Portal:Philosophy/Selected philosopher/47

Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher best known for developing Objectivism and for writing the novels We the Living, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and the novella Anthem. A broadly influential figure in post-WWII America, her work attracted both enthusiastic admiration and scathing denunciations.

Rand's writing emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality, reason, rational egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism, while attacking what she saw as the irrationality and immorality of altruism, collectivism, and communism. She believed that people must choose their values and actions by reason; that the individual has a right to exist for his or her own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and that no one has the right to take what belongs to others by physical force or fraud, or impose their moral code on others by physical force. Her politics have been described as minarchism and libertarianism, though she never used the first term and detested the second.