Celebrating Ayn Rand’s 105th birthday — VOICES for REASON

In honor of the 105th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth (February 2, 1905), I’d like to recommend Jeff Britting’s short but surprisingly comprehensive biography, Ayn Rand. Lavishly illustrated with items from the Ayn Rand Archives (a special department Britting manages within the Ayn Rand Institute), this biography is especially valuable because it pays close attention to the mental choices and processes by which Ayn Rand shaped her own character and ideology.

Britting’s biography traces Rand’s brilliant successes to the fundamental choices she made—choices about how to manage her own thinking and action. It started in early childhood, Britting observes, with a vigorously questioning attitude “aimed at understanding the things around her.” (p. 4) As she entered her teens, she “began asking why she liked what she did and, as a result, she began integrating her ideas into wider generalizations. She called this approach to integrating ideas ‘thinking in principle.’” (p. 13)

This allowed her, while still a teenager residing in St. Petersburg, to assess the unfolding Russian Revolution and its communist leaders. Britting writes:

For Rand, the Communist motto, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” meant that man should live for the state and not his own personal happiness. The revolution was her first confrontation with the “ethics of altruism” (the view that service to others is the highest moral virtue), which she rejected instantly as an attack on men of “intelligence, ability, and heroism.” (pp. 14-15)

It was this careful type of thinking over many decades that enabled Rand, as a mature philosopher, to identify the moral base of capitalism in an ethics of rational self-interest.

Britting’s analytical method focuses on how people choose to think and act, within the historical context in which they find themselves. Ultimately, this is the only way to explain how one young girl could emerge from the brutality of Soviet Russia to write a great novel championing capitalism, defining in the process a philosophy of reason that clashed with every irrationality she had endured in her childhood.