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FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944–1957
my theme in The Fountainhead. It has to start further back—with the
fi rst axioms of existence.” She confessed to Paterson that the effort was
much harder than she had anticipated. 30
Rand’s turn to Aristotle refl ected her sense that individualism as a
political philosophy needed to be reconstituted from the ground up.
The rise of Communism and fascism had convinced her that nineteenth-century
liberalism, as she noted in the margins of The Road
to Serfdom, “had failed.” This sense that established ideologies were
bankrupt was widely shared. Indeed the rise of totalitarianism had
triggered a crisis in liberal political theory, for it called into question
long held assumptions about human progress and rationality. As tensions
between the United States and Russia grew, intellectuals across
the political spectrum sought foundations that could bolster and support
American democracy in its battle with Soviet Communism. The
sudden popularity of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,
who emphasized the innate sinfulness of mankind, refl ected the urgent
search for meaning that characterized the postwar era. Others looked
to Aristotle, who appealed to many religious as well as secular thinkers.
Catholics had long touted the wisdom of Thomist philosophy,
proposing it as an alternative to relativism and naturalism, which they
blamed for the collapse of the West. They had a high-profi le convert in
University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, who a decade earlier
had discovered in Aristotle a resource for the development of sound
political ideas. 31 Rand too would embrace ancient philosophy as the
antidote to modern political ills.
As she began to educate herself about philosophy Rand turned to
Paterson for a durable frame of reference. In New York Paterson had
ranted against Kant, Hegel, and Marx, quoting instead Aristotle and
the dictum “A is A.” 32 Now, as she read Aristotle and Plato, Rand told
Paterson, “I think of you all the time—of what you used to say about
them,” and her fi rst notes for the project were fi lled with allusions to
Paterson’s ideas and opinions. Both Paterson and Rand rejected the idea
that man, like an animal, was controlled by instincts and subconscious
drives. Instead they envisioned human nature as rational, voluntary, and
defi ned by free will. “Man does not act to its kind by the pure instinct of
species, as other animals generally do,” Paterson wrote in one of her letters
to Rand. She also asserted that any philosophical defense of liberty
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