Biography

Ayn Rand (1905–1982), born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, was a Russian-American novelist and philosopher whose family business was confiscated after the Bolshevik revolution — the experience that shaped everything she later wrote. She emigrated in 1926, worked in Hollywood, and became famous through two novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). She then spent two decades presenting her ideas as a formal philosophy, Objectivism: reality is objective, reason is man’s only means of knowledge, rational self-interest is the standard of morality, and laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system consistent with it. She remains largely outside the academic canon and enormously influential outside it.

Life

Russia (1905–1926): Born in St. Petersburg; witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of her father’s pharmacy; studied history at Petrograd State University.
America (1926–1940s): Emigrated in 1926, never returned; worked in the film industry; published We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938).
The novels (1943, 1957): The Fountainhead made her famous; Atlas Shrugged made her a movement, with Galt’s speech serving as the systematic statement of the ethics.
Objectivism as philosophy (1957–1982): Nonfiction essays and lectures — For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology — plus a circle of followers, a famous break with Nathaniel Branden, and a lasting institutional presence through the Ayn Rand Institute.

Core Ideas

Values presuppose life. Only a living being faces alternatives, so “value” is meaningless without the phenomenon of life. The standard of value is “man’s life qua man” — the survival and flourishing proper to a rational being, not mere physical persistence.
Reason as the primary virtue. Man has no automatic means of survival; conceptual thought is the means. Rationality is therefore the root virtue, with independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride as its expressions.
Rational selfishness — and what it is not. Explicitly not hedonism, whim-worship, or predation. The predator lives off others’ minds and is therefore not pursuing his interest at all.
Against altruism. The doctrine that self-sacrifice is the moral standard is the target: it makes moral life a contest over who is consumed. She rejects sacrifice in both directions — you owe no one your life, and no one owes you theirs.
The trader principle and the harmony of interests. Dealings should be voluntary exchanges of value for value; among rational people, properly understood interests do not conflict.
Rights and politics. Rights are conditions of action required by man’s nature; the only proper function of government is to bar the initiation of physical force — hence laissez-faire capitalism, defended as moral rather than merely productive.
Art and romantic realism. Art concretizes a view of existence; hers projects the ideal man as an achievable standard rather than a fantasy.

Criticism

The is-ought derivation. The move from “life makes values possible” to “you ought to pursue your life” is the disputed joint. Nozick's 1971 paper is the sharpest version of the objection.
A hypothetical imperative in disguise? If the ethics binds only those who have chosen to live, its “oughts” are conditional — a Humean structure reached by an anti-Humean route. → Categorical vs. Hypothetical Imperative · Hypothetical Imperatives
The harmony of interests is an empirical claim with apparent counterexamples in genuinely zero-sum situations.
Altruism as strawman. Few philosophical defenders of other-regarding morality hold the position she attacks.
Treatment of predecessors. Aristotle is claimed, Kant demonized, Nietzsche disowned, and Hume dismissed rather than engaged — the arguments of the philosophers she blames mostly go unaddressed. → Hume Is-Ought Problem
Method and tone. The system is presented deductively and polemically, with dissent treated as corruption rather than error — a large part of why academic philosophy has largely ignored it.

In the vault

The school itself → Objectivism · Objectivist critique of Conservatism · Yaron Brook vs Jay Dyer · Family Values
Three-way comparison with Mandeville and Hume → Mandeville, Rand, and Hume - Self-Interest, Virtue, and the Sources of Morality
Political economy → Capitalism · Rights

References

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead (1943) · Atlas Shrugged (1957).
Rand, Ayn. “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).
Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) · Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979).
Nozick, Robert. “On the Randian Argument,” The Personalist (1971).
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991).