In this 1965 talk, Ayn Rand discusses the “anti-ideology” of pressure group warfare and unlimited majority rule known at the time as “government by consensus.” Rand explains why America, “a country which does abhor fascism, is moving by imperceptible degrees — through ignorance, confusion, evasion, moral cowardice, and intellectual default — not toward socialism or any mawkish altruistic ideal, but toward a plain, brutal, predatory, power-grubbing, de facto fascism.”

The lecture lasts 54 minutes.

In this radio interview, Ayn Rand explains her theory of rights as a social application of morality, designed to ensure “those conditions of existence which are required by man’s nature for his proper survival.” The individual’s rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, she argues, protect his ability to act on his own rational judgment, to choose his own values, and to keep the material product of his efforts. Rand addresses and rejects theories that rights are gifts from a supernatural power or from society. She also discusses the contradiction involved in asserting welfare rights to goods and services.

The program lasts 25 minutes.

In honor of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Ayn Rand contrasts the Founding Fathers’ principled concern for individual rights with the unprincipled views of voters and candidates in the 1976 presidential election. Rand also dissects the evils of the welfare state, focusing on Sweden as its exemplar, and calls for Americans to observe their Bicentennial by discovering and upholding the nation’s founding ideals.

In the ensuing Q&A, Rand addresses a variety of topics including her favorite Founding Father, the reason she pays income taxes, the Vietnam War, anti-war activists, bonuses and profit sharing in business, control of environmental pollution, Objectivism’s influence in Scandinavia, the fate of innocents in war, the Equal Rights Amendment, the use of amphetamines, compulsory copyright licensing, the Soviet Union’s influence in the Middle East, the Patricia Hearst kidnapping, American Indians and abortion.

The talk lasts 41 minutes, followed by a 47-minute Q&A.

In this 1963 talk, Ayn Rand offers her assessment of President Kennedy’s signature New Frontier program. Rand identifies a fundamental principle that Kennedy’s program shares with the fascist states of twentieth-century Europe: the “subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the collective.” This principle, Rand argues, is the “ideological root of all statist systems, in any variation, from welfare statism to a totalitarian dictatorship,” and was ubiquitous in the political dialogue of 1960s America.

The program lasts 58 minutes.

In this radio interview, Ayn Rand responds to questions about the nature and purpose of law. She discusses various topics, including the crucial differences between objective and non-objective law, the principles governing rules of evidence, the propriety of capital punishment, the scope of judicial discretion and the evil of preventive laws.

In this radio program from 1965, Ayn Rand responds to questions about the ideal political structure of a free society. Topics addressed include the government’s role as protector of individual rights, the relationship between a country’s political and economic systems, the role of a written constitution, voting, taxes, the difference between a democracy and a republic, and non-coercive methods of financing government’s operations.

The recording lasts 28 minutes.

A startling, controversial argument that the key to reviving the American Dream of limitless opportunity is not to fight income inequality — but to celebrate unequal achievement.

We’ve all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we’re told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes and a far higher minimum wage.

But what if that narrative is wrong? What if the real threat to the American Dream isn’t rising income inequality — but an all-out war on success?

In this timely and thought-provoking work, Don Watkins and Yaron Brook reveal that almost everything we’ve been taught about inequality is wrong. You’ll discover:

• Why successful CEOs make so much money — and deserve to
• How the minimum wage hurts the very people it claims to help
• Why middle-class stagnation is a myth
• How the little-known history of Sweden reveals the dangers of forced equality
• The disturbing philosophy behind Obama’s economic agenda

The critics of inequality are right about one thing: the American Dream is under attack. But instead of fighting to make America a place where anyone can achieve success, they are fighting to tear down those who already have. The real key to making America a freer, fairer, more prosperous nation is to protect and celebrate the pursuit of success — not pull down the high fliers in the name of equality.

Our Message

Our Book: Read chapter 1 of Equal Is Unfair

Our Manifesto: Turning the Tables on the Inequality Alarmists

Interview: Don Watkins on Challenging the Inequality Alarmists

Videos: See our YouTube playlist, Economic Equality Is Unfair

Commentary: Regular doses of insight at Voices for Reason

Updates: Sign up to be on the Ayn Rand Institute’s email list

What People Are Saying

“Incisive, well-written, much-needed and powerful antidote to the pernicious ‘wisdom’ about income inequality. The real problem is not free markets but arbitrary government power. An impressive achievement.” (Steve Forbes)

“This is an extraordinary book that will open your eyes and increase your awareness about this politically charged subject. You learn how and why ‘inequality’ is largely a myth and that the key to higher incomes lies in making yourself more productive throughout your life.” (Brian Tracy, author – No Excuses!)

“There are all sorts of very good books and articles exposing the economic fallacies underlying recent calls for more aggressive government-sponsored wealth-redistribution. But none exposes the misguided ethics underlying such calls as effectively as Don Watkins’ and Yaron Brook’s Equal is Unfair. Defenders of free markets need to recapture the high moral ground from their redistributionist opponents, and this book supplies just the ammunition needed for the job.” (George Selgin, director, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute)

“Watkins and Brook have written the best summary of Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged I could imagine in Equal is Unfair. This is a must read for every individual who wonders about America’s direction these past few years. The American Dream is under attack and this book clearly and succinctly explains the motives of the attackers and the defense which we all must provide. A brilliant piece of work!” (David L Sokol, chairman of Teton Capital, LLC)

“This book is like an oasis in the desert. At LAST the voice of reason breaks through the prejudices and presumptions and outright misrepresentations that are at the heart of the hysterical cries of the inequality fighters.” (Mark Pellegrino, star of Lost, Dexter, Supernatural and Quantico)

“Don Watkins’ and Yaron Brook’s latest book, Equal is Unfair is a much needed and well crafted take down of the attempt to force a political consensus that the State must focus on ending ‘inequality.’ Government does not like concrete tasks—like building a bridge on time on budget. Government prospers when it convinces voters to demand that it pursue the impossible. Why? Because every failure becomes an argument for more centralized power.” (Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform)

“More bad ideas are promoted under the beguiling banner of ‘equality’ than anything else these days. If you’ve been seduced into thinking that it’s the key to personal or material progress, this book is your antidote. Read it cover to cover and you’ll never see humanity, the economy or public policy the same again.” (Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education)

“Equal Is Unfair demolishes the Left’s myths and demonstrates that the campaign against income inequality is actually an attack on the concept of the ‘land of opportunity’—America’s unique sense of life. As Watkins and Brook show, reason and freedom, not handouts and high taxes, are the foundations of human progress. And production, not redistribution, is the source of human flourishing.” (John A. Allison, retired president and CEO of the Cato Institute, retired chairman and CEO of BB&T)

‘There are basically two ways of thinking about policy responses to inequality–raising or leveling. Leveling tends to promote the idea that there is a fixed pie of wealth in society and distribution is a function of luck, while raising tends to promote the idea that wealth must be created by individuals who realize the gains from trade and the gains from innovation, and as such distribution is a function of rewards for superior talent and insight into how to satisfy the demands of others in the market. Human excellence must be acknowledge before it can be rewarded, and talents are to be celebrated rather than explained away as a consequence of luck. In Equal is Unfair Watkins and Brook provide a persuasive defense of human excellence, and of true capitalism which brings out the best in humanity and unleashes the creative genius in man in the arts, science and commerce. Highly recommended.” (Peter Boettke, University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University)

“Arguing the unarguable, Watkins and Brook blow the top off established wisdom on the evil of income inequality and the culpability of the 1%. Today’s one-sided debate on income inequality amounts to envy politics, not logic or fact, as these authors demonstrate in their explosive and entertaining book, Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. This book shows why the profit motive is noble and shows that government intervention in all areas of our lives—not income inequality—is what’s really threatening the American Dream. A must read for those who desire prosperity for more of the world’s people.” (Mallory Factor, NYT Bestselling Author of Shadowbosses and Big Tent, FoxNews Contributor and Professor: The Citadel, Oxford University and Buckingham University)

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This lecture was delivered at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum on April 20, 1986, published in The Objectivist Forum in June 1986 and anthologized in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought in 1989.

A specter is haunting America — the specter of religion. This, borrowing Karl Marx’s literary style, is my theme tonight. Where do I see religion? The outstanding political fact of the 1980s is the rise of the New Right, and its penetration of the Republican Party under President Reagan. The bulk of the New Right consists of Protestant Fundamentalists, typified by the Moral Majority. These men are frequently allied on basic issues with other religiously oriented groups, including conservative Catholics of the William F. Buckley ilk and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals of the Commentary magazine variety.

All these groups observed the behavior of the New Left awhile back and concluded, understandably enough, that the country was perishing. They saw the liberals’ idealization of drugged hippies and nihilistic Yippies; they saw the proliferation of pornography, of sexual perversion, of noisy Lib and Power gangs running to the Democrats to demand ever more outrageous handouts and quotas; they heard the routine leftist deprecation of the United States and the routine counsel to appease Soviet Russia — and they concluded, with good reason, that what the country was perishing from was a lack of values, of ethical absolutes, of morality.

Values, the Left retorted, are subjective; no lifestyle (and no country) is better or worse than any other; there is no absolute right or wrong anymore — unless, the liberals added, you believe in some outmoded ideology like religion. Precisely, the New Rightists reply; that is our whole point. There are absolute truths and absolute values, they say, which are the key to the salvation of our great country; but there is only one source of such values: not man or this earth or the human brain, but the Deity as revealed in scripture. The choice we face, they conclude, is the skepticism, decadence, and statism of the Democrats, or morality, absolutes, Americanism, and their only possible base: religion — old-time, Judeo-Christian religion.

“Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time for our country’s sake,” said Mr. Reagan in 1980. “In a struggle against totalitarian tyranny, traditional values based on religious morality are among our greatest strengths.” 1 Quoted in Conservative Digest, Sept. 1980.

“Religious views,” says Congressman Jack Kemp, “lie at the heart of our political system. The ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are based on the belief that each individual is created by God and has a special value in His eyes. . . . Without a common belief in the one God who created us, there could be no freedom and no recourse if a majority were to seek to abrogate the rights of the minority.” 2 From a symposium on “Sex and God in American Politics,” Policy Review, Summer 1984.

Or, as Education Secretary William Bennett sums up this viewpoint: “Our values as a free people and the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood.” 3 Quoted in the New York Times, Aug. 8, 1985.

Politicians in America have characteristically given lip service to the platitudes of piety. But the New Right is different. These men seem to mean their religiosity, and they are dedicated to implementing their religious creeds politically; they seek to make these creeds the governing factor in the realm of our personal relations, our art and literature, our clinics and hospitals, and the education of our youth. Whatever else you say about him, Mr. Reagan has delivered handsomely on one of his campaign promises: he has given the adherents of religion a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations.

This defines our subject for tonight. It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises. Is the New Right the answer to the New Left? What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism? Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism — or to something else?

In discussing these issues, I am not going to say much about the New Right as such; its specific beliefs are widely known. Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader, philosophical context. I want to ask: what is religion? and then: how does it function in the life of a nation, any nation, past or present? These, to be sure, are very abstract questions, but they are inescapable. Only when we have considered them can we go on to judge the relation between a particular religion, such as Christianity, and a particular nation, such as America.

Let us begin with a definition. What is religion as such? What is the essence common to all its varieties, Western and Oriental, which distinguishes it from other cultural phenomena?

Religion involves a certain kind of outlook on the world and a consequent way of life. In other words, the term “religion” denotes a type (actually, a precursor) of philosophy. As such, a religion must include a view of knowledge (which is the subject matter of the branch of philosophy called epistemology) and a view of reality (metaphysics). Then, on this foundation, a religion builds a code of values (ethics). So the question becomes: what type of philosophy constitutes a religion?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “religion” as “a particular system of faith and worship,” and goes on, in part: “Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship.”

The fundamental concept here is “faith.” “Faith” in this context means belief in the absence of evidence. This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science. A scientist may believe in entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he proves their existence logically, by inference from the things he does observe. A religious man, however, believes in “some higher unseen power” which he cannot observe and cannot logically prove. As the whole history of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity. The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.

Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God not only is an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man’s worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.

If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to the New York Times, a religious revival is now occurring. Will you find students eagerly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teachings of science? On the contrary. The students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. “Students today are more reconciled to authority,” one campus religious official notes. “There is less need for students to sit on their own mountaintop” — i.e., to exercise their own independent minds and judgment. Why not? They are content simply to believe. At Columbia University, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly not to analyze, but “to sing, worship, and speak in tongues.” “People are coming back to religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture,’’ says a chaplain at Columbia. 4 The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1985 and Jan. 5, 1986. This is absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to: not reason or logic, but faith.

“Faith” names the method of religion, the essence of its epistemology; and, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, the belief in “some higher unseen power” is the basic content of religion, its distinctive view of reality, its metaphysics. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God; some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural — in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.

According to religion, this supernatural power is the essence of the universe and the source of all value. It constitutes the realm of true reality and of absolute perfection. By contrast, the world around us is viewed as only semi-real and as inherently imperfect, even corrupt, in any event metaphysically unimportant. According to most religions, this life is a mere episode in the soul’s journey to its ultimate fulfillment, which involves leaving behind earthly things in order to unite with Deity. As a pamphlet issued by a Catholic study group expresses this point: Man “cannot achieve perfection or true happiness in this life here on earth. He can only achieve this in the eternity of the next life after death. . . . Therefore . . . what a person has or lacks in terms of worldly possessions, privileges or advantages is not important.’’ 5 “What the Catholic Church Teaches About Socialism, Communism, and Marxism,” The Catholic Study Council, Washington, DC. In New Delhi a few months ago, expressing this viewpoint, Pope John Paul II urged on the Indians a life of “asceticism and renunciation.” In Quebec some time earlier, he decried “the fascination the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, and records of physical strength.” Too many men, he explained in Luxembourg, “consciously organize their way of life merely on the basis of the realities of this world without any heed for God and His wishes.’’ 6 The New York Times, Feb. 2, 1986, Sept. 11, 1984, and May 17, 1985.

This brings us to religious ethics, the essence of which also involves faith, faith in God’s commandments. Virtue, in this view, consists of obedience. Virtue is not a matter of achieving your desires, whatever they may be, but of seeking to carry out God’s; it is not the pursuit of egoistic goals, whether rational or not, but the willingness to renounce your own goals in the service of the Lord. What religion counsels is the ethics of self-transcendence, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice.

What single attitude most stands in the way of this ethics, according to religious writers? The sin of pride. Why is pride a sin? Because man, in this view, is a metaphysically defective creature. His intellect is helpless in the crucial questions of life. His will has no real power over his existence, which is ultimately controlled by God. His body lusts after all the temptations of the flesh. In short, man is weak, ugly, and low, a typical product of the low, unreal world in which he lives. Your proper attitude toward yourself, therefore, as to this world, should be a negative one. For earthly creatures such as you and I, “Know thyself’ means “Know thy worthlessness”; simple honesty entails humility, self-castigation, even self-disgust.

Religion means orienting one’s existence around faith, God, and a life of service — and correspondingly of downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality.

What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.

Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the counts I mentioned. The gods of Mount Olympus were like a race of elder brothers to man, mischievous brothers with rather limited powers; they were closer to Steven Spielberg’s extraterrestrial visitor than to anything we would call “God.” They did not create the universe or shape its laws or leave any message of revelations or demand a life of sacrifice. Nor were they taken very seriously by the leading voices of the culture, such as Plato and Aristotle. From start to finish, the Greek thinkers recognized no sacred texts, no infallible priesthood, no intellectual authority beyond the human mind; they allowed no room for faith. Epistemologically, most were staunch individualists who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own powers of sensory observation and logical thought. For details, I refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit.

Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture. Men generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural; their energies were devoted to the joys and challenges of life. There was a shadowy belief in immortality, but the dominant attitude to it was summed up by Homer, who has Achilles declare that he would rather be a slave on earth than “bear sway among all the dead that be departed.”

The Greek ethics followed from this base. All the Greek thinkers agreed that virtue is egoistic. The purpose of morality, in their view, is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own happiness, by means of a proper development of his natural faculties — above all, of his cognitive faculty, his intellect. And as to the Greek estimate of man — look at the statues of the Greek gods, made in the image of human strength, human grace, human beauty; and read Aristotle’s account of the virtue — yes, the virtue — of pride.

I must note here that in many ways Plato was an exception to the general irreligion of the Greeks. But his ideas were not dominant until much later. When Plato’s spirit did take over, the Greek approach had already died out. What replaced it was the era of Christianity.

Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man’s entire mental life. “I do not know in order to believe,” he said, “I believe in order to know.” In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus Tertullian’s famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe it because it is absurd”).

As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare — a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.

What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn’t it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine’s answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he put it, “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous”?

What were the practical results — in the ancient world, then in the medieval — of these two opposite approaches to life?

Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a magnificent, man-glorifying art; it gave us the base of modern civilization in every field; it taught the West how to think. In addition, through its admirers in ancient Rome, which built on the Greek intellectual base, Greece indirectly gave us the rule of law and the first idea of man’s rights (this idea was originated by the pagan Stoics). Politically, the ancients never conceived a society of full-fledged individual liberty; no nation achieved that before the United States. But the ancients did lay certain theoretical bases for the concept of liberty; and in practice, both in some of the Greek city-states and in republican Rome, large numbers of men at various times were at least relatively free. They were incomparably more free than their counterparts ever had been in the religious cultures of ancient Egypt and its equivalents.

What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was antimaterialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable: mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.

What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the feudal serf tied for life to his plot of ground, his noble overlord, and the all-encompassing decrees of the Church. Or, if you want an example closer to home, jump several centuries forward to the American Puritans, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin continent, and who proceeded to establish a theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts. Such a dictatorship, they declared, was necessitated by the very nature of their religion. You are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter; therefore, you are a servant who must act as your Creator, through his spokesmen, decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately depraved, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on your vicious impulses. And, they said, you don’t really own your property either; wealth, like all values, is a gift from Heaven temporarily held in trust, to be controlled, like all else, by the elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so what? You’re not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.

There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must offer obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment, either, but must be submissive in action as well. This is the reason why, historically — as Ayn Rand has pointed out — faith and force are always corollaries; each requires the other.

The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has value as an individual — that the individual soul is precious — is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite original sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power — only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy — only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.

What — or who — ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought that he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It is all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.”

The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance. Renaissance means “rebirth,” the rebirth of reason and of man’s concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America’s founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.

The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway) of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian, spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man’s intellect and, correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible. “While we are under the tyranny of Priests,” he declared in 1784, “. . . it ever will be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.’’ 7 From Reason the Only Oracle of Man (Bennington: 1784), p. 457.

Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God “is supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity.” The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere, “the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants . . . has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emolument.” “It has hitherto been deemed a crime to think,” he observes, but at last men have a chance — because they have finally escaped from the “long and doleful night” of Christian rule, and have grasped instead “the unlimited power of human reason” — “reason, which is the glory of our nature.” 8 The Examiners Examined: Being a Defence of the Age of Reason (New York: 1794), pp. 9–10. An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (London: 1826), p. 35. Principles of Nature (New York: 1801), from chap. 1 and chap. 22.

Allen and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared by all the founding fathers as their basic, revolutionary premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” he advises a nephew, “and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.’’ 9 Writings, A. E. Bergh, ed. (Washington, DC: 1903), vol. 6, p. 258. Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man’s mind comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach — in this fundamental rejection of faith — that the irreligion of the Enlightenment lies.

The consequence of this approach was the age’s rejection of all the other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles, but of impersonal, natural law. In ethics: success in this life became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man’s pursuit of happiness — his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.

Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man.

Many of the founding fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint, known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step between Christianity and outright atheism.

This is why the religious men of the Enlightenment were scandalized and even panicked by the deist atmosphere. Here is the Rev. Peter Clark of Salem, Mass., in 1739: “The former Strictness in Religion, that . . . Zeal for the Order and Ordinances of the Gospel, which was so much the Glory of our Fathers, is very much abated, yea disrelished by too many: and a Spirit of Licentiousness, and Neutrality in Religion . . . so opposite to the Ways of God’s People, do exceedingly prevail in the midst of us.” 10 A Sermon Preach’d . . . May 30th, 1739 (Boston: 1739), p. 40. And here, fifty years later, is the Rev. Charles Backus of Springfield, Mass. The threat to divine religion, he says, is the “indifference which prevails” and the “ridicule.” Mankind, he warns, is in “great danger of being laughed out of religion.” 11 A Sermon Preached in Long-Meadow at the Publick Fast (Springfield:1788). This was true; these preachers were not alarmists; their description of the Enlightenment atmosphere is correct.

This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point for point, the founding fathers’ argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans’ argument for dictatorship — but in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the founding fathers said in essence (with a large assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority, human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being — not in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action, either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, they added, the motive of man’s action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.

This, in substance, was the American argument for man’s inalienable rights. It was the argument that reason demands freedom. And this is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically different century. It required what the Enlightenment offered: a rational, secular context.

When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is what the founding fathers did in one crucial respect. All men, said Jefferson, are endowed “by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God. Despite Jefferson’s eminence, however, his statement (along with its counterparts in Locke and others) is intellectually unwarranted. The principle of individual rights does not derive from or depend on the idea of God as man’s creator. It derives from the very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from the requirements of man’s mind and his survival. In fact, as I have argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically. Through all the centuries of the Dark and Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a Creator; but it was only when religion began to fade that the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerged as an historical, nation-shaping force. What then deserves the credit for the new development — the age-old belief or the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protector of human liberty — God or reason?

My answer is now evident. America does rest on a code of values and morality — in this, the New Right is correct. But, by all the evidence of philosophy and history, it does not rest on the values or ideas of religion. It rests on their opposite.

You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.

The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois’’ reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical, predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice everything in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must accept them because that is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every count, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.

This is why, so far, Communism has been unable to win out in the West. Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion — in faith, sacrifice, humility and, therefore, in servility. We are still too rational, too this-worldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny. We are still being protected by the fading remnants of our Enlightenment heritage.

But we will not be so for long if the New Right has its way.

Philosophically, the New Right holds the same fundamental ideas as the New Left — its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice — and therefore it has to lead to the same result in practice: dictatorship. Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction. The New Rightists themselves announce it openly. While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is pure statism.

The outstanding example of this fact is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion even in the first trimester of pregnancy. A woman, in this view, has no right to her own body or even, the most consistent New Rightists add, to her own life; instead, she should be made to sacrifice at the behest of the state, to sacrifice her desires, her life goals, and even her existence in the name of a mass of protoplasm which is at most a potential human being, not an actual one. “Abortion,” says Paul Weyrich, executive director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, “is wrong in all cases. I believe that if you have to choose between new life and existing life, you should choose new life. The person who has had an opportunity to live at least has been given that gift by God and should make way for a new life on earth.” 12 From “Sex and God in American Politics,” op. cit.

Another example: men and women, the New Right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private, in accordance with their own choice and values; the law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion. And: children, we are told, should be indoctrinated with state-mandated religion at school. For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the Book of Genesis as a scientific theory on a par with or even superior to the theory of evolution. And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children’s throats. Is this not, contrary to the Constitution, a state establishment of religion, and of a controversial, intellectual viewpoint? Not at all, says Jack Kemp. “If a prayer is said aloud,” he explains, “it need be no more than a general acknowledgment of the existence, power, authority, and love of God, the Creator.” 13 Ibid. That’s all — nothing controversial or indoctrinating about that!

And: when the students finally do leave school, after all the indoctrination, can they then be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly? No, says the New Right. Adults should not be free to write, to publish, or to read, according to their own judgment; literature should be censored by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as against obscene.

Is this a movement in behalf of Americanism and individual rights? Is it a movement consistent with the principles of the Constitution?

“The Constitution established freedom for religion,” says Mr. Kemp, “not from it” — a sentiment which is shared by President Reagan and by the whole New Right. 14 “Jack Kemp at Liberty Baptist,” Policy Review, Spring 1984. What then becomes of intellectual freedom? Are meetings such as this evening’s deprived of constitutional protection, since the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under “freedom for religion’’? And what happens when one religious sect concludes that the statements of another are subversive of true religion? Who decides which, if either, should be struck down by the standard of “freedom for religion, not from it”? Can you predict the fate of free thought, and of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” if Mr. Kemp and associates ever get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress?

What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans all over again, but without their excuse of ignorance. We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans, who live not before the founding fathers’ heroic experiment in liberty, but after it.

The New Right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American Revolution.

But, you may say, aren’t the New Rightists at least champions of property rights and capitalism, as against the economic statism of the liberals? They are not. Capitalism is the separation of state and economics, a condition that none of our current politicians or pressure groups even dreams of advocating. The New Right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare-state mixed economy created by the New Deal and its heirs; our conservatives now merely haggle on the system’s fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike. In this matter, the New Right is moved solely by the power of tradition. These men do not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism by freezing the economic status quo. And even in regard to this highly limited goal, they are disarmed and useless.

If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first drafts of the [1986] pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops, men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the New Right. The bishops recommend a giant step in the direction of socialism. They ask for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor, at home and abroad. They ask for it on a single basic ground: consistency with the teachings of Christianity.

Some of you may wonder here: “But if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don’t they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity, which makes everyone richer?” If you think about it, however, you will see that, valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it.

Can they praise the profit motive — while extolling selflessness? Can they commend the passion to own material property — while declaring that worldly possessions are not important? Can they urge men to practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning — while upholding as the human model the lilies of the field? Can they celebrate the self-assertive risk taking of the entrepreneur — while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth? Can they glorify and liberate the creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth — while elevating faith above reason? The answers are obvious. Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the New Right, no religion, by its nature, can appeal to or admire the capitalist system; not if the religion is true to itself. Nor can any religion liberate man’s power to create new wealth. If, therefore, the faithful are concerned about poverty — as the Bible demands they be — they have no alternative but to counsel a redistribution of whatever wealth already happens to have been produced. The goods, they have to say, are here. How did they get here? God, they reply, has seen to that; now let men make sure that His largesse is distributed fairly. Or, as the bishops put it: “The goods of this earth are common property and . . . men and women are summoned to faithful stewardship rather than to selfish appropriation or exploitation of what was destined for all.” 15 Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (First Draft); in Origins, NC Documentary Service, vol. 14, no. 22/23, Nov. 15, 1984, p. 344.

For further details on this point, I refer you to the bishops’ letter; given their premises, their argument is unanswerable. If, as the New Right claims, there is scriptural warrant for state control of men’s sexual activities, then there is surely much more such warrant for state control of men’s economic activities. The idea of the Bible (or the “Protestant ethic”) as the base of capitalism is ludicrous, both logically and historically.

Economically, as in all other respects, the New Right is leading us, admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents. By virtue of the movement’s essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country — and, therefore, of Communism in the world at large. When a free nation betrays its own heritage, it has no heart left, no conviction by means of which to stand up to foreign aggressors.

There was a flaw in the intellectual foundations of America from the start: the attempt to combine the Enlightenment approach in politics with the Judeo-Christian ethics. For a while, the latter element was on the defensive, muted by the eighteenth-century spirit, so that America could gain a foothold, grow to maturity, and become great. But only for a while. Thanks to Immanuel Kant, as I have discussed in my book The Ominous Parallels, the base of religion — faith and self-sacrifice — was reestablished at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, all of modern philosophy embraced collectivism, in the form of socialism, Fascism, Communism, welfare statism. By now, the distinctive ideas at the base of America have been largely forgotten or swept aside. They will not be brought back by an appeal to religion.

What then is the solution? It is not atheism as such — and I say this even though as an Objectivist I am an atheist. “Atheism” is a negative; it means not believing in God — which leaves wide open what you do believe in. It is futile to crusade merely for a negative; the Communists, too, call themselves atheists. Nor is the answer “secular humanism,” about which we often hear today. This term is used so loosely that it is practically contentless; it is compatible with a wide range of conflicting viewpoints, including, again, Communism. To combat the doctrines that are destroying our country, out-of-context terms and ideas such as these are useless. What we need is an integrated, consistent philosophy in every branch, and especially in the two most important ones: epistemology and ethics. We need a philosophy of reason and of rational self-interest, a philosophy that would once again release the power of man’s mind and the energy inherent in his pursuit of happiness. Nothing less will save America or individual rights.

There are many good people in the world who accept religion, and many of them hold some good ideas on social questions. I do not dispute that. But their religion is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem. Do I say therefore that there should only be “freedom for atheism”? No, I am not Mr. Kemp. Of course, religions must be left free; no philosophic viewpoint, right or wrong, should be interfered with by the state. I do say, however, that it is time for patriots to take a stand — to name publicly what America does depend on, and why that is not Judaism or Christianity.

There are men today who advocate freedom and who recognize what ideas lie at its base, but who then counsel “practicality.’’ It is too late, they say, to educate people philosophically; we must appeal to what they already believe; we must pretend to endorse religion on strategic grounds, even if privately we don’t.

This is a counsel of intellectual dishonesty and of utter impracticality. It is too late indeed, far too late for a strategy of deception which by its nature has to backfire and always has, because it consists of affirming and supporting the very ideas that have to be uprooted and replaced. It is time to tell people the unvarnished truth: to stand up for man’s mind and this earth, and against any version of mysticism or religion. It is time to tell people: “You must choose between unreason and America. You cannot have both. Take your pick.”

If there is to be any chance for the future, this is the only chance there is.

This essay was originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in May 1963 and later anthologized in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989).

A version was also delivered as a 28-minute radio address in May 1963.

If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and — like an axiom — used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counterrevolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions — and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.

Today, philosophy has sunk below the level of Aristotle versus Plato, down to the primitive gropings of Parmenides versus Heraclitus; whose disciples were unable to reconcile the concept of intellectual certainty with the phenomenon of change: the Eleatics, who claimed that change is illogical, that in any clash between mind and reality, reality is dispensable and, therefore, change is an illusion — versus the Heraclitean Sophists, who claimed that mind is dispensable, that knowledge is an illusion and nothing exists but change. Or: consciousness without existence versus existence without consciousness. Or: blind dogmatism versus cynical subjectivism. Or: Rationalism versus Empiricism.

Aristotle was the first man who integrated the facts of identity and change, thus solving that ancient dichotomy. Or rather, he laid the foundation and indicated the method by which a full solution could be reached. In order to resurrect that dichotomy thereafter, it was necessary to ignore and evade his works. Ever since the Renaissance, the dichotomy kept being resurrected, in one form or another, always aimed at one crucial target: the concept of identity — always leading to some alleged demonstration of the deceptiveness, the limitations, the ultimate impotence of reason.

It took several centuries of misrepresenting Aristotle to turn him into a straw man, to declare the straw man invalidated, and to release such a torrent of irrationality that it is now sweeping philosophy away and carrying us back past the pre-Socratics, past Western civilization, into the prehistorical swamps of the Orient, via Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.

Today, Aristotle is the forgotten man of philosophy. Slick young men go about droning the wearisome sophistries of the fifth century B.C., to the effect that man can know nothing, while unshaven young men go about chanting that they do know by means of their whole body from the neck down.

It is in this context that one must evaluate the significance of an unusual book appearing on such a scene — Aristotle by John Herman Randall, Jr.

Let me hasten to state that the above remarks are mine, not Professor Randall’s. He does not condemn modern philosophy as it deserves — he seems to share some of its errors. But the theme of his book is the crucial relevance and importance of Aristotle to the philosophical problems of our age. And his book is an attempt to bring Aristotle’s theories back into the light of day — of our day — from under the shambles of misrepresentation by medieval mystics and by modern Platonists.

“Indeed,” he writes, “[Aristotle’s] may well be the most passionate mind in history: it shines through every page, almost every line. His crabbed documents exhibit, not ‘cold thought,’ but the passionate search for passionless truth. For him, there is no ‘mean,’ no moderation, in intellectual excellence. The ‘theoretical life’ is not for him the life of quiet ‘contemplation,’ serene and unemotional, but the life of nous, of theoria, of intelligence, burning, immoderate, without bounds or limits.”

Indicating that the early scientists had discarded Aristotle in rebellion against his religious interpreters, Professor Randall points out that their scientific achievements had, in fact, an unacknowledged Aristotelian base and were carrying out the implications of Aristotle’s theories.

Blaming the epistemological chaos of modern science on the influence of Newton’s mechanistic philosophy of nature, he writes:

It is fascinating to speculate how, had it been possible in the seventeenth century to reconstruct rather than abandon Aristotle, we might have been saved several centuries of gross confusion and error. . . . Where we are often still groping, Aristotle is frequently clear, suggestive, and fruitful. This holds true of many of his analyses: his doctrine of natural teleology; his view of natural necessity as not simple and mechanical but hypothetical; his conception of the infinite as potential, not actual; his notion of a finite universe; his doctrine of natural place; his conception of time as not absolute, but rather a dimension, a system of measurement; his conception that place is a coordinate system, and hence relative. On countless problems, from the standpoint of our present theory, Aristotle was right, where the nineteenth-century Newtonian physicists were wrong.

Objecting to “the structureless world of Hume in which ‘anything may be followed by anything,’” Professor Randall writes:

To such a view, which he found maintained by the Megarians, Aristotle answers, No! Every process involves the operation of determinate powers. There is nothing that can become anything else whatsoever. A thing can become only what it has the specific power to become, only what it already is, in a sense, potentially. And a thing can be understood only as that kind of thing that has that kind of a specific power; while the process can be understood only as the operation, the actualization, the functioning of the powers of its subject or bearer.

To read a concise, lucid presentation of Aristotle’s system, written by a distinguished modern philosopher — written in terms of basic principles and broad fundamentals, as against the senseless “teasing” of trivia by today’s alleged thinkers — is so rare a value that it is sufficient to establish the importance of Professor Randall’s book, in spite of its flaws.

Its flaws, unfortunately, are numerous. Professor Randall describes his book as “a philosopher’s delineation of Aristotle.” Since there are many contradictory elements and many obscure passages in Aristotle’s own works (including, in some cases, the question of their authenticity), it is a philosopher’s privilege (within demonstrable limits) to decide which strands of a badly torn fabric he chooses to present as significantly “Aristotelian.” But nothing — particularly not Aristotle — is infinite and indeterminate. And while Professor Randall tries to separate his presentation from his interpretation, he does not always succeed. Some of his interpretations are questionable: some are stretched beyond the limit of the permissible.

For instance, he describes Aristotle’s approach to knowledge as follows: “Knowing is for him an obvious fact. . . . The real question, as he sees it, is, ‘In what kind of a world is knowing possible?’ What does the fact of knowing imply about our world?” This is a form of “the prior certainty of consciousness” — the notion that one can first possess knowledge and then proceed to discover what that knowledge is of, thus making the world a derivative of consciousness — a Cartesian approach which would have been inconceivable to Aristotle and which Professor Randall himself is combating throughout his book.

Most of the book’s flaws come from the same root: from Professor Randall’s inability or unwillingness to break with modern premises, methods and terminology. The perceptiveness he brings to his consideration of Aristotle’s ideas, seems to vanish whenever he attempts to equate Aristotle with modern trends. To claim, as he does, that: “In modern terms, Aristotle can be viewed as a behaviorist, an operationalist, and a contextualist” (and, later, as a “functionalist” and a “relativist”), is either inexcusable or so loosely generalized as to rob those terms of any meaning.

Granted that those terms have no specific definitions and are used, like most of today’s philosophical language, in the manner of “mobiles” which connote, rather than denote — even so, their accepted “connotations” are so anti-Aristotelian that one is forced, at times, to wonder whether Professor Randall is trying to put something over on the moderns or on Aristotle. There are passages in the book to support either hypothesis.

On the one hand, Professor Randall writes: “That we can know things as they are, that such knowledge is possible, is the fact that Aristotle is trying to explain, and not, like Kant and his followers, trying to deny and explain away.” And: “Indeed, any construing of the fact of ‘knowledge,’ whether Kantian, Hegelian, Deweyan, Positivistic, or any other, seems to be consistent and fruitful, and to avoid the impasses of barren self-contradiction, and insoluble and meaningless problems, only when it proceeds from the Aristotelian approach, and pushes Aristotle’s own analyses further . . . only, that is, in the measure that it is conducted upon an Aristotelian basis.” (Though one wonders what exactly would be left of Kant, Hegel, Dewey, or the Positivists if they were stripped of their non-Aristotelian elements.)

On the other hand, Professor Randall seems to turn Aristotle into some foggy combination of a linguistic analyst and a Heraclitean, as if language and reality could be understood as two separate, unconnected dimensions — in such passages as: “When [Aristotle] goes on to examine what is involved in ‘being’ anything . . . he is led to formulate two sets of distinctions: the one set appropriate to understanding any ‘thing’ or ousia as a subject of discourse, the other set appropriate to understanding any ‘thing’ or ousia as the outcome of a process, as the operation or functioning of powers, and ultimately as sheer functioning, activity.”

It is true that Aristotle holds the answer to Professor Randall’s “structuralism-functionalism” dichotomy and that his answer is vitally important today. But his answer eliminates that dichotomy altogether — and one cannot solve it by classifying him as a “functionalist” who believed that things are “sheer process.”

The best parts of Professor Randall’s book are Chapters VIII, IX, and XI, particularly this last. In discussing the importance of Aristotle’s biological theory and “the biological motivation of Aristotle’s thought,” he brings out an aspect of Aristotle which has been featured too seldom in recent discussions and which is much more profound than the question of Aristotle’s “functionalism”: the central place given to living entities, to the phenomenon of life, in Aristotle’s philosophy.

For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature. And consciousness is a natural attribute of certain living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action — not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension. For Aristotle, “living” and “knowing” are facts of reality; man’s mind is neither unnatural nor supernatural, but natural — and this is the root of Aristotle’s greatness, of the immeasurable distance that separates him from other thinkers.

Life — and its highest form, man’s life — is the central fact in Aristotle’s view of reality. The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle’s philosophy is “biocentric.”

This is the source of Aristotle’s intense concern with the study of living entities, the source of the enormously “pro-life” attitude that dominates his thinking. In some oddly undefined manner, Professor Randall seems to share it. This, in spite of all his contradictions, seems to be his real bond with Aristotle.

“Life is the end of living bodies,” writes Professor Randall, “since they exist for the sake of living.” And: “No kind of thing, no species is subordinated to the purposes and interests of any other kind. In biological theory, the end served by the structure of any specific kind of living thing is the good — ultimately, the ’survival’ — of that kind of thing.” And, discussing the ends and conclusions of natural processes: “Only in human life are these ends and conclusions consciously intended, only in men are purposes found. For Aristotle, even God has no purpose, only man!”

The blackest patch in this often illuminating book is Chapter XII, which deals with ethics and politics. Its contradictions are apparent even without reference to Aristotle’s text. It is astonishing to read the assertion: “Aristotle’s ethics and politics are actually his supreme achievement.” They are not, even in their original form — let alone in Professor Randall’s version, which transforms them into the ethics of pragmatism.

It is shocking to read the assertion that Aristotle is an advocate of the “welfare state.” Whatever flaws there are in Aristotle’s political theory — and there are many — he does not deserve that kind of indignity.

Professor Randall, who stresses that knowledge must rest on empirical evidence, should take cognizance of the empirical fact that throughout history the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy (particularly of his epistemology) has led in the direction of individual freedom, of man’s liberation from the power of the state — that Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States and thus of capitalism — that it is Plato and Hegel, not Aristotle, who have been the philosophical ancestors of all totalitarian and welfare states, whether Bismarck’s, Lenin’s, or Hitler’s.

An “Aristotelian statist” is a contradiction in terms — and this, perhaps, is a clue to the conflict that mars the value of Professor Randall’s book.

But if read critically, this book is of great value in the study of Aristotle’s philosophy. It is a concise and comprehensive presentation which many people need and look for, but cannot find today. It is of particular value to college students: by providing a frame of reference, a clear summary of the whole, it will help them to grasp the meaning of the issues through the fog of the fragmentary, unintelligible manner in which most courses on Aristotle are taught today.

Above all, this book is important culturally, as a step in the right direction, as a recognition of the fact that the great physician needed by our dying science of philosophy is Aristotle — that if we are to emerge from the intellectual shambles of the present, we can do it only by means of an Aristotelian approach.

“Clearly,” writes Professor Randall, “Aristotle did not say everything; though without what he first said, all words would be meaningless, and when it is forgotten they usually are.”

This article was originally published in the May 1970 issue of The Objectivist and later anthologized in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1970) and Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999).

A very dangerous notion is now being smuggled into our cultural atmosphere. It is being introduced in reverse, in a form that looks like the opposite of its actual meaning and logical consequences. The form is sympathy for criminals who claim to be motivated by political goals; the notion is the legal category of “political crimes.”

There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology.

By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.

A crime is a violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others — i.e., the recourse to violence — that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime — and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

If one keeps clearly in mind the moral-legal context (and hierarchical derivation) of any given political principle, one will not find any difficulty or contradiction in applying it to specific cases. For instance, American citizens possess the right to freedom of religion; but if some sect adopted primitive beliefs and, began to practice human sacrifices, it would be prosecuted for murder. Clearly, this is not an infringement of the sect’s religious freedom; it is the proper application of the principle that all rights are derived from the right to life and that those who violate it cannot claim its protection, i.e., cannot claim the right to violate a right.

In exactly the same way, for the same reasons, the unspeakable little drugged monstrosities who resort to violence — and who have progressed, without significant opposition, from campus sit-ins to arson to such an atrocity as mass terrorization and the bombing of public places — should be treated as the criminals they are, and not as political “dissenters.”

Morally, they are worse than the plain criminal: he, at least, does not subvert the realm of ideas; he does not posture as a champion of rights, justice and freedom. Legally, both kinds should be given the same treatment. Ideas end where a gun begins.

The moral bankruptcy of today’s liberal Establishment (including its concomitant: the erosion of the concept of individual rights) is the basic cause of the young thugs’ activities. The granting to these thugs of such titles as “political dissenters” and “idealists’’ is the major reason of their accelerating growth. The alleged economic justification of their violence — the notion that it is caused by poverty — would be inexcusably evil, if the notion were true; but it becomes grotesque in the light of the mounting evidence that the young thugs are predominantly children of the well-to-do.

There is only one doctrine that can permit this to go on: the morality of altruism. I have said that altruism is, in fact, the negation of morality. “Your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: . . . if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.” (Atlas Shrugged.) You can now see it demonstrated in practice. If such monstrous actions as bombings are regarded as “idealistic” because the actors profess to be motivated by the “welfare of others” — and the liberal journalists who proclaim this are not hooted out of their profession — then the last vestige of and pretense at morality are gone from today’s culture.

The actual motive of whoever manipulates the opinions of the dazed, scared liberals is fairly obvious: by arousing sympathy for “political” criminals, by staging protests and demanding leniency from the courts — allegedly in the name of political freedom — the  statists are establishing the precedent of political trials. Once the issue of ideology is made part of a court’s consideration, the principle is established: the government is brought into the courtroom as an arbiter of ideas. If the government assumes the power to exonerate a man on the grounds of his political ideas, it has assumed the power to prosecute and condemn him on the same grounds.

It is in Europe, under the despotism of absolute monarchies, that a legal distinction was made between political and non-political crimes. The first category consisted predominantly, not of acts of violence, but of such acts as uttering or publishing ideas that displeased the government. And, in the growing trend toward political freedom, public opinion was on the side of such offenders: they were fighting for individual rights, against the rule of force.

If and when the public opinion of a free country accepts a distinction between political and non-political criminals, it accepts the notion of political crimes, it supports the use of force in violation of rights — and the historical process takes place in reverse: the country crosses the borderline into political despotism.