It was October 1957, several days before the official publication date. That evening, I went with Ayn, Frank, and my husband, Nathaniel, to see if the book was displayed in the Random House window. It was the first time we had seen the book outside of our own small, private world of Ayn’s apartment, the first time it had been out in the wider world where it belonged. I grinned from ear to ear, and quite involuntarily pointed at the book and blurted excitedly, “That’s us!”

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Letters from Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard to Ayn Rand.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Belying their seemingly chaotic diversity, all of modern fiction and modern criticism unite on at least one point: rejection of romanticism. The characteristic literature—and, indeed, art in general—of the twentieth century has been, broadly, either naturalist or nonobjective.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Why is it important to dramatize our values? Well, morality or ethics, Rand tells us, “is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Casual acquaintance with Ayn Rand’s ideas often involves the assumption that Rand would approve of Oliver Stone’s character Gordon Gekko (of “greed is good” fame) and of popular rich guys such as Donald Trump. It is easy to correct the misapprehension concerning Gordon Gekko. He spouts a philosophy at odds with Rand’s, insisting that morality must be abandoned for wealth while she suggests the opposite. But explaining why Rand would not approve of Donald Trump is a trickier matter—if it does not seem so, start to give it a try.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Perhaps everyone will agree that if we were all angels, no state would be necessary, and if angels were the governors, they would require neither internal nor external constraints to ensure that they governed justly.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

Harvard professor of philosophy, John Rawls, can be credited with provoking the most recent angst over the issue of intergenerational equity. Rawls views intergenerational equity as a policy issue necessitating governmental intervention to manage “social saving and investment” for the benefit of the least advantaged generation.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

In this paper, I take up the long-overdue task of constructing the foundation for an a priori theory of international relations. For, contra Morgenthau and the legions of empiricists who have followed him, it would not only be possible to construct an a priori theory of international relations, the foundation for such a theory already exists.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

The aim of this article is to resolve the putative contradiction between Hayek’s “legal framework of general and abstract rules” and the concepts of “twin ideas of evolution and of the spontaneous formation of order”.

Volume 21, Number 4 (2007)

“The Broken Window,” An essay written by Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), was the first of a dozen short essays compiled under the heading, What is Seen and What is Not Seen (1964). In these essays, Bastiat cautions us by saying that to accurately evaluate the full outcome of an event, we must account for all effects of that event, namely, the obvious (that which is seen), and also the not so obvious (that which is not seen). “The Broken Window” is the most famous of these instructive essays and is often cited by libertarians as a precise lesson in critical economic analysis.