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A ROUND UNIVERSE 153
was close to fi nishing his doctorate and increasingly certain about his
ideas. He explained to Richard Cornuelle, “my position—and yours too,
I bet—is not really the same as hers at all.” The strength of Rand’s system,
he argued, was that it treated ethics as a serious fi eld, in contrast to the
void of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism. Apparently after his
fi rst meeting with Rand, Rothbard had credulously accepted her claims to
originality. Now he discovered that “the good stuff in Ayn’s system is not
Ayn’s original contribution at all.” There was a whole tradition of rational
ethics, and “Ayn is not the sole source and owner of the rational tradition,
nor even the sole heir to Aristotle.” 48 Moreover, Rand’s interest in liberty
was only superfi cial, Rothbard believed. A few of his disciples continued
to meet with Rand and reported back that she claimed Communists
should be jailed. They also introduced Rand to Rothbard’s anarchism, and
his idea of privately competing courts and protective agencies that could
replace the state. Rand responded swiftly that state action was necessary
to hold society together. For Rothbard, an anarchist who believed the state
itself was immoral, all this merely confi rmed his differences with Rand.
More seriously, Rothbard teased apart Rand’s system and discovered
that it meant the very negation of individuality. Rand denied both basic
instincts and the primacy of emotion, he wrote Cornuelle. This meant,
in practice, that “she actually denies all individuality whatsoever!” Rand
insisted that all men had similar rational endowments, telling Rothbard,
“I could be just as good in music as in economics if I applied myself,” a
proposition he found doubtful. By excising emotions, asserting that men
were only “bundles of premises,” and then outlining the correct rational
premises that each should hold, Rand made individuals interchangeable.
Therefore, Rothbard concluded, in an eerily perceptive aside, “there is
no reason whatever why Ayn, for example, shouldn’t sleep with Nathan.”
The proof of Rothbard’s analysis lay in the Collective, a group of lifeless
acolytes who frightened Rothbard in their numb devotion to Rand. 49
Always a charismatic and dominant personality, Rand now began
to codify the rules of engagement. Richard Cornuelle was among the
fi rst to experience this treatment. He enjoyed the certainty he found in
Rand, the sense that he “suddenly had an answer for practically anything
that might come up.” He was both drawn to Rand and unsettled by her.
Pecking away at his Calvinist shell, Rand would ask him psychologically
probing questions about sexuality and his feelings. “I think she might
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