The Ayn Rand Reader

Mentions of Ayn Rand—and references to her ideas—pop up routinely in today’s culture, and many people are curious about what she actually stood for. Given that her fiction and philosophical writings span several thousands of pages across numerous books, where might a time-pressed person begin?

The Ayn Rand Reader provides a compact overview of her novels and philosophic essays. The Reader is a selection of important passages from her writings indicating the contours of Ayn Rand’s thought—and suggesting where to turn to learn more.

Key passages from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged offer a flavor of the literary power and distinctive worldview that millions of fans have found irresistible. The exalted view of man as a heroic being that pervades Ayn Rand’s fiction is underpinned by her revolutionary moral code of rational egoism; The Reader sketches out Ayn Rand’s ethics with several nonfiction passages. Her distinctive view that moral values are objective—as objective as the laws of science—has its root in her discoveries about how man acquires and validates his knowledge; the Reader features passages from her seminal treatise on theory of knowledge.

The Reader also includes passages from Anthem and We the Living—her early novels—whose themes bear on the relation between the individual and the collective. In the accompanying nonfiction excerpts from Ayn Rand’s political writings, readers can learn why she staunchly defended laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system.

The Reader concludes with passages culled from Ayn Rand’s essays on esthetics, or philosophy of art, as well as a snapshot of the “benevolent universe premise”. This basic premise, running through her work, holds that human values are achievable, that this world is not a vale of tears; that happiness, not suffering, is man’s normal state.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Leonard Peikoff
• Editor’s Preface by Gary Hull
• Part One: The Fountainhead
  • Roark vs. Keating
  • The Quarry Sequence
  • The Stoddard Trial
• Part Two: Ethics
  1. Selfishness
     • From Roark’s Speech
     • Why “Selfishness”?
     • The Objectivist Ethics
  2. Anti-Altruism
     • From Galt’s Speech
     • Moral Inflation
     • The Age of Envy
  3. Man, the Rational Animal
     • Apollo 11
     • Apollo and Dionysus
     • How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?
• Part Three: Atlas Shrugged
  • Rearden’s Anniversary Party
  • The John Galt Line
  • The Abandoned Factory
  • Directive 10-289
  • The Tunnel Disaster
  • Atlantis
• Part Four: Basic Philosophy
  1. Reason and Reality
     • Axioms of Objectivism
     • Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World
  2. Mind and Body
     • Attila and the Witch Doctor
     • The Meaning of Sex
     • Of Living Death
     • On Emotions, Including Love
  3. Theory of Concepts
     • Concept-Formation
     • Consciousness and Identity
     • Abstraction from Abstractions
     • Induction
• Part Five: Early Novels and Politics
  1. The Individual vs. the State
     • Anthem
     • We the Living
     • The Purge
     • The Profiteers on Collectivism
  2. Capitalism vs. Collectivism
     • What Is Capitalism?
     • Man’s Rights
     • Collectivized “Rights”
     • On Utilitarianism
• Part Six: Romanticism and the Benevolent Universe
  1. Romanticism
     • The Goal of My Writing
     • What Is Romanticism?
  2. The Benevolent Universe
     • Introduction to Calumet “K”
     • Letter to a Fan
     • Don’t Let It Go
• Recommended Readings

(Softcover; 497 pages)

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