Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (51 page)

In 1946, in one of her first published discussions of the subject, Rand argued: “A right is the sanction of independent action.” She endorsed a traditional Lockean-Jeffersonian view that the individual has the right to life, liberty (including
property
), and the pursuit of
happiness
. Having already written
The Fountainhead
as a tribute to the human ego, Rand was insightful enough to see this last right as a celebration of the individual’s ability to choose and pursue “his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others.” For Rand (1946, 5–6, 8–9), criminal activity is not an affront to “society,” but an infringement on the rights of
individuals.

In later years, Rand expanded on her earlier formulations and integrated these into the corpus of her fully developed philosophy. She argued that the concept of “rights” provides a moral bridge between individual ethics and social relations. It “preserves and protects individual morality in a social context,” and is “
the means of subordinating society to moral law.
”
²²
Just as life provides the standard of morality, so, too, the right to life provides the basis for all other rights. For Rand, “the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the
freedom
to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.”
²³

Rights have both positive and negative aspects. They sanction the freedom of voluntary, uncoerced action, even as they include the provision that each individual abstain from violating the corresponding rights of others. But Rand argued that all rights are indivisible. There is no distinction between the right to life and the right to property, just as there is no duality between mind and body. The right to life cannot be abstracted from its material manifestation. Just as the virtue of productive work derives from the value of
human
life, so too, the right to keep the products of our labor is the means by which we sustain our own lives. Property rights are a material corollary of the right to life. Since we must appropriate the products of our own efforts in order to survive, “The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave” (94).

In economic terms, Marx endorsed a similar view. He argued that the capitalists’ extraction of surplus value from the laborer’s product is in essence an act of expropriation. Rand, however, rejected this Marxian conviction and maintained that it is the initiation of force that constitutes the fundamental means of nullifying an individual’s ability and right to sustain his or her life.

At this juncture, it is valuable to consider some of the immediate implications of Rand’s formulation.
Den Uyl
and Rasmussen (1991, 111–15) have argued that Rand’s conception of
rights
is “ambiguous,” since it is not clear if rights are “normative principles” counseling
individuals
in their
social
conduct, or if they are “meta-normative principles,” which provide guidance in the creation of a constitutional order and legal system that protects the individual’s “self-directedness.” They recognize that for Rand, rights
include
the normative provision that an individual is obliged to respect the self-directedness of others. They argue, however, that rights are metanormative principles. To this extent, rights provide a broad framework for a legal system that applies fundamental criteria to the definition of
specific
obligations.

The evidence suggests that Rand’s conception of rights is indeed, metanormative, even though it has some obvious normative implications. If rights provide a link between individual morality and a society’s law codes, clearly, they are broad principles that serve as guides for specific legal applications. It was not Rand’s goal to define these applications; this is a social task that relates general abstractions to a specific context.

But in another sense, Rand’s system of thought moves toward the fusion of metanormative and normative considerations. For Rand, an individual has the right to choose between life-affirming and self-destructive courses of action,
as long as the latter do not infringe on other peoples’ rights to do the same.
The first provision of this formulation is just as important as the second. She made a distinction between what a person has a
right
to do, and what is the
right
course of action for a person to take in the pursuit of the ultimate value of life. The most important ramification of Rand’s theory is her view that rights provide a social sanction of the individual’s quest for a moral existence. Crucial to Objectivist epistemology and Objectivist ethics is the human ability to choose. Rand may show contempt for certain individual practices, but this hostility does not translate into a denial of the legal rights of the religious worshiper, the gambler, the drug pusher, the drug taker, or any person engaging in unconventional, consensual sexual activities.

Hence, individuals have the right to pursue even anti-life activities, as long as these activities do not infringe on the corresponding
rights
of others. In a sense, individuals have the right to pursue suicidal actions, but not homicidal ones. But this is not the whole story; for Rand refuses to disconnect her notion of individual rights from the broader ethical theory of Objectivism. Since Rand believed that certain actions were immoral, her approach sought to understand and articulate the cognitive and social roots of such behavior as a means to their transcendence. For Rand, the more
interesting question was not whether or not a person had the right to poison his or her own body with lethal drugs, but
why
someone would seek to escape from reality through drugs.

In this regard, Rand’s approach echoes the dimensions of the Marxian perspective. Marx opposed the concept of rights because it seemed to create a dualistic distinction between form and content. The rights doctrine endorsed the form of liberation, namely, free, conscious,
human
activity, by abstracting it from the content or context within which choices are made. Thus, bourgeois “freedom of conscience” merely tolerates
religion
, rather than liberating the human soul “from the witchery of religion.”
²⁴
For Marx, human beings created religion as the “heart of a heartless world.”

They will not transcend mysticism until they abandon “
a condition which requires illusions.
”
²⁵

Rand would have agreed with the thrust of Marx’s perspective. She viewed religious practices as not much different from drug addiction. Such practices were manifestations of a broader, anti-conceptual cultural bias, social conditions that have engendered a profound sense of alienation. Rand’s exploration of this issue links her libertarian politics to a critical, secular, humanist perspective.

Rand’s ability to rise above the strictures of previous rights theories is indicative of her fundamentally
dialectical
methods of inquiry. And yet, while Rand shared this integrated approach with Marxism, she departed significantly from Marx’s political orientation. According to Marx, the doctrine of individual rights was based on an atomistic conception of humanity. Private
property
defined the limits within which someone could enjoy his own possessions, seeing “in other men not the realisation but the limitation of his own freedom.” Marx wrote: “The right of man to freedom is not based on the union of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of the limited individual who is limited to himself.… The right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other men, independently from society, the right of
selfishness
.”
²⁶

Whereas Rand would have proudly affirmed
property
as “the right of selfishness,” it is obvious that Marx spoke disparagingly of this phenomenon. In this regard, Rand was actually closer to Hegel than to Marx. In Rand’s philosophy, individualism has ontological, ethical, political, and psychological components. The concept of
rights
does not depend on the reified, atomistic individual of bourgeois economy. Rand’s individualism does not view any person as a means to any end, rather, it views each person as an end in him-or herself. It holds that each of us should value nothing higher than our own autonomous thinking and judgment. The
rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are the social expression of the individual’s quest for self-realization.
²⁷
Since property is the material means of sustaining life, it is crucial to the actualization of the human potential.

It should be emphasized that Rand defined property broadly; it does not necessarily entail land ownership. Property is the product of a person’s labors. It refers to all of the material assets he or she has created, earned, exchanged, and legitimately appropriated for survival as a rational being. Much like Hegel, who saw property in an ontological relation to the person, Rand viewed the right to property as a sanction of human ability to appropriate nature for the purposes of self-development. As
Den Uyl
and Rasmussen suggest, this conjunction of property and personhood is so intimate that one cannot separate the creator from the creation without obliterating the integrated view of human existence that Rand projected.
²⁸
In Rand’s conception, people have the potential to engage in empowering social activities. They can pursue their goals
un
arbitrarily, with reason, creativity, purpose, and pride. And while an individual’s rights may be threatened by others, the Randian vision points toward a social order based on voluntary, mutually beneficial interaction. Rand’s philosophy aims for a free association of persons united
by their
own
choice.

Rand’s concept of rights has many other specific implications that are outside the scope of this book. But it is valuable to mention some of these briefly. Rand did not believe that rights were applicable to fetuses or to nonhumans; she fervently advocated the right to
abortion
and opposed the
animal
-rights movement.
²⁹
She supported the extension of rights into the realm of intellectual property. She defended the right of inheritance, voluntary association, incorporation, free trade, and immigration.
³⁰
She believed that apart from some tangential public property linked to narrowly defined governmental functions, all property should be privately owned. For Rand, the notion of “public property” undermined individual responsibility, since everyone and no one was held liable for their actions. In Rand’s view, privatization should be extended to the forests, the oceans, and the airwaves as a means of introducing accountability into law.
³¹

Rand’s doctrine of individual rights was also in stark opposition to modern welfarism. Rand believed that the entitlement mentality had manufactured all sorts of illegitimate “rights,” such as the “right” to food, clothing, shelter, employment, and medical care. No one could have a right to goods or services abstracted from the process that makes them possible. Rand asks, “
At whose expense
” are such goods to be provided? To postulate that some people are rightfully entitled to goods which they have not earned, is to
force
those who have achieved legitimate values into supporting others by
unchosen obligation.
³²
This was not a resistance to voluntary
charity
, but it was a moral condemnation of the coercive redistribution that characterizes the
welfare
state
.

ANARCHY AND GOVERNMENT

John Robbins
(1974, 123, 125) argues that Rand’s undiluted concept of individual rights logically entails an endorsement of anarchy. Despite her dissociation from
anarchism
, Rand, like Marx, incorporated some basic anarchistic elements into her political theory.
Murray Rothbard
, the contemporary
libertarian
, credited Rand with having convinced him of the theory of natural rights.
³³
But he too believed that Rand’s injunction against force must necessarily translate into a moral opposition to the state as such. In Rothbard’s view, the state is force incarnate.
³⁴

While Rand would have vehemently disagreed with Robbins and Rothbard on this issue, her understanding of the nature of
government
does in fact sublate and preserve elements of anarchist theory. Just as Marx seems to have endorsed an anarchistic utopia in the final stages of communism, so Rand assimilated anarchistic elements in her vision of the ideal government. The reasons for this provocative parallel between Marx and Rand are strategic and methodological.

First, within their respective political movements, both thinkers had to deal with dissenting factions. Marx dealt strategically with the followers of
Proudhon
,
Stirner
, and
Bakunin
; Rand, with the Rothbardian
anarcho-capitalists
. The anarcho-capitalists were forging a new, vibrant ideology in their synthesis of Austrian-school economics, natural rights, New Left historical revisionism, and an indigenous brand of American individualist anarchism in the tradition of
Tucker
,
Spooner
, and
Nock
. Against such opposition, Marx and Rand developed remarkably similar theoretical responses to anarchism.

This is not to say that the Marxian and Randian critiques of anarchism are instances of mere political strategy. Their opposition to anarchism was primarily the expression of their distinctive
dialectical
methods. Marx had opposed the anarchists because they advocated a
dualistic
worldview in which the state was distinguished from civil society. They emphasized the voluntarist principles of the latter to the detriment of the former. But this anarchist approach was ahistorical. The history of
capitalism
, according to Marx
(
Grundrisse
, 885), was replete with “state influences.” Indeed, the state was endemic to the genesis and development of capitalism, the source of primitive accumulation, and the financial fulcrum of the business cycle.
Marx maintained that capitalism had never existed in its purest form and that it would take a historical movement to dispense with both the market and the state.