ken Lay increasingly dealt with external matters and edged toward a post-Enron life. But Jeff Skilling was something else as Book 3 will document: Enron’s chief manipulation officer. Ken Lay was Skilling’s enabler and to a degree accomplice in Enron’s misdeeds. But Skilling was the executer and tone-setter of Enron’s many and varied frauds in his four-and-a-half years atop the company.
Skilling’s view of business and life has been likened by some writers to the Objectivist philosophy. However, Skilling, an amoral pragmatist—an ends-justify-the-means operator—was quite the opposite. The philosopher closest to the Skilling mindset would not be Ayn Rand but Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).
Secular and humanistic, Nietzsche was a late-nineteenth-century German philosopher whose “life-affirming” ethics questioned traditional morality and Christianity. Because of such views, Nietzsche’s writings attracted Rand in her youth. But Nietzsche is most accurately remembered for his conception of the ideal man as one whose central, life-organizing drive is a will to power. And that is the very opposite of Rand’s mature ethics, which abhorred the initiation of coercion and extolled voluntary exchange.
The Nietzschean “Great Man” deceives, uses others, and acts coldly toward others. “No egoism at all exists that remains within itself and does not encroach,” he states. “‘One furthers one’s ego always at the expense of other life’” (Nietzsche, 1901: 199). Nietzsche’s idea of the moral man can also be gleaned from these writings:
| • | “He wants no ‘sympathetic’ heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on making something out of them” (1901: 505). | |
| • | “When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather lies than tells the truth: it requires more of spirit and will. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice is beyond appeal” (1901: 505). | |
| • | “In great men, the specific qualities of life—injustice, falsehood, exploitation—are at their greatest” (1901: 507). | |
| • | “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation” (1886: 393). | |
| • | “People are now raving everywhere, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which ‘the exploiting character’ will be removed—which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions” (1886: 393). | |
| • | “The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite viewpoints of value” (1887: 492). |
This conception of man-centeredness has been challenged by Objectivist Nathaniel Branden in his essay “Counterfeit Individualism”:
| Too often the ethical-political meaning of individualism is held to be: doing whatever one wishes, regardless of the rights of others. Writers such as Nietzsche and Max Stirner are sometimes quoted in support of this interpretation…. The contradiction in, and refutation of, such an interpretation of individualism is this: since the only rational base of individualism as an ethical principle is the requirements of man’s survival qua man, one man cannot claim the moral right to violate the rights of another” (135). |
Nietzsche’s philosophy is also the opposite of Objectivism at a deeper level. As with Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” Nietzsche’s individualism is founded on irrationalism. Philosopher Stephen Hicks describes Nietzsche’s view thus: “What we need to bring out the best possible in us is ‘the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts’” (56, quoting Nietzsche, 1887: 475). Against this form of “counterfeit individualism,” Branden wrote: “Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason, can exist only as parasites on the thinking of others. And a parasite is not an individualist” (136).
Jeff Skilling has been characterized as a cold capitalist in manner (arrogant, ruthless) and politics (Darwinian libertarianism). In manner:
| Skilling was never much of a team player. If he thought he was smarter than someone—and he usually did—he would treat him harshly if he had the temerity to disagree with him. [People] began saying of Skilling, “Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt” (McLean and Elkind: 32–33). |
In politics:
| [Skilling] stood out in part because of … his harshly libertarian views of business and markets. The markets, he believed, were the ultimate judge of right and wrong. Social policies designed to temper the market’s Darwinian judgments were wrongheaded and counterproductive (McLean and Elkind: 31). |
But Skilling was an anti-capitalist hero under a Smith-Smiles-Rand standard. He evolved into a master corner-cutter, perceptionist, and political capitalist (rent-seeker).
Friedrich Nietzsche was no fan of industrial capitalism, likening the factory system to slavery (1881: Section 206). But he might have seen in Enron’s Jeff Skilling the qualities of his Great Man (der grosse Mensch).
3.5 Selfishness versus Altruism Revisited
A tenet of scholarly endeavor requires that texts be read with deference to what the author is trying to say. Words should be supplemented with intent. Yet many critics of Ayn Rand have obfuscated her views by failing to read her actual writings and/or not take the time to understand her arguments. This is particularly true regarding her position against altruism and for selfishness and greed, as she defined them. One textbook on applied ethics, for example, posited that a Randian world would
| leave seriously disabled people uncared for, and leave us oblivious to people … who fall into desperate circumstances. It would also undermine friendship, love, and community, all of which depend on a willingness to care for others, not merely for one’s own sake, but for theirs (Martin: 12). |
Rand argued for values-based self-interest and against “mindless self-indulgence” (1957: 1059). She welcomed charity to the needy for the right reasons. “If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, or the fight to recover, or his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help.” In contrast, “to help … a man who has no virtues … is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction” (1957: 1060).
In a book devoted to the practical results of the conflict between self-interest and altruism, Rand argued that the implementation of “friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one’s own hierarchy of values” (1963a: 46). Rand supported giving aid and comfort to total strangers in emergencies “if it is in one’s power” (1963a: 48–49).
Ayn Rand does not have a monopoly on stating the Objectivist position toward charity. David Kelley, the founder of The Objectivist Center (now Atlas Society), has argued that Objectivism’s individualism is unrugged, not rugged:
| The frontiersman keeping his distance from organized society … [and] the sharp-elbowed trader … [are] false images of individualism. Therational individualist is not the enemy of benevolence or civility, but their truest exemplar” (Kelley, 2003: 47). |
Kelley explains how benevolence comes from Rand’s conception of a benevolent universe, and how the capitalist virtue of productiveness leads to civility, sympathy, and generosity (Kelley, 2003).
Objectivism’s position can be seen as part of a wider tradition of benevolent individualism. For example, in The Mainspring of Human Progress, Henry Grady Weaver wrote:
| Egoism, a natural human trait, is constructive when kept within bounds. But it is highly presumptuous of any mortal man to assume that he is endowed with such fantastic ability that he can run the affairs of all his fellowmen better than they, as individuals, can run their own personal affairs (1953: 41). |
Mischaracterizations of Rand’s philosophy have little excuse given her well-known writings in the area. The New York Times obituary of Rand gave both sides of the story when it said:
| Her detractors decried objectivism as the deification of selfishness. But Miss Rand, its founder, asserted that she had never advocated the “pursuit of mindless self-interest at all cost.” …. Rand despised altruism as personal weakness and believed it responsible for much of the world’s dishonesty and misery (Saxon). |
Objectivism’s elevation of values over duty and its antipathy toward welfarism is very much in the tradition of Samuel Smiles and is akin to what is called tough love. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which moved the U.S. welfare system toward workfare and time limits, was championed by President Bill Clinton for “providing opportunity to all those willing to exercise responsibility,” giving them “the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work” (Clinton, 1998). The altruist wing of the Democratic Party and welfare establishment decried the legislation. During the legislative debate, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, a Left-wing child advocacy group, called the reform “morally and practically indefensible” and “callous, anti-child” (quoted in R.K. Weaver: 315). Upon enactment, she called the reform a “moment of shame” (Lewis). Her husband, Peter Edelman, resigned a senior position at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in protest (R.K. Weaver: 335–36).
Yet a decade later, Left and Right have recognized tough-love welfare reform as providing needed incentives to help vulnerable individuals help themselves and lead better lives at lower cost to taxpayers. The New York Times, which originally characterized the law as “draconian” (“The ‘Nonworking Class’”), editorialized ten years later: “Very few people would argue that welfare reform has been a failure, or that the country should go back to the old system of open-ended welfare eligibility with no serious emphasis on work requirements” (“Mission Unaccomplished”). “Ten years on,” The Economist concluded, “America’s work-based welfare reforms have succeeded” (“From Welfare to Workfare”: 27). Indeed, welfare rolls in the United States in the ten years had fallen in half, from 3.9 million to 1.9 million (Wessel: A10). Contrary to the altruist Left’s emotional and intellectual doomsaying over 1990s welfare reform, independence, not dependency, proved to be the way out of poverty.
3.6 Critics of Objectivism
Objectivism has been criticized from many sides (Gladstein: chap. 5). Literary critics have questioned Rand’s style and stature as a fiction writer. Her personal behavior after the publication of Atlas Shrugged (1957) in regard to Nathaniel Branden and “the collective” has provided case material for writers equating Objectivism to a cult and a secular religion. These critics have argued, with some justification, that dismissing emotional responses because they are noncognitive leads to alienation and other mental health disorders. Rand admirers, too, have critically studied the conflict to warn about neglecting emotions (Sciabarra, 1995: chap. 7; B. Branden: 299–305).
Theists and deists have criticized Rand’s atheism—one derived from her belief that reason can provide no basis for faith (Conway: 105–26). New Republicliberals and other proponents of government intervention have criticized her laissez-faire position as inconsistent with social-justice welfarism and other traditional rationales for government activism (Tracy). National Reviewconservatives vehemently criticized Rand’s “philosophic materialism” and “inverted religion” (Nash: 157). Libertarians have argued that Objectivism’s prohibition of the initiation of force supports free-market anarchism, not the limited-government position she saw following from her principles (Childs, 1969: 145–56). Objectivism has been called “untenable” and “lacking in formal philosophy,” on the grounds that its axioms must either be taken on faith, which it eschews, or logically proven, which it admits cannot be done (Robbins: 22). (Objectivism asserts that its axioms are verified directly by perception.)
Another critic, capitalist philosopher and theologian Michael Novak, has argued:
| Ayn Rand by no means speaks for the capitalist spirit. In a pluralistic culture hers is but one voice. Hers is not the voice of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln (whose words on “the just and prosperous system” of “‘free labor” are too often neglected), Frank Knight, Wilhelm Roepke, or even such severe libertarians but large-minded reformers as Milton Friedman (Novak, 1993: 22). |
This conclusion is highly debatable. Rand’s major themes are complementary to other great thinkers in the capitalist tradition, as Part I of this book, Heroic Capitalism, shows in the cases of Adam Smith and Samuel Smiles. And when Rand speaks of the capitalist spirit, certainly, she is one of capitalism’s greatest thinkers and popularizers.
Objectivists have recognized the need for a more humanist approach to philosophy and living. Nathaniel Branden has remarked on the
| inadequate attention [Rand] paid to benevolence, mutual aid, generosity, and simple kindness as ethical desirables. If life were the standard of the good, these issues were not marginal but important. These issues deserved a more prominent place in Objectivism (N. Branden, 1999: 373). |
In any case, the adage applies: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Objectivism should be evaluated by its logic, its utility for understanding the real world, and its practicality in helping individuals achieve personal and professional success. Like Austrian-School (market-process) economics, which has been marginalized by the professional mainstream because of its strict realism, Objectivism has penetrated the ivory tower from the outside because of, in part, strong interest from the causality-anchored, results-oriented public. To belittle Objectivism because of Ayn Rand’s personal style and choices is to commit the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. Added Barbara Branden (xiii), “Those who worship Ayn Rand and those who damn her do her the same disservice: they make her unreal and they deny her humanity.” Nathaniel Branden remarked how “a philosophy is not to be judged by the behavior—or misbehavior—of any of its exponents” (N. Branden, 1999: 351).
Objectivism’s relevance to contemporary affairs has been affirmed by the Enron-inspired debate over business and society. The first on-the-mark dissection of Enron’s philosophical modus operandi was penned by an analyst at The Objectivist Center (Donway). Sales of Rand’s major books surged amid a national debate over Objectivism and business ethics in the wake of Enron’s collapse. The present book is part of that debate.
3.7 Objectivism in the History of Philosophy
Objectivism is a young philosophy. It was originally presented from the 1930s through the 1950s in Ayn Rand’s fictional writings. It was then formalized in non-fictional essays and social commentary by Rand and several disciples working under her guidance. With her global book sales estimated at fifteen million (Rothstein: B1), Rand has become one of the most widely read and discussed philosophers of the twentieth century—as well as history’s leading female philosopher.
Rand’s derivation of the right to property from the right to life, and of the right to life from the ethics of self-preservation, follows the reasoning of the father of natural rights theory, John Locke (1632–1704). Locke was “the principal architect both of libertarianism and of the modern world” (Boaz: 123).
Mainstream social and political philosophy has paid little attention to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) or Ayn Rand’s moral case for capitalism. The debate over individual and social justice is described in most textbooks (e.g., Shaw and Barry: 103–23) as being between
| • | Utilitarianism, defined as the greatest good for the greatest number (formulated by Jeremy Bentham); | |
| • | Egalitarianism, a redistributive theory favoring the welfare state (formulated by John Rawls); and | |
| • | Libertarianism, favoring a non-coercive society with private property rights and a minimal state (interpreted by Robert Nozick). |
Bentham (1748–1832) was an Enlightenment philosopher; Rawls (1921–92) and Nozick (1938–2002) were colleagues in the philosophy department at Harvard University.
Shaw and Barry’s evaluation of the Rawls-versus-Nozick contest fails to evaluate the practicality of their two opposing philosophical/legal frameworks, as well as the superior ability of capitalism to expand the total wealth pie rather than just (re)distribute fixed pieces. On this score, Rawls’s welfarism scores low, a point underlined by the aforementioned demotion of the welfare state, and consequent advancement of true welfare, by President Bill Clinton and Congress in 1996 legislation.
Objectivism is even left out of the modernism/postmodernism debate (e.g., Appleby et al.). Yet Rand can claim to be the late twentieth-century’s leadingintellectual and public champion of modernism. Her trenchant fictional and non-fictional writings glorifying the Enlightenment and its philosophical precepts have been absorbed by millions. It is true that Rand did not invent but synthesized much of her world view (using ideas from Aristotle in particular), but so did the man credited as being the father of economics, and the most revered social scientist in history, Adam Smith.
Academia has been slow to embrace Objectivism for several reasons. First, as a non-academic, Rand was an outsider to the philosophy profession. She did not study for an advanced degree and never taught in academia. Rand was so alienated from the philosophy profession that she read very little of the mainstream literature (N. Branden, 1999: 149–50), much less wrote in the scholarly journals. She began but did not complete a systemic presentation of Objectivism, nor did she place her ideas in the history of philosophical thought. This gap is now being rectified by well-credentialed philosophers working in her tradition inside and outside of academia.
Rand alienated the academic mainstream by her stance as a “radical for capitalism” (Rand, 1963b: vii); contrarian usage of the key terms selfishness,altruism, and greed; and open dislike of the intellectual class (B. Branden: 302). Rand, uncompromising, quick tempered, and intellectually isolated, did not build bridges to her critics but reveled in destroying them. In Atlas Shrugged, her characters complain about “modern college-infected parasites” (659) and “ivory-tower intellectuals” (1074). She glorified “the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success” and disparaged “the professors, the poets, the intellectuals, the world-savers and the brother-lovers” (322, 974). She banked on common sense and practicality, not the smartest guys in the room, at least in her book. One character in Atlas Shrugged is described thus: “[He] knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live” (602). Thus it was not surprising that “Atlas inevitably antagonized the very group among which Ayn had expected to find the voices to speak for her: the Intellectuals” (B. Branden: 302).
Rand’s influence on the culture and media puts her at the pinnacle of all philosophers (Sciabarra, 2004). Her influence on academia is growing, although her ideas remain very young in philosophic time (Kelley 2000: 76). Objectivism is a robust intellectual movement that can be expected to prosper alongside reason, individualism, and capitalism. It will also advance by the fact that Objectivism is maturing in the post-Rand period, given the personality and behavioral shortcomings of its founder, described in Appendix A of Capitalism at Work.
Bibliography: Chapter 3 Internet Appendices
Appleby, Joyce, et al. Telling the Truth about History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994.Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. Translated by W.D. Ross. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Boaz, David. The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986.
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