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in her lifetime. Such a task is reserved necessarily for succeeding generations of scholars.

      First and foremost then, this is a book about ideas. I discuss Rand’s ideas as she expressed them in her published and unpublished works, in her written essays and spoken lectures, from the earliest available material to the last. I consider all these sources important to a comprehensive understanding of her thought and legacy. Unfortunately, because Rand never wrote an exhaustive treatise, her system must be pieced together from her novels, essays, and lectures. Furthermore, many of Rand’s journals and private papers are not yet available to the scholarly community. Since Rand agreed to place these papers with the Library of Congress, it is hoped that future scholars will have more information at their disposal than I have had.¹⁸

      I also discuss Rand’s thought as it has been interpreted, modified, or extended by those she influenced. This book is as much an analysis of the tradition that Rand’s philosophy has sparked as it is of the ideas she herself expressed, and I include substantive analysis of work by Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, Douglas Den Uyl, David Kelley, Tibor Machan, Leonard Peikoff, Douglas Rasmussen, George Walsh, and others. Even for those works not officially sanctioned by Rand, there is significant textual evidence to support their continuity and consistency with Objectivism. Some of these authors in fact, have written more for a scholarly than for a popular audience. Hence, their alternative formulations of Objectivist positions are characterized by scholarly rigor and precision appropriate to that context. I do not hesitate to use these materials, although this must be done with care, always remembering that the best source for evaluating their consistency is the writing of Rand herself. Ultimately, I argue that there is an essential unity in Rand’s legacy and that this unity is both philosophical and methodological.

      Before proceeding, however, I feel compelled to assert that Rand’s philosophy should be taken seriously and treated with respect. The mere mention of Ayn Rand’s name in academic circles can evoke smirks and a rolling of the eyes. Most often she is dismissed, without discussion, as a reactionary, a propagandist, or a pop-fiction writer with a cult following. The fact that her work often appeals to the young seems proof that her ideas are immature or simplistic.

      From my own experience, I can attest that Rand’s work does inspire youthful admiration. I was first exposed to her ideas when I was a senior in high school. Captivated by the starkness of her essays and the benevolent heroism of her fictional protagonists, I consumed all of Rand’s available works. I gradually discovered a rich classical liberal and libertarian literature that provided a fundamental alternative to mainstream social science.

      Although my interest in Rand never abated during my college years, I was far removed from the dogmatic, cult-like devotion of fans who seemed to worship her every pronouncement. Moreover, I witnessed the hostile reaction to her work by many academic professionals. Although Rand provided an insightful, moral defense of capitalism, I found it difficult to imagine that she could ever gain scholarly acceptance.

      Not until I was in graduate school did I discover something else in Rand’s work. As a doctoral student, I was engaged in a comprehensive study of dialectical method with two distinguished scholars of the left academy, Bertell Ollman and Wolf Heydebrand. Much to my amazement, I discovered provocative parallels between the methods of Marxian social theory and the philosophic approach of Ayn Rand. Both Marx and Rand traced the interconnectedness of social phenomena, uncovering a startling cluster of relations between and among the institutions and structures of society. Both Marx and Rand opposed the mind-body dichotomy, and all of its derivatives. But unlike Marx, Rand was virulently anticommunist. Unlike Marx, Rand viewed a genuinely capitalist social system as a necessary condition for the achievement of truly integrated human being. Paradoxically, Rand seemed to embrace a dialectical perspective that resembled the approach of her Marxist political adversaries, even while defending capitalism as an “unknown ideal.”

      In 1984, recognizing these parallels and distinctions, I was encouraged by Ollman and Heydebrand to undertake my first systematic study of the dialectical aspects of Rand’s philosophy. In the process, I rediscovered elements in Objectivism that challenged my entire understanding of that philosophy and its place in intellectual history.

      Rand was notorious for maintaining that her intellectual debt to other thinkers was very limited. And yet in my own research, I discovered similarities between Rand’s approach and the dialectical approach of Hegelians and Marxists. Rand would have vehemently denied such a link. She viewed Hegel and Marx as heirs to the destructive Platonic and Kantian philosophic traditions. I grew certain, however, that at some point in her intellectual development, Rand had absorbed, perhaps unwittingly, crucial dialectical methods of analysis. My preliminary study compelled me to look further.

      THE STUDY IN BRIEF

      Rand was born and reared during a revolutionary period in Russian history. That context is the key to understanding the peculiar character of her Objectivism, her essentially dialectical mode of inquiry, and her radical critique of contemporary society. By the time she graduated from the University of Leningrad in 1924,¹⁹ she had been exposed to a dialectical revolt against formal dualism that would profoundly influence her literary craft and philosophical project.

      In this book, I explore Objectivism on three distinct levels: (1) its intellectual roots, (2) its formal structure, and (3) its radical social implications.

      All too often, Rand’s philosophy is presented as a deductive formulation from first principles. This approach prevails in the work of both her followers and her detractors. Objectivism is defined in a logically derivative manner: Rand allegedly begins with an ontological view of the law of identity and then proceeds to enunciate a doctrine of epistemological realism, ethical egoism, individualist-libertarian-capitalist social philosophy, and a “Romantic-Realist” literary credo. Each of these branches is integrated in a hierarchy of interrelated abstractions.

      I do not deny that such a relational structure exists within Objectivism as a formal totality, but I depart from established perspectives by exploring Rand’s philosophy as a phenomenon with a history and as a system.

      From a historical vantage point, I examine Rand’s philosophy in “the process of its becoming.” I approach Objectivism diachronically, as an evolved response to the dualities that Rand confronted in Soviet Russia. Although she rejected both the mysticism of Russia’s religious traditions²⁰ and the secular collectivism of the Russian Marxists, she nonetheless remained a profoundly Russian thinker. Rand’s Russian nature was not reflected merely in her heavy foreign accent or in the length of her novels. She was Russian in more fundamental ways. In the sweeping character of her generalizations, and in her passionate commitment to the practical realization of her ideals, Rand was fully within the Russian literary and philosophic tradition. Like most of Russia’s great literary figures, she was an artist, social critic, and nonacademic philosopher who constructed a broad synthesis in her battle against the traditional antinomies in Western thought: mind versus body, fact versus value, theory versus practice, reason versus emotion, rationalism versus empiricism, idealism versus materialism, and so on. And like most of Russia’s indigenous philosophers, she presented an exhaustive, all-encompassing theoretical totality. Her system is as much defined by what she accepted in Russian thought as by what she rejected. In her intellectual development, Rand reflects the very Hegelian Aufhebung she ridiculed as a violation of the law of identity. In her intellectual evolution, Rand both absorbed and abolished, preserved and transcended, the elements of her Russian past.

      I do not mean to imply that Rand’s ideas can be wholly explained by—or reduced to—the context from which they emerged. People have free will; innovation and creativity are possible. But free will does not mean that people can step outside of their own skin. No human being can adopt a perspective on the whole that is external to all personal, cultural, social, or historical context. We are as much the creatures of history as its creators. Though Rand used genuinely inductive and deductive techniques in fashioning her unique synthesis, she also responded to real, concrete circumstances. Abstracting Rand’s philosophy from this context damages our understanding of its historical importance.

      Part One partially recovers the lost world of revolutionary Russia and evokes the oppressive conditions that prompted

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