 Yesterday I gave you a fairly highly prepared talk because I felt it was important to try to condense what Objectivism was and what its intellectual influence was. This morning it will be somewhat more informal and I want to leave quite a bit of time for discussion. Let me start with a few caveats. I believe in the brochure this was described as a talk about the Objectivist movement and my place in it. This makes me intensely uncomfortable. I am somewhat diffident about assigning any place to myself. I don't think that's my business to do. I will have to let the marketplace of ideas or history, if that's not too grand a way of putting it, decide that. What I will talk about are what I think some of the things that movement has to do, what some of its goals should be and as it happens these are goals of my organization so it will give me a chance to talk about the Institute for Objectivist Studies. Also I feel, I always feel a little awkward talking in public about the Objectivist movement because it has been a rather small movement and there have been many of the internal goings on have the character of family squabbles. I don't enjoy airing dirty laundry or engaging in name calling or talking about individuals. Speaking as I am to a European audience I feel especially awkward about this because I imagine that from the perspective of a transatlantic perspective these things look even smaller than they actually are in the U.S. And I must say, particularly since we have people here from Eastern Europe, I imagine that for people who have just escaped from hell many of the things I'm going to talk about will seem especially petty. So I'm not going to dwell on them but I think it might gather it is of interest and I think rightly so. To know something about how the Objectivist ideas emerged and were organized as a movement perhaps it will tell us something about the nature of movements in general. And also I would like to talk about what I see as the future of the movement. I've always enjoyed talking about the future. As a philosopher I feel unsafe or ground when I'm not bound to historical fact. So, but I do think it's some interesting questions about how intellectual movements, intellectual life can be organized. But as I say let me start with a brief kind of review of what the Objectivist movement is and has been. I ran published her major work, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. I would say before that there was no Objectivist movement because there was no such thing as Objectivism. In the sense of an organized systematic philosophy that had any kind of public identity. During the 30s and 40s, Ayn Rand was very active as a writer and to some extent as a political speaker and activist. She published her first novel We The Living in, I believe it was 1936. It was published in England and then in America. At that time partly as a result of her book which was a very stinging portrayal of life under the communist system. Which was published at a time that we in America referred to as the red decade when so many intellectuals were communist or fellow travelers. Partly as a result of this she came into contact with a number of the other thinkers in the United States who opposed the communist system and but perhaps equally importantly imposed the drift toward a socialist state in the United States. The Roosevelt era, the New Deal. Ayn Rand worked on the campaign in 1940 of Wendell Wilkie who ran against Roosevelt and she did so because she felt that the New Deal was destroying what was left of American freedom. She published The Fountainhead as I described yesterday in 1943 and this brought her even greater fame and again it furthered her contacts and work with conservative spokesmen. At that time there was no real distinction between conservatism and libertarianism. The concept of libertarianism it really had not emerged. There were just people who favored free enterprise were opposed to communism. At the time Ayn Rand was clear in her own mind that her ground for opposition was quite different from that of some of the people she was working with but it had not been developed out into a systematic philosophy. And The Fountainhead itself was not really a political novel although it had political implications. It was much more a personal story about an individual creator and the meaning of individuality and individualism in an individual person's life rather than in a society at large. But with the publication of Atlas she had developed a systematic philosophy touching on all the major areas of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics as well as political philosophy. The novel was overtly political that is it was a novel about the decay of a political system. It was a kind of anti-utopia novel on a large scale. And at the same time Ayn Rand identified herself as a non-conservative. That is as someone who advocated freedom, capitalism, individualism on grounds other than religion or tradition and became a very vocal critic of conservatism. She had a falling out with William Buckley, the conservative founder of the National Review, and her book was really trashed in Buckley's magazine. I won't repeat some of the things that were said about it but it was very much below the belt sort of review. That was the point at which the objective is movement I think can be said to have begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her work attracted many readers who not only enjoyed the novel and took something from it personally but wanted to be involved in what they saw as a potential for changing the world, changing the culture and the political system by means of these new ideas. In the early 1960s Nathaniel Brandon who was a close friend and as we now know something more of Ayn Rand's founded the Nathaniel Brandon Institute in New York City which began offering lectures and courses and social occasions. It became a mini-university, a free university in the proper sense. That is the non-leftist sense. In New York City and thousands of people over the years took courses either in New York City or by a system that I, as far as I know Brandon invented of, of tape, sending tapes around the country for groups to listen to. There was a great spirit of a new age dawning during this time. It was a great positive spirit that these ideas were so good, so right, and had been put so well and persuasively in Atlas Shrugged and in the non-fiction essays that Ayn Rand was writing that it wouldn't take long for them to sweep the country, change the culture and bring back capitalism and the gold standard. Many people lost money investing in gold. The movement acquired its name, Objectivism, and it became the subject of a great deal of media attention. Reporters were noted the phenomenon of Ayn Rand's novels sparking so much interest among students, especially college students. There were groups on many of the campuses. Ayn Rand herself did a great deal of speaking on college campuses. And so as I say, there was a great spirit of a new age dawning. At the same time there were problems. The kinds of problems I think that are not really endemic to Objectivism, and as I was suggesting yesterday in answer to one of the questions, problems to which the content of Objectivism as a philosophy I think holds the cure, so that to some extent these things over time could be expected to be self-correcting and I think they are in now in the process of being corrected. The problems are probably not unknown to you, so I won't dwell on them, but they include such things as a tendency toward rigidity and closure to new ideas. The sense that this was the new truth and it was the whole truth. I've always felt it's important to draw a distinction in my mind between subscribing to a philosophy in the sense of believing that it is wholly true and subscribing to a philosophy in the sense of believing that it is the whole truth. And I think that distinction is a mark of the difference between having a rational systematic philosophy in one hand and having a religion or a dogma on the other hand. It's a tremendous danger sign when any movement takes the attitude we have nothing to learn from anyone else because what that really means is we have nothing to learn, it's all known now. Another unfortunate feature was a concern about purity, ideological purity. Again, this is nothing new. Every movement in intellectual movement in history has run into this and it's been a much more virulent problem on the left I would say than on the right. And on the right it's not limited to objectivism. All of you who have been around libertarian circles know that there are many gurus who are just as concerned with ideological purity as objectivists ever were. But it is an unfortunate fact and it was present there in the movement. There was a certain tendency to turn the truths of the philosophy, the principles of the philosophy into dogmas, into formulas. And a certain lockstep kind of thinking in which it was one ceased to expect discussion and debate except on marginal issues over interpretation. There was a phenomenon I sometimes joke that at times Ein Rand would have a new insight or one of the other founders would have a new insight and then thousands of objectivists would have to be recalled for service work on their beliefs. But there was some of that. Another, and this I think was extremely unfortunate, a tendency to identify the philosophy with the people who led it and to identify the future and the interests of the cause of the ideas with the interests of the individual leaders with Ein Rand and her inner circle. So then anything that the way to promote objectivism had to be to promote her or her ideas. People were roundly criticized, people who went out into an academic world or the political world of journalism espousing some of the new ideas that they had learned. And that was fine. But if you fail to cite Ein Rand, it was regarded as a very large black mark by many people. And if you came back and said, well, look, just by the standards of this profession or the standards of academic scholarship here, it wasn't appropriate to cite it. I was using an idea, but it was too amorphous to cite. It was often argued, well, you should have cited it anyway. You should have gone out of your way because after all, the best thing we can do, the only real thing we can do is to get her name into print and in the public. So as I said, there was this aspect of identifying the interests of the ideas of the people. And finally, as part and parcel of this, a certain spirit of authoritarianism in which people felt not free to question and challenge ideas for fear of being drummed out, not free to express some of the artistic preferences that were unusual, let's say for objective, it's not the standard kinds of aesthetic preferences. People felt sometimes very intimidated about saying they liked this or that, artists whom Ein Rand didn't like. But all of these were problems, I think, that were, first of all, as much the result of the kind of people who were associated with Ein Rand and attracted to the movement as they were her problems. In fact, I think she played, was not really the primary source of them. And I should also say that these problems were just that. They were problems on a movement that did a great deal of good, invented a number of new ways of getting ideas out to the public, and was a very fertile period for the development of the Objectivist philosophy. Virtually all of Ein Rand's nonfiction writings were done at this time in the Objectivist newsletter, the Objectivist magazine, and then the Ein Rand letter in her speeches at Fort Hall Forum in Boston, where she spoke every year. So we owe to this period a great deal of the intellectual development of the movement and also the political, activist, practical level of organization. At the end of the 60s, as I'm sure many of you know, there was a falling out between Brandon and Ein Rand. The Objectivist movement split into warring camps, people on opposite sides stopped speaking to each other. Many people simply threw up their hands and left the movement in disillusionment. And I think in a sense the movement, the internal movement of Objectivism, the movement of people who call themselves Objectivists has never really recovered. Perhaps it should not have recovered. Perhaps it was not fully healthy to have been that tightly organized, but although it did to some extent in the 1980s recover a bit. In the 1970s were a fallow period, virtually nothing happened. Ein Rand continued to write. The people associated with her continued to write and to deal with each other as friends or as colleagues in various individual pursuits, but there was no really organized vehicle. No institute, no association other than Ein Rand's publication, Ein Rand Letter, which published only her own writings. There was no publication. It was also a very politically disappointing period in the United States and I believe the same can be said of Europe. It was a period when the broader free market movement was developing intellectually, but had not reached the political level yet and had very much influence. And so in the United States we were in the unhappy position of accepting as our warriors people like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, pragmatists of the worst kind. And I think many of us who were Objectivists at the time remembering the spirit of a new age at an earlier time felt, and this is a great line from one of Don Henley's songs. I think it's very clever, felt that the new age is dawning on fewer than expected. We wondered what happened. In the 1980s there was to some extent a rebirth of the organized Objectivist movement. Something called the Jefferson School was begun in 1983. This was a summer conference which continues to meet every other year in San Diego. It's organized by George Reisman, an economist, and Edith Packer, his wife who is a psychotherapist. And it was a chance for the intellectuals who during the preceding ten years had developed their ideas and moved into academic life to come and lecture and for people to gather together again. The INRAN Institute was formed in 1985. This was an organization that was formed after INRAN's death to promote her ideas and focus concentrated on getting her ideas across to students, high school students and college students. Book services sprang up, there were several newsletters. And there was also, I believe, a certain spirit of renewal and openness. At least I thought at the time, it turns out I was partly mistaken in this, but not wholly mistaken. There was a spirit of the doctrinaire, somewhat dogmatic, closed aspect of the movement in the 60s had been a mistake and that we wouldn't do it again. I'm sure I remember now that the word tolerance was often used in a positive sense, on occasion anyway. There was a great deal of talk about encouraging spontaneity. There was a recognition that many of the attitudes and policies of the movement at an earlier time had encouraged repression, psychologically, the spirit of repression. And that was something that we had to overcome. It was a great deal of concern for individuality, that people who accepted the same philosophy didn't have to all to be friends. They could have friends who didn't subscribe to the philosophy and they didn't all have to wear the same clothes or like the same movies. And they didn't even have to like the things INRAN liked. The great symbol of this was, INRAN had one point, I remember, commented on the kind of dancing that was introduced in the 60s, rock and roll dancing as jerk and moan dancing. And it was a sign of liberation, I think, at some of these conferences too, when people dragged out their rock and roll music and got on the floor and jerked and moaned for a while. However, this was a, turns out, only a partial reform, which is from my point of view. In 1986, Barbara Brandon published her biography of INRAN, which I'm sure many of you have read, a biography which was written by someone who knew INRAN intimately over a period of years, was basically, as far as I can see, having read the book, was basically an admiring biography. Indeed, by the standards of contemporary biography, it would, by many intellectuals, be considered a shamelessly admiring biography. But was critical of many aspects of the Objectivist movement and also of INRAN herself. And also told a story of an affair which apparently had been kept secret between INRAN and Nathaniel Brandon over those many years, an affair which in retrospect did seem to explain an awful lot of the animosity looking back on that time. Well, this was a real crisis because there were people who could accept this and people who couldn't. And it was the source of the beginning of my own difficulties with the other leaders of the movement. There was, for a long time, what I considered to be stonewalling about admitting the truth, the basic truth of the events told by Barbara Brandon. There were many bizarre arguments invented to, at first, to argue that this was, this had no testimonial credibility, whatever. It's now everyone admits that it was true of this affair. But many people regarded this book as a work of malice because it criticized INRAN in the way that it did. I did not feel that way. I didn't agree with all of it by any means. And I thought some of the points were not well substantiated, but I thought it was a pretty fair shot. At the same time, here I have to continue speaking about myself because this most recent split did involve me. At the same time, it seemed to me that there had been, there was a change of foot in the libertarian movement. It's early days, as I think I was saying yesterday, there were a great, I think there were great many problems with it and a great many things that made me, along with most other objectivists, want to keep our distance from it. For that reason and also because I was, during the 70s and early 80s, concerned with my own philosophical writing, I didn't have any involvement really. But I was writing political commentary and in the course of that I was constantly speaking to free market oriented people. At the Cato Institute, at the Institute for Humane Studies, at other public policy groups that were springing up like mushrooms. People who could give me good journalistic information on topics I needed to write about. When Reagan got into power, I found that I could find almost any piece of information I wanted by calling around in the government because the government was being infiltrated by free market economists at the lower levels. But when you're a journalist, you know how to get to those people. And so I began to sense that, A, there was a movement away from the idea that political change would come solely by activist electioneering, trying to get people elected. A lot of people were losing interest in the libertarian party per se, not because they were losing interest in libertarianism, but because they were seeing that you had to work at many different levels and change ideas and change policies and incentives of a kind that are not amenable to direct election. And also, I think there was very much a renewed appreciation for Ayn Rand in particular and for the role and importance of philosophy in general. I began to hear people telling me, you know, for 10 years I've been making economic arguments and they're all valid, but they just won't work. We've got to make a moral case. And, you know, Ayn Rand really had it right. I began hearing this over and over again from people who were familiar with objectivism, were part of that much wider movement of people who never attended NBI lectures or never attended more than one, but who were deeply influenced by the novels, by the ideas, who had been touched and changed by them. And these were people who had gone off and developed careers in law, journalism, economics, or whatever. And we're now coming back to Ayn Rand and saying, well, this is good. So I felt, fair enough, I'm suddenly prepared to meet people halfway and I began doing some speaking to libertarian groups. And it turned out somewhat to my surprise that this was also, like the Brandon book, a cause for vilification. A cause of great antipathy on the part of some of the other leaders of the objectivist movement. It seemed to me, it seems to me ironic that at the, just as I think the libertarian movement was getting back on its feet and becoming a much more solid intellectual movement, a major, what is now considered a major work in the objectivist movement, a work by Peter Schwartz called libertarianism, came out which trashed the entire movement and it seems to me tried to accuse, engage in guilt by association, accusing everyone in the movement of the sins committed by a relatively, at that time by then were relatively few and flaky people. It reminds me of the definition of fanaticism, of a fanatica, someone who redoubles his effort when he has lost sight of his goal. Much of this would have been very timely ten years earlier but was beside the point and unfair at the time it came out. At any rate, this led over time to a parting of the company between me and many of the other leaders. And not just me, there were some of the other intellectuals who had been active in speaking at objectivist conferences came with me. We founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies and this was a year and a half ago finally, we founded this which is now a organization based in New York which is in the business of promoting the study in development of objectivism. I'd like to talk a little bit about its goals by talking about what I see as a future of the movement because I think the goals of the organization are precisely to foster the movement and so I've had to do quite a bit of thinking about what the movement needs in the future if it's going to succeed. And here let me say I think there is a fundamental problem that arises for any kind of intellectual movement any kind of organization within an intellectual movement. It's a conflict between the integrity of the ideas and the independence of the individual people. If you're going to have a movement to promote certain ideas to try to get those ideas accepted and developed further you do have to take some care that it's those ideas that are being promoted not other ideas. You cannot open your doors totally to any idea that comes along and says well that's fine. If you do then there's nothing left you have no content left. If you're not, it's the old law of, in philosophy there's a, Lazarus Spinoza came up with a statement all determination is by negation. That is to have an identity to be something is at the same time not to be something else and this holds for ideas. To believe A you really do have to say not A is false. For a philosophy it's important to preserve some kind of integrity of the ideas. It's also important to preserve certain intellectual standards. The intellectual world has developed very standards of rigor, clarity, originality and if you're promoting, particularly promoting a new set of ideas you want to try to meet the highest standards because you've got an uphill battle to fight. You want the best exponents, the clearest, most logical, most knowledgeable exponents and that means choices. Saying you're in or you're out. But on the other hand, a movement, particularly a movement of individualists cannot be organized in any authoritarian fashion and it can't be organized in terms of dogmas. Individuals who are going to participate must be free to understand the ideas on their own which means, inevitably, as part of the process of understanding, asking hard questions, playing devil's advocate, exploring connections with new ideas even with other non-objectivist ideas even if they turn out to see that those connections can't be sustained. Learning is a process in which, learning, like discovery I would say, is a process in which there are no holds barred. You do anything that works and you sift it out later. But any kind of constraint or demand that you not consider this, not read that, that this is not an objectivist idea or a rhetoric, this is death to independent thinking. This is a conflict then between the integrity of the ideas and the independence of people. It's a problem that has arisen whenever intellectuals have expounded any view. It arose for Marxism, for Freudianism, for pragmatism even so loose and soft-boiled the philosophy of pragmatism had this problem between William James and Charles Sanders Purse and we're not speaking to each other. My way of approaching it is to think that it's important to distinguish a movement from an organization. If a movement is so small that a single organization can dominate it or represent it, it really shouldn't be called a movement. It's just an organization. I think objectivism is past that point. I think it is an idea that has reached thousands of people and is going to have to be promoted by not thousands but at least numerous different organizations. An organization will organize itself for a specific purpose and define its standards and will commit itself to pursuing those purposes as best it can in accordance with the standards but have to recognize that there are other organizations pursuing ideas within the same movement and not try to claim hegemony. The only cases in which an entire broad-based movement I think has been represented by a single institution are either religious, as in the Catholic Church, or totalitarian, where typically you have a party that represents the ideology that I'll say on what the party line is. But neither of these is a very appealing model for secular individualists. So, I've tried to define as specific a purpose for the Institute for Objective Studies as I can. Let me just say a few words briefly about what the purposes are. One of them is the intellectual development of objectivism and the communication of it in the academic intellectual world which includes work with graduate students training them in the philosophy and helping them to enter the academic world. I think that objectivism is the only systematic, fully integrated philosophy in the classical liberal camp. And I think it's important to develop this philosophy. Not everyone who is a classical liberal is an objectivist or would want to consider himself an objectivist. That's certainly true. But I don't think there is any alternative philosophy that is as well worked out and as widely known as objectivism. Hayek's philosophy I think is a rival in terms of its state of development but it's not, in many ways, very idiosyncratic to Hayek. But the objectivist philosophy, in my view, is very far from being completed. I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about the completion of a philosophy. But certainly this one isn't. There are many questions that have not been addressed or resolved. Both questions of detail of the kind that scholars are concerned with and questions of application of the kind that other people are concerned with, like what are the implications of the objectivist ethics for families or how do we integrate it with some of the new interesting ideas in psychology, what are bearing on legal problems and so forth. All of these things need to be developed and worked out. Secondly, I think it's important to try to get objectivist ideas out to as wide an audience as possible. The objectivist philosophy, the theory of how history moves is that ideas have to change before you have any long-term enduring change in an economy or political system. You have to have a society in which people largely subscribe to certain values. Not in a religious sense, but in a broad kind of sense for which the best model in my mind is the Enlightenment. When you had something that was broadly speaking a movement and was considered by the people at the time to be a movement of ideas, people identified themselves as of the Enlightenment. But it was broadly defined in terms of certain key values, such as reason and the belief in first-hand understanding and individual rights and so on and so forth. I believe in the United States and I imagine this is true in Europe as well, that there are a large number of people who are still basically Enlightenment people. This includes most libertarians. I think it includes a lot of modern contemporary welfare state liberals who are wrong politically but who have some kind of connection or are reachable on the basis of certain basic values. I think that the act of trying to get up to them and convince them is an important one. In this connection I'm all in favor of the widest possible cooperation with the libertarian or the classical liberal movement. I always insist that I'm an objectivist and I will always argue for the truth of objectivism. So I'm not a relativist on that sense and I don't believe that you can, over the long run, organize a purely political movement. I think it always has to be rooted in some sense of values. But I think that there are many people out there who are open to those values and also have something to teach me and objectivist about aspects of human life that maybe we haven't thought about enough. So I'm now operating on the assumption that people that I come across are innocent until proven guilty. Some do prove themselves guilty but it's much fewer than my former colleagues used to imagine. Finally, there are many people who do call themselves objectivists and for whom objectivism is both a guide to life, not only in politics but in their personal relationships, their work, their families and also an intellectual structure that they use to integrate their understanding of the world. And we are in business also to serve their interests, to have conferences, lectures and publications that deal with the issues they're concerned with and allow them to discuss and debate many of the applications of objectivism to the issues that they're concerned with. Now I have brought brochures for my organization which I've put up front and a number of you have expressed an interest in finding out more about us and getting on our mailing list. So please feel free to take one. If you would like me to add you to our mailing list please let me know if you've given me your cards. I have a pad of paper there if you're welcome to leave me your name and address and I'll make sure you get information. We have a journal, a newsletter called The Journal which goes out to our members which contains information about what we're doing and also some of the some excerpts from talks and conferences that we sponsor that you might be interested in as well. So let me end there and thank you all for hearing me out and I'd be happy to take any questions.