In This Issue

by Edward L. Hudgins
February 2, 2005, marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, she survived the communist revolution and came to the United States in 1925 to launch her own revolution, which today is manifest in the continuing battle for freedom and true individualism.

Rand was in love with the heroic potential of human beings, and her fiction portrayed individuals as they could be and should be. In her first great novel, We the Living, published in 1937, she showed a young girl struggling to realize her dream of becoming an engineer, against the backdrop of a communist dictatorship that did not recognize the legitimacy of private dreams. Her work was a rebuke to an elite culture in America that romanticized Stalin's brutal regime.

Her next major book, The Fountainhead, published in 1943, portrayed a true individualist, an architect who loved his work and pursued his own vision of beauty, against those who simply lived to impress others. In her 1957 magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, she presented a new philosophy, Objectivism, and showed the reasons and consequences of rejecting capitalism for government control.

In this issue, TOC's Director of Programs, Will Thomas, explains Rand's credo of "reason, individualism, achievement, and freedom" and her recognition that these concepts are integrated and tied together in reality. TOC Founder David Kelley, in "Epistemology and Politics: Ayn Rand's Cultural Commentary," shows how Rand's foresights in her commentaries concerning cultural trends were so accurate because she understood issues on the deepest level. In my piece, I show the relevance of Rand's understanding of the moral foundations of capitalism and the importance of the money-making entrepreneur versus the wealth-appropriating government bureaucrat or dishonest businessman.

The appreciations in this issue show the breadth of Rand's influence. Among others: Rep. Edward Royce (R-CA) discusses Rand's all-absorbing passion to create and her arguments against every attempt to evade the responsibility of thinking. Bob Poole, founder of the Reason Foundation and long-time editor of Reason magazine, tells us how Rand's works were the single most important factor inspiring his endeavors. Charles Murray, author of numerous cutting-edge studies of policy and culture, reflects on why he and others still read Atlas Shrugged decades after its publication. And philosophers Tibor Machan and Eric Mack acknowledge her understanding that individuals are moral ends in themselves.

Inside the back cover of this issue, we present a final form of tribute to Ayn Rand. When planning her funeral, Rand said that she wanted no eulogies, just a reading of her favorite poem, "If," by Rudyard Kipling. David Kelley, later the founder of The Objectivist Center, gave that reading, and we present the poem here as the memorial Ayn Rand thought most fitting.

We dedicate this issue to her achievement and wish a hardy "Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand!"