Ayn Rand & Objectivism

The leftist publication The Nation paid Ayn Rand a backhanded compliment by featuring a photograph of Atlas Shrugged in an advertisement for gift subscriptions. The ad reads, “It might be too late to change Uncle Norm, but there’s still hope for the kids.” It claims that The Nation offers “proudly…

Suppose your city were on fire, buildings were ablaze, people were stuck in the buildings, and time was running out. And suppose the firefighters got busy—not manning fire trucks, fire hoses, and ladders—but inconclusively debating whether such tools exist. This, in effect, is what libertarians are doing as the Land…

That Cass Sunstein has no idea (or chooses to misrepresent) what Ayn Rand wrote, believed, and advocated is obvious from his recent, concerted smear of Rand. Among other absurdities: Sunstein claims that Rand believed that “people’s happiness” has nothing do with “anything spiritual,” when in fact Rand recognized that happiness…

Jeff Britting, a composer and curator of the Ayn Rand Archives, has adapted Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem as stage play, which will be presented in New York City by the Austin Shakespeare Theater Company. Under the artistic direction of Ann Ciccolella, the production was originally performed in Austin, Texas in…

Although some of Ted Cruz’s views and positions are contrary to the principle of individual rights and thus wrong, he deserves great credit for his stand on defunding ObamaCare—and high praise for speaking all night last night, urging both Democrat and Republican senators to do the right thing and defund…

Allan Gotthelf—a philosopher and author best known for his scholarship on Aristotle and Ayn Rand—died August 30, 2013 of cancer at the age of seventy. Gotthelf knew Rand, discussed philosophy with her on multiple occasions, and participated in her workshops on epistemology, transcripts of which were later published. His obituary…

On July 18, the city of Detroit declared that it had reached insolvency, and, with $11 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy. Since the announcement, numerous pundits have penned postmortems attempting to explain Detroit’s decline, but Daniel Hannan has gotten closest to the essence of the issue. In his piece…

In this episode of Reason at Large, Craig Biddle addresses the question, "If an Objectivist is someone who accepts Ayn Rand’s entire philosophy as true, how is Objectivism different from a cult?" In answering, Biddle discusses the essence of Objectivism, the nature of a cult, and the absurdity of positing…

In this episode of Reason at Large, I address the question "Why do you use 'sacrifice' to mean giving up a greater value for a lesser value, when the widely accepted meaning of that term is the opposite: giving up a lesser value for the sake of a greater value?"…

This is the Q&A from Craig Biddle's speech "The Trinity of Liberty: Individualism, Individual Rights, and Independent Thinking," delivered at Hungry Minds Speaker Series, Denver, CO, Feb 2, 2013. Biddle answers questions about egoism, moral principles, the proper use of the term "selfishness," the nature of individual rights, and the…