Gazing over a barren, pristine landscape surrounded by mountains, divorced from the brutal forces of the socialist dystopia that seeks to crush his individuality and repress his intellect, Prometheus – the hero of Ayn Rand’s (1905-1982)...
moreGazing over a barren, pristine landscape surrounded by mountains, divorced from the brutal forces of the socialist dystopia that seeks to crush his individuality and repress his intellect, Prometheus – the hero of Ayn Rand’s (1905-1982) novella Anthem – ponders with exhilaration his new life away from civilization. “This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest,” he says. “I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.” The image of Prometheus standing alone in the wilderness constitutes an enduring symbol of Rand’s work. In this context, the pursuit of political excellence and universal goodness remains incidental to human virtue. Man lives for his own sake. The quest for happiness, for righteousness, for meaning, begins and ends not with the common good, but with the individual good.
Rand’s decision to name Prometheus after Aeschylus’s ill-fated hero amounts to a particularly apt expression of her story’s central theme. The classical Prometheus’s disobedience of the gods corresponds to Rand’s contention that neither religion nor tradition – let alone the state – can function as a standard of morality. Only an individual’s happiness, which man advances through reason, may serve as a bellwether of virtue. For Rand, Greek authors such as Aeschylus and Aristotle provide the first moral worldview that grounds itself not in institutions or authority, but in an individual’s untrammeled use of his cognitive faculty. Thus, to develop the philosophy she calls Objectivism, Rand seeks to explore the thought of classical Athens, the originator and incubator of the philosophic enterprise.
The philosophy of ancient Greece paves the groundwork not only for Rand’s worldview, but also for the thought of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a contemporary of Rand who sees the classics as the architects of the concept of natural right, which in modern times finds its most eloquent expression in the Declaration of Independence. While neither Strauss nor Rand exhibits any awareness of each other’s thought in their voluminous writings, their respective approaches to classical philosophy, modern philosophy, and ethics bear striking resemblances. Both believe that modern philosophy, by rejecting reason as a definitive means of approaching reality, has gone tragically astray. Both advocate revisiting the classics to rediscover concepts like virtue, truth, morality, objectivity, and the good. Both ground their worldviews in the belief that objective morality remains a distinct possibility, that reason even in the absence of God can lead to truth grounded in natural law. And both cite authorities like Aristotle in their efforts to explicate a philosophical system that rejects the fact-value distinction postulated by modern thinkers like Weber and Heidegger.
Yet even as Rand and Strauss appeal to identical sources in the formulation of their respective philosophies, their specific conceptions of truth and natural law stand at starkly dissimilar poles. Both, in all likelihood, would have strenuously rejected each other’s worldview. Still, while scholars have yet to advance significant comparative analyses of Rand and Strauss, the striking overlaps in their ideological paradigms demand a more in-depth study of their approaches to political philosophy. Indeed, the bitter controversy and recriminations that often surround even a casual reference to Strauss and Rand in public life have inhibited a balanced and dispassionate examination of their thought. This essay aims to explore the differences between the respective philosophies of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand, with a particular focus on their application to the relationship between the individual and the state. In this respect, I seek not to mount a comprehensive investigation of their oeuvres, but rather to consider their writings with regard to several political-philosophical questions that lie at the heart of their worldviews and of classical political philosophy. What role does the concept of natural right play in political governance? How should we define morality and virtue in politics? Is it possible to reconcile the tension between the individual and the state? In addressing the approaches of Rand and Strauss to these problems, I intend to advance a critique of Rand’s position on the basis of Strauss’s views. By demonstrating that Strauss employs a more accurate and comprehensive use of classical thinkers than Rand does, I seek to uncover the flaws in Rand’s perception of human nature, the state, and natural right, and to show why her political philosophy remains inconsistent with the classical sources she quotes selectively to justify it.
