Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Careers, Workplace and Religion
Ayn Rand Didn’t Understand Capitalism. Or Altruism. Or Christianity. Or Reality.

Ayn Rand Didn’t Understand Capitalism. Or Altruism. Or Christianity. Or Reality.

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 12:46 pm by Acton Institute

Ayn Rand Didn’t Understand Capitalism. Or Altruism. Or Christianity. Or Reality. 2016-01-04T12:46:10-05:00 Acton Institute

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Joe Carter

There once was a time when I was enamored by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. An émigré from the Soviet Union, the influential novelist and founder of the philosophy Objectivism had an enthusiasm for market capitalism and a hatred of communism that I found entrancing. I discovered her two major philosophical novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in my early years in college as I was beginning to wake from my enchantment with liberalism. I was instantly hooked.

Rand’s ideas were intriguing, yet she harbored sentiments that made it difficult for a young Christian to accept. She was an atheist who despised altruism and preached the “virtue of selfishness.” She believed that rational self-interest was the greatest good and sang egoism’s praises.

In retrospect, it appears obvious that any attempt to reconcile these ideas with my orthodox evangelicalism was destined to fail. Still, I thought there might be something to her philosophy and was particularly intrigued by her defense of capitalism. My understanding of our capitalist economic system was rather immature, though, and I failed to recognize that Rand had an almost complete misunderstanding of capitalism. She confused self-interest with selfishness.

Many people, of course, share this profound misunderstanding. For some peculiar reason they act as if Adam Smith’s invisible hand has the Midas touch that can alchemically transform the vice of avarice into the great goods of capitalism. Like most proponents of capitalism, Rand never explains how this magical process occurs. Instead she just accepts this sleight of hand as a matter of brute fact.

It is true, of course, that self-interest is the engine that drives capitalism. But self-interest is not the same as selfishness, at least not in the way that Rand would use the term. In her novel The Fountainhead, Rand’s protagonists are portrayed as the epitome of the capitalist intellectual hero. In fact, they rarely act like actual capitalists, choosing instead to behave like spoiled, egotistical artistes.

Consider, for example, the novel’s main character, an architect named Howard Roark. In one particularly illuminating passage, Roark is told that his job as an architect, the primary purpose of his work, is to serve his clients. Roark responds by affirming, “I don’t intend to build in order to serve or help anyone. I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”

While such egotistical bluster may make for an interesting fictional character, Roark’s attitude can hardly be considered a solid foundation for capitalism. As the libertarian economist Mark Skousen observes in a critique of Rand:

The goal of all rational entrepreneurship must be to satisfy the needs of consumers, not to ignore them! Discovering and fulfilling the needs of customers is the essence of market capitalism. Imagine how far a TV manufacturer would get if he decides to build TVs that only tune into his five favorite channels, the consumer be damned. It wouldn’t be long before he would be on the road to bankruptcy.

This leads us to one of the primary misunderstandings held by many of Rand’s admirers. Although she is widely praised for her defense of capitalism (she was famous for wearing a gold brooch in the shape of a dollar sign), she viewed it as subservient to a greater ideal:

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (“The Objectivist”, September 1971)

On this point Rand was quite mistaken. Reason, applied consistently, doesn’t lead us down a straight path to egoism, much less to capitalism. Examined closely, we would find that her entire Objectivist philosophy is founded on this simple question-begging premise. Rand claimed that it was a self-evident truth. But this requires us to believe that no one who ever came to a different conclusion was following reason where it leads. She might have no problem accepting such a conclusion—she was never one to tolerate dissent—but we don’t have sufficient justification for doing so.

This veneration of egoism also led her to consider altruism to be evil. As she explains in The Virtue of Selfishness:

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value–and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

At first glance it appears that she has built a strawman by redefining “altruism” in a way that is not commonly used. But she does have justification for her claim, for her idea of altruism is based on the ethical system of Auguste Comte and English positivists. Comte’s system, which considered that only actions that benefited others could be considered moral, was both ethical and religious. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains Comte’s thought:

Not only is the happiness to be found in living for others the supreme end of conduct, but a disinterested devotion to Humanity as a whole is the highest form of religious service. His ethical theory may be epitomized in the following propositions.

–The dominion of feeling over thought is the normative principle of human conduct, for it is the affective impulses that govern the individual and the race.

–Man is under the influence of two affective impulses, the personal or egoistic, and the social or altruistic.

–A just balance between these two is not possible, one or other must preponderate.

–The first condition of individual and social well-being is the subordination of self-love to the benevolent impulses.

–The first principle of morality, therefore, is the regulative supremacy of social sympathy over the self-regarding instincts.

To bring about the reign of altruism Comte invented a religion which substituted for God an abstraction called Humanity.

If Howard Roark was the incarnation of Rand’s egoistic ideal, then her character Ellsworth M. Toohey was the exemplar of Comte’s religion of Humanity. Toohey, the antagonist in The Fountainhead, embodied all that Rand would consider most base and unworthy in a person. His altruistic behavior and self-sacrifice is portrayed as loathsome. The reader is meant to despise him as weak and unmanly and, thanks to Rand’s powers as a novelist, we have no trouble seeing him in this way. By rejecting Toohey, we reject altruism.

Those who fail to notice the way Rand defines altruism often mistake her critique as an argument against Christian morality. This isn’t surprising when we consider that Rand herself seems to make the same error. But the Christian view of altruism is not predicated on an obligation to love others more than we love ourselves. While there may be instances where such self-sacrificial love is appropriate, it is not an absolute duty. What we are commanded to do is love others just as we love ourselves. We are to love other humans in the same way, taking into account their interests and needs. We are not to treat them, as Comte would have us, in a disinterested manner.

Rand’s views ultimately congeal into a fatally flawed philosophy. Even when stripped of its atheistic elements, Objectivism’s focus on radical individualism cuts it off from reality and causes it to wither under scrutiny. And as much as we might admire Rand’s deep-rooted hatred of collectivism, her philosophy is still just another utopian dream, a transvalued Marxism.

Ultimately, Rand’s egoism is irreconcilable with both Christianity and capitalism. In fact, since the system fails to have any true explanatory value, it’s difficult to find any reason to adopt Objectivism at all. Fortunately, we don’t have to buy into Rand’s philosophical errors in order to appreciate her fiction. We just have to keep in mind that instead of reading a “novel of ideas”, we are reading a work of fantasy.

From Acton PowerBlog.

Previous Post

December 24, 2015

Why It Takes More than a New Year's Resolution to Truly Change Yourself

Next Post

January 6, 2016 Songs of Thankfulness and Praise: A hymn about God at work in the world for #Epiphany

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Art Audio posts Bible and Work Book Review Books Budgeting Calling Common Good Community Development Conferences Discipleship Economics Entrepreneurship Ethics Faith and Family Faith and the Marketplace Faith and the Workplace faith and work History of Work and Vocation Leadership Local Church Meaning New Blogger News Prayer Relationships Seminaries Theology of Work Uncategorized Video posts Vocation Worship Resources

Select a Month April 2026 October 2025 September 2025 July 2025 April 2025 January 2025 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 May 2024 March 2024 February 2024 December 2023 November 2023 August 2023 July 2023 April 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 May 2022 April 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 June 2021 May 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 January 2020 December 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 April 2018 March 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Gospel is written by a doctor?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Mark Matthew John Luke