Objectivist Round-up, October 2025

1. In 2022, correspondence was discovered from Murray Rothbard to Frank Meyer concerning his involvement with Ayn Rand and Objectivism.  I haven’t had the time to read the essay in full, but here is the abstract:

Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusations of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Molding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.”

2. Objectivist writer Craig Biddle has a series of videos on religion and reason.  See here (concerning William Craig).  Biddle thinks that – as Rand said – faith means believing something without reason or that is opposed to reason.  Biddle knows that there are plenty of religious believers who think that their faith is supported by reason, faith means trust, etc. but, seems to think that at the end of the day they are “really” operating on faith as Rand defined it.  

The overvaluing of definitions is a sub theme of Objectivism -- definitions don’t just describe how words are used, but somehow (at least if you get them correct) give a deeper understanding of the world.  For example, as Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness, “[y]et the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one's own interests.” I don’t know any dictionary that defines “selfishness” that way and dictionaries don’t normally give “exact” definitions.*  Likewise, in her essay “Racism,” Rand defines racism as “the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.”  I’d say that racism includes an element of invidiousness.  However, taken to the extreme, according to Rand, if you believe Joe White Guy is smarter than Bill White Guy and this has something to do with genes, you might as well be George Wallace or even Adolf Hitler.  

The latest version of “definitionalism” is the constant use by Ayn Rand Institute Objectivists is the endless attack on “tribalism,” which apparently means anything that the ARI speaker doesn’t like.  ARI Charman of the Board Yaron Brook seems to think that every issue from immigration to free trade to abortion could be resolved if you get the definition of tribalism correct (and apply it to anyone Brook doesn’t like).  Would that resolving life’s most complicated questions be so easy.

In any event, as libertarian philosopher David Gordon wrote me, “Biddle misstates Craig's position. Craig is saying, if we have good reason to think someone is trustworthy, then we have good reason to accept what he tells us. He is not saying that reason and faith are the same concept, as Biddle claims. Craig is a trained philosopher, and Biddle is out of his depth.”

_____________

*A prominent Objectivist once told me that the dictionaries of the world should be rewritten to define “selfishness” according to the Randian definition even if that definition is still in the minority of normal usage.

Objectivist Round-up, September 2025

1. It’s been reported that Allan Blumenthal and his wife Joan Mitchel Blumenthal passed away recently.  Allan Blumenthal (Nathaniel Branden’s cousin) was a psychiatrist and a member of the Collective (he signed the statement denouncing Nathaniel after Rand booted Nathaniel and Barbara out of the movement).  Allan (who was joint heir to Rand’s estate with Leonard Peikoff) broke with Rand around 1974, finding it impossible to maintain a civil, non-argumentative relationship with her.  Barbara Branden, in her biography of Rand quoted Allan: "She was relentless in her pursuit of so-called psychological errors [concerning judgments on art]. If an issue were once raised, she would never drop it; after an evening's conversation, she'd telephone the next day to ask what we had concluded about it overnight . . . It was becoming a nightmare." She quotes Joan: "but, often, she would seem deliberately to insult and antagonize us." 

2. Ayn Rand Institute thinkers Don Watkins and Onkar Ghate have a new book, Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up For Business.  I discussed it here.

3. The Ayn Rand Fan Club has an excellent discussion of grudges within and outside of the Objectivist movement.  Highlights: Yaron Brook says (shockingly) that “I’m a big believer in holding grudges” and Leonard Peikoff saying in 1989 that he won’t live long enough to forgive David Kelley even if Kelley became repentant.  They make they point that many Objectivist schisms are in part personal grudges disguised as philosophical disputes.

—Neil Parille

Objectivism and Sources by Neil Parille

One of the things I’ve noticed having followed the Objectivist movement for close to thirty years is the extreme reliance of Objectivist authors on secondary (and often outdated) sources and the constant use of previous Objectivist writings in place of original research. As a result, Objectivists tend to fall for urban legends at a rate higher than any group I can think of. I’ll present some examples and give a few potential explanations.

The Fountainhead: Leonard Peikoff

The first book by an Objectivist philosopher (other than Ayn Rand) was Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels in 1982.  This book, which was heavily edited by Rand, claimed to show that Nazism was caused by Kantian philosophy and that the influence of Kantian-inspired philosophy in the United States was leading to similar results. Say what you want about the thesis of the book, one of Peikoff’s main sources for Hitler’s thought was the work Hitler Speaks (also known as The Voice of Destruction) by Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi leader in Danzig who later left the Nazi Party and moved to the US. While Rauschning may have met Hitler a time or two, it’s unlikely he had any private conversations with him much less enough to fill a book. The Hitler quotes Peikoff used portray Hitler at his nihilistic best, e. g., “the Age of Reason is over.” A friend told me that when he first read Peikoff’s book that he thought the quotes were “too good to be true.” I can’t blame Peikoff for using the book because it wasn’t known at the time that it was spurious, but it was known around 2000 that the book was largely, if not completely, fraudulent. Unfortunately, Objectivist author Craig Biddle quoted from the book in his 2002 Loving Life (a summary of Objectivist ethics) and Andrew Bernstein in his 2005, The Capitalist Manifesto.

Objectivism and War by Neil Parille

The Ayn Rand Fan Club (YouTubers Scott Schiff and Willliam Swig) has a new episode entitled “Objectivism and War,” which discusses the views of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff and Yaron Brook on war, focusing on the status of innocents in war.  Rand’s comments, albeit off the cuff, don’t seem consistent or entirely thought out.  She says, in response to a question about war with the Soviet Union:

Why is it important to be concerned about politics?  Why should we care about having the right social system?  Because our lives are dependent on it.  Because those systems, good or bad, are established in our name, and we bear responsibility.  So that the Soviet citizens who are innocent I hope someday will be destroyed in a proper war along with the guilty.  There aren’t very many innocent ones, and they’re not in the big cities—they’re mainly in concentration camps.  

Robert “Rewrite” Mayhew in his edition of Rand’s Question and Answers, toned down her response a bit, adding a new sentence -- “If we go to war with Russia” -- to make her call for the death of innocents (now put in scare quotes) appear conditional.

But we must care about the right social system, because our lives depend on it—because a political system, good or bad, is established in our name, and we bear the responsibility for it.

If we go to war with Russia, I hope the “innocent” are destroyed along with the guilty.  There aren’t many innocent people there; those who do exist are not in the big cities, but mainly in concentration camps.

Scott and William then mention Peikoff, who was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly shortly after September 11, 2001.  Peikoff called for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran and said what kind of weapons to be used was entirely battlefield issue to be determined by the military in the war zone.  As William says, even of utilitarian grounds, there are good reasons not to use nuclear weapons since many of the people killed who would have been allies or even spies for the United States.  I’m no expert on Iran, but I get the impression that the base of the regime’s power is in the countryside.  Using nuclear weapons against the major cities could increase the support for the regime and perhaps radicalize the fence sitters.  Best I can tell, the entire leadership of the Ayn Rand Institute has either called for the use of nuclear weapons against Saudi Arabia and Iran or at least said it should not be taken off the table.  Never considered is that there are European countries where the Islamic population is now approaching ten percent.  The ARI doesn’t seem to have given any thought on what might happen in, say, London (now fifteen percent Muslim) should the spiritual capitals of Islam be attacked with nuclear weapons.  Likewise, it isn’t clear how attacking Iran and Saudi Arabia would stop terrorism.  For example, how would the 2016 Nice truck attack (which was carried out by a Tunisian living in France) been prevented by an attack on Saudi Arabia or Iran?

Objectivist Round-up, August 2025

1. The Ayn Rand Institute’s 2025 Objectivist Conference was held in July.  ARI president Tal Tsfany gave an address about the ARI’s future.  The most interesting part was the discussion of the new archival finds (see below).

2. Chris Sciabarra has a lengthy post, the ARI at Forty.

3. ARI honcho Yaron Brook is preparing courses for The (Jordan) Peterson Academy.  The Peterson Academy also features courses by Open Objectivist Stephen Hicks.  Shouldn’t Brook be working more with Ayn Rand University than Peterson (who is sympathetic to Christianity)?

4. Long time Objectivist writer Andrew Bernstein has a new collection of essays Aristotle Versus Religion.  One thing I’ve noticed about Bernstein and some other Objectivists is their extreme reliance on secondary (and often outdated) sources.  Bernstein’s main source for the history of Europe is Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization (1945-1975).  Bernstein cites it 64 times.  As an atheist and Objectivist, Bernstein isn’t a fan of Christianity.  Fair enough, yet many of his claims about Christianity are second-hand and often unsourced.  The atheist historian Tim O’Neill has a website that refutes the numerous urban and semi-urban legends that Bernstein has accepted uncritically.

Here is an example of Bernstein’s “scholarship”:

The Apostle Paul, for example, wrote: “The more they [the Greeks] called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”  

Bernstein doesn’t even quote Paul directly but instead Charles Freeman’s 2002 book, The Closing of the Western Mind: 

“The more they [non-Christians] called themselves philosophers,” he tells the Romans (1.21-22), “the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”  

For whatever reason, Freeman used the 1966 Jerusalem Bible (an English translation of a French translation).  However, the most widely used English translation of the Bible in scholarly circles is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which says:

20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;

21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools;

The use of the words “philosophers” instead of “wise,” and “logic” instead of “thinking” in the Jerusalem Bible is idiosyncratic.  I can’t find a single English version that translates the Greek text that way.  The revised New Jerusalem Bible (1985) translates Romans 1:21-22 similar to the NRSV.  In context, Paul seems to be referring to human beings as a result of the fall, not to Greek philosophy or logical reasoning.

4. The Ayn Rand Fan Club has a lengthy discussion of the Leonard Peikoff/Kira Peikoff Bellis situation.

—Neil Parille

Objectivist Round-up, July 2025

1. The Ayn Rand University press recently published Harry Binswanger’s 1975 doctoral dissertation, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts.

2. The ARU press also published a collection of essays by Binswanger, Ayn Rand’s Philosophic Achievement and Other Essays.  You can read the Philosophic Achievement essay here and here.  I found this interesting:

Ayn Rand’s esthetics depends upon her entire philosophical base, from metaphysics through ethics. Yet her basic explanation of art is quite simple: “What an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects is: "This is life as I see it." ...

The history of esthetics is perhaps even bleaker than the general history of philosophy. The 2300 years stretching from Aristotle’s Poetics to The Romantic Manifesto is practically a void; philosophers of art have seemed to be discussing some mysterious, inaccessible entity — not art. Their sterile disquisitions on “the sublime and the beautiful” and their contrived theories of “art as play” or “art as pure form” bear no discernible relationship to the actual paintings, dramas, symphonies, and sculptures that constitute the history of art.

The history of esthetics isn’t my strong suit, but I doubt nothing useful was written for 2300 years and that no one ever said something to the effect that art expresses, “this is life as I see it.”  Binswanger’s essay is rather abstract so it’s difficult to critique.  Some years ago I did a series on Ayn Rand’s originality.  See here, here, and here.

3. Objectivist Conference 2025 is happening in July in Boston.  

4. James Valliant is interviewed about the Leonard Peikoff and Kira Peikoff situation.

-Neil Parille

Objectivist Round-up, June 2025

 1. The Ayn Rand Institute Archives are now searchable, but the on-line Archives seem limited to Rand’s letters.

2. Sam Tannenhaus just published his long-awaited biography of William Buckley, coming in at 900 pages (plus endnotes).  I was naturally interested in what he said about Ayn Rand.  It’s only one paragraph and oddly refers to Rand as an “[Alfred J.} Nock disciple.”  He confirms (citing an interview of Buckley by Anne Heller) that Rand’s first words to him were, “You are too intelligent to believe in God.”  I was surprised that Tannenhaus (who wrote a biography of Whittaker Chambers) didn’t mention Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review.

-Neil Parille