Celebrated Russian-born philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand possessed a deep love and appreciation for the United States and its foundational principles.
Her incredible admiration of America bubbles enthusiastically in her own words and in the analysis of leading scholars.
“She believed what the Founding Fathers achieved was pretty close to perfection,” Yaron Brook, chair of the California-based Ayn Rand Institute, told Fox News Digital.
But it chimed in at 562,000 words and 1,168 pages in its original printing — only slightly shorter than “War and Peace,” the historic gold standard of lengthy novel narrative.
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being” — Ayn Rand
A member of the National Guard is seen reading “Atlas Shrugged” in the Capitol Visitor Center while the House debated an article of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2021. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being,” Rand wrote in the “Atlas Shrugged” appendix, “with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
Here are five ways Rand displayed her love of the United States and had faith in it as the best hope for humankind.
1. She grasped and proselytized the power of the Declaration of Independence
“The Declaration of Independence,” Rand said in a 1976 bicentennial lecture in Boston, “is probably the greatest document in human history, both philosophically and literarily.”
It’s a perspective that’s been lost to simplistic academics today who never knew world without the virtues the founders carved from the darkness of the human experience.
This undated engraving shows the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Philip Livingston and Roger Sherman, was approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. (AP Photo)
The concept of individual rights was “so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully. And 200 years have not been enough for other countries to understand it,” she wrote.
“But this is the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience,” she also wrote.
2. Rand fled totalitarianism overseas and prospered in America
The groundbreaking thinker was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905.
She flourished with her mind freed in the United States.
“Ayn Rand believed what the Founding Fathers achieved was pretty close to perfection.” — Yaron Brook
3. Like the Founding Fathers, Rand was an advocate of reason
The Founding Fathers supplanted the mysticism of the human experience and, building upon the known reason of the era, became the first group in history to apply reason to widespread political practice.
A woman holds a first edition copy of “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand borrowed in 1983 from the San Francisco Public Library on Dec. 18, 2016. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
“Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem,” Rand observed.
“It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one’s thinking — the right to live by one’s own independent judgment.”
“It liberates the best within each of us — our reason … It is a rational philosophy consonant with the original, individualist American vision of society.”
4. Rand believed individual initiative and limited government fueled the common good
“In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on Earth,” Rand wrote in “For the New Intellectual.”
“The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.” — Ayn Rand
“The right to the pursuit of happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own, private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement,” wrote Rand.
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“Each individual is the sole and final judge in this choice. A man’s happiness cannot be prescribed to him by another man or by any number of other men.”
She enthusiastically embraced their vision.
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Rand wrote powerfully of America: “I can say, not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots — that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”