Publicidad y Promoción

RAND’S PROJECT

This work on individualism would be incomplete without at least a cursory exploration of one thinker who gave its thesis a most forthright exposition throughout several decades of the twentieth century. If there is anyone who has come close to outlining—although not fully developing—the tenets of the classical-individualist stance in moral and political thought, it is the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand.

Why did Rand embark upon this task? And how should we assess the results of her work?

As to the first question, Rand herself provides a pretty good clue to the answer. She explains, in an essay that explicitly addresses her own career, that she wanted to make it possible for her to write about human beings as they ought to be, not as they usually are. In particular, the worldview she sought to express as an aspiring novelist was missing from the contemporary intellectual climate.1 _{Instead, what reigned supreme during the}

early and middle portions of the twentieth century was either naturalism or some version of absurdism. So, as she explains, this required that she turn to the development of a philosophical system. She explains that she realized that only if she first developed a rational, reality-based philosophy would there exist a foundation and context for her romantic realistic fiction. Such a vision would have to be complex and nonutopian, and inspire men and women to admire and defend the social and political system suitable for its realization, namely, capitalism.

How successful was Rand’s project? The results of her undertaking are her literary artistry (as playwright and novelist) and objectivism (as philosopher). Together, I would argue—and have made the point in several places over the last three decades—these provide a philosophical foundation for a rational moral and political system and a vision of human life lived in accordance with such a system, superior—in the appropriately limited context of a general philosophy (as distinct from some concrete life plan)—to all other life options.

THE AMERICAN LEGACY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

Within recent human history, the United States has approximated the system of capitalism. The political foundations of capitalism—by no means a mere economic system—were best expressed in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Despite the political substance of the Declaration, it is connected to a philosophical point of view and not simply to greedy motives, as alleged by capitalism’s critics. Lincoln made this point eloquently in 1859:

All this is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is the principle of “Liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path to all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise and industry to all.2

The priority of commerce, or exchange, is not implied in the American system, even if we admit that it “clears the path to…enterprise and industry to all.” Common sense plainly shows this, even in the face of widespread accusations about the necessary economic motivations of all human action and thought. The principle of liberty for all is not embraced within the American political tradition merely because this tradition rests on the view, shared by Hobbes and Locke, that life is the joyless quest for joy.3

THE CHALLENGE OF THE CRITICS

But more than common sense is required in order to uphold a good idea in any sphere of concern. Without a firm philosophical base, the free system is vulnerable, even if this base need not be at hand for every citizen.

The critics make the valid point that capitalism lacks moral fuel because it has yet to be widely and prominently associated with a comprehensive philosophical ethics. The

problem with Western, classical-liberal capitalism is that the political liberty it cherishes (at least in the language of its political declarations) has not been adequately justified by the pursuit of human excellence. As Solzhenitsyn has noted, “A society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not worthy of man either.”4

THE CHALLENGE CAN BE MET

The critics are wrong to claim, however, that because the bourgeois capitalist idea has not had a full moral-political case to back it up, it is a crass, callous, heartless, nihilistic, purely legalistic, and uninspired way of life. Capitalism, the socioeconomic system that has at its political foundation the principles announced in the Declaration of Independence, contains abundant normative elements. Even if understood merely as an economic system, capitalism is quite attentive to values, for it fosters personal responsibility and excludes force from human relationships. It requires the individual’s initiative to achieve prosperity, however understood, with the clear implication that others’ efforts must be respected. There is ample moral substance in this alone.

The problem has been that the political principles of capitalism, while in the main requiring every individual to lead the moral life, are neither sufficient as a moral code nor firmly linked philosophically with such a code. Two approaches to the problem have dominated the work of moral theoreticians—philosophers, theologians, and pedagogues.5 The first has assumed a need for the religious ethical traditions of earlier times: loyalty to and faith in something superior to human life are supposed to sustain a culture. The second has denied that we can identify a moral foundation for any sort of political system; a culture rests only on human drives, vested interests, and economic, psychological, or social instincts.

PROBLEMS WITH THE RELIGIOUS AND AMORALIST ANSWERS Looking first at the second alternative, we can see that the idea of a free society has come to be widely linked with amoralist tenets. This is due in part to the mistaken association of modern economics with scientific neutrality (especially regarding moral or political values). The point may be stated as follows: Modern economics both is scientific and gives support to the free market; introducing moral issues just weakens the scientific integrity of the case for liberty.

Those who have sought religious support for politics have, in turn, been willing to make compromises between liberty and slavery. They have denied Lincoln’s premise that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent,”6mainly on grounds of faith and tradition. For these individuals (mainly America’s conservatives)