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LOVE IS EXCEPTION MAKING 219
the very idea of it infuriated Rand. But some students saw anarchism as
the logical next step after Objectivism. Others, infatuated with Rand’s
idea of a capitalist utopia, hatched elaborate plans for a new libertarian
Atlantis. A truly free market society could be founded in uninhabited
lands or even established on offshore fl oating platforms, they believed.
Rand found these schemes ludicrous.
She was more troubled by the New Left. Leftist campus activism had
started small, with a few dedicated students protesting against mandatory
anti-Communist loyalty oaths for faculty. It gathered steam in tandem
with the Civil Rights movement. Soon the locus of concern shifted
to students themselves, their rights on campus, their place within the
university structure. Later the Vietnam War and the draft would become
central issues. Rand made her clearest statement against the New Left in
a 1965 essay directed at UC Berkeley’s Free Speech movement, “Cashing
In: The Student Rebellion.” Characteristically, she blamed Berkeley’s
troubles on modern philosophy. According to her, “the man most
responsible for the present state of the world” was Immanuel Kant,
whom she identifi ed as the spiritual “father” of Berkeley’s student rebel
leader, Mario Savio. Rand’s invocation of the villainous Kant was one
aspect of Objectivism’s kooky side. Yet it was also a source of its appeal,
for the demonization of Kant spoke to Objectivism’s earnest intellectualism
and deep reverence for the power of ideas.
Rand’s focus on the philosophical roots of the campus disturbances
also highlighted a basic theoretical difference between left and right.
Unlike their counterparts on the left, Objectivists saw the problems of
society in entirely abstract terms. The left certainly had theorists analogous
to Rand, namely Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre. But students
on the left tended to see injustice as fi rmly embedded in the material
world, be it racism, sexism, militarism, or class oppression. Conversely,
contrast Rand and her followers identifi ed the ills of the world in purely
philosophical terms. This was a tendency that permeated the right
more broadly. Conservatives had long believed that “ideas have consequences,”
as the title of Richard Weaver’s 1948 book put it. Similarly, in
The Conscience of a Conservative Barry Goldwater identifi ed a critical distinction
between left and right: “Conservatives take account of the whole
man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s
nature. . . . In the name of a concern for ‘human beings’ [liberals] regard
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