Word: rand
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NATION GASPS AT WIDE CONCESSIONS, headlined the Rand Daily Mail, and the head of the temperance movement cried, "I can see only evil arising from this measure . . . Africans don't drink to enjoy it . . . they drink to get drunk." Angriest of all were the shebeen queens, whose brimming vats of fermenting rotgut would become unsalable when their thirsty black customers finally could walk around the corner and buy the real stuff...
...what, it might be asked, do businessmen have to do with the intellectuals? The function of a businessman, in Miss Rand's scheme of existence, is to distribute to the general public the technical advances discovered in the scientist's laboratory. In an analagous manner, the intellectual must keep before the people the latest philosophic ideas on human existence. Businessmen and intellectuals then, are middlemen in the ideal free-enterprise system...
...this would be fine if it were working properly. But the great contention of Miss Rand's book is that it is not. Ever since the encroachment of eighteenth and nineteenth century mistrust of the infallibility of pure reason (Kant is not very popular with Miss Rand: "those who accept any part of Kant's philosophy deserve it"), the intellectuals have sold out the rest of the world's producers, primarily the businessman. America today, she feels, is culturally bankrupt, a country without any intellectual leadership. It must be the duty of the new intellectuals (i.e., "any man or woman...
Understandably, For the New intellectual explains only in the most general terms how this feat is to be accomplished. Miss Rand does, however, list two general principles by which her "intellectual Renaissance" must be brought about--"that emotions are not tools of cognition" and that "no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others." The first of these is fully consistent with the basic axioms of "objectivism." The second is presumably a product of Miss Rand's high opinion of personal freedom, but it seems strange that men should be able to cut one another...
...Miss Rand's philosophy encompasses much more than economics, but the fallacies evident in her economic dabblings are probably representative of the weakness plaguing her philosophy as a whole. Miss Rand is, ironically enough, over-idealistic. Her book reasons its way from assumption to answer, without a quaver. But the assumptions do not match up with reality, and the answers are easier to discuss than to execute. Woman's place is in the home