Ayn Rand's Contribution to the Cause of Freedom

A ler no Mises Institute. A defesa radical do capitalismo por quem emigrou da Rússia usando a filosofia e os romances como o meio de excelência de propagação dos seus argumentos.

"After living through the Russian Revolution, and the economic chaos and political repression that came in its wake—events she would later dramatize in her novel We the Living—Rand fled the Soviet Union for the United States in 1926 to begin her career as screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. Dividing her time between Hollywood and New York, the fiercely anticommunist Rand began to develop a philosophy of ethical and political individualism, and to make the acquaintance of such leaders of the libertarian "Old Right" as John Flynn, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane, H.L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read, and a fellow refugee from European totalitarianism, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.

Rand's chief popular success came from The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), two epic philosophical novels on the model of Dostoyevksy that quickly established her as one of the century's most controversial authors. The enthusiastic audience these works brought her enabled Rand to build a politico-philosophical movement based on the system of thought she would call "Objectivism," and Rand's attention accordingly turned thereafter to nonfiction; she would devote the remainder of her career to editing a series of Objectivist periodicals and to penning philosophical essays, political commentary, and cultural criticism."