Reviews for The contested legacy of Ayn Rand

The average rating for The contested legacy of Ayn Rand based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-05 00:00:00 Ryan McCannell Also read way back in high school. An excellent book. It emerged out of the aftermath between the split between Peikoff/ARI and Kelley/TAS in the Objectivist movement, but it goes far beyond that and is of broad interest to anyone who is interested in trying to reconcile respect for objective truth and moral judgment with the importance of toleration. Far too few people (see: the social justice left and many of their right-wing opponents, as well) have internalized how and why to tolerate others who disagree with them not just on issues they consider unimportant but on the most vital moral questions. It also contains some interesting perspectives on the proper assignment of blame to intellectuals for the crimes of regimes which they in some sense "paved the way for" (Kelley mitigates some of Rand and Peikoff's hyberbole here). And it has a good passage on the "direct" vs. "indirect" consequences of ideas: Only the direct effects of an idea are immediately implied by its content, and it is only these effects that exponents of the idea can be said to be advocating. The indirect effects occur because the idea is false. To grasp that such effects do or would follow from implementing the idea, one must first grasp that the idea is false. Until an exponent is prepared to abandon his idea as false, in other words, we cannot expect him to accept our assertion that his ideas have destructive consequences. In attributing such consequences to the idea, we are relying on our own opposing philosophical views. Until he is persuaded of the truth of our views, he will properly reject the attribution of the consequences to his ideas, and will reject as unfair the claim that he advocates those consequences, even implicitly. Objectivists should be especially sensitive to this point. All of us have heard the accusation that we are fascists, and felt that the charge was a preposterous misinterpretation. The real problem is that the accusers are reading into our defense of egoism their own assumption that egoism involves the sacrifice of others to self and thus the glorification of power. If that assumption were true, then our philosophy would indeed have bad effects. But they would be indirect effects, and our critics would still have to acknowledge that we do not advocate the pursuit of power as such. Fairness requires that we draw the same distinction when we criticize other views.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-06-15 00:00:00 Gerald Huston The Ayn Rand Lexicon can be a great resource. Now it is available for free at