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Ayn Rand, one of the few systematic philosophers who have used imaginative literature to develop their ideas, was a novelist and the founder of the Objectivist school of philosophy. She was an advocate of realism in epistemology, rational self-interest i...

Ayn Rand has been both revered and disparaged as the author of controversial novels, essays, and other works that espouse her philosophy of Objectivism. A Russian-born American citizen, Rand celebrated laissez-faire capitalism in her writings, arguing th...

Ayn Rand's novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) develop her philosophy of objectivism, which challenged conventional values by emphasizing laissez-faire capitalism, individualism, and opposition to altruism. After her novels, Rand pro...

An hideously horribly overly long edition of Thursday Styles with Tom Scocca, a weekly recording of an IM conversation with Tom Scocca, the New York Observer's Off the Record columnist. Brought to you as a public service by your trusty Transom editor. MediaTom: Well, have...

President Bush said Saturday that Osama bin Laden's first video appearance in three years is a reminder of "the dangerous world in which we live.""It's important that we show resolve and determination to protect ourselves, to deny al-Qaida safe haven and support young democracies, which...

The movie theater darkened and one man clapped. Then another couple of men stood up, and, quickly, the entire capacity theater at Loews Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side turned and stood to see Michael Moore ambling up the aisle shortly after 11 on...

[Ayn Rand] has written a novel ["We the Living"] to make it finally plain that the Soviet state, as far as she has been able to discover, is not only a farce on the face of it but is likewise fostering a race of "crippled, creeping, crawling, broken monstrosities." Miss Rand is determined that her readers shall have nothing less than the whole truth. Kira Argounova, her protagonist, speaks for her on at least one occasion: "For one insane second Kira wondered if she could ...

["We the Living"] is slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda. Actually Miss Rand can command a good deal of narrative skill, and her novel moves with alacrity and vigor upon occasion. It is only the blind fervor with which she has dedicated herself to the annihilation of the Soviet Union that has led her to blunder into palpable improbabilities. We refer strictly to artistic probability; we cannot here hold in question the facts upon which Miss Rand's political attitude is based....

One often wishes that writers would yield a little more to their satirical inclinations, and that goes for Miss Ayn Rand. From internal evidence one would guess her to be a middle-class White or Whitish Russian living in exile in America, and We the Living (a title of no particular significance) is so frankly counter-revolutionary that it ought to annoy readers of Red or Reddish sympathies. Writing, often graphically, of life in Leningrad in the 'twenties she seems anxious to show the corruption of t...

Ayn Rand's novel "We the Living" is a codemnation of communism as a societal and political system. Communism is based upon an all-powerful state in which individual rights are sacrificed for the good of the nation. Rand's view is that a human's calling is to live for himself or herself, that humanity is inherently free and that repressing freedom turns people into animals.