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252
LEGACIES
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in ethics there are only two sides to any question—the good and the
evil—so too are there only two logical sides to the political question
of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it.” 13 Describing the
origin of radical libertarianism and the new anarcho-capitalism, Jerome
Tuccille called Atlas Shrugged “the seeds of this latest eruption.” 14 Even
more tellingly, he titled his memoir of libertarian activism It Usually
Begins with Ayn Rand.
To some degree, Rand was proud of her role as an intellectual counterpoint
to the New Left. In the fi rst Objectivist published after her break
with Nathan she praised a group at Brooklyn College, the Committee
against Student Terrorism, for protesting a leftist rebellion with a leafl et
that “condemned the violence, named the philosophical issues involved,
and demonstrated that the antidote to the problem was to be found in
the works of Ayn Rand and the literature of the Objectivist philosophy.”
15 At the same time, she emphasized that students of Objectivism
“cannot be and must not attempt to be the theoreticians of the subject
they are studying.” She repeated a guideline from two years earlier: “It
is our job to tell people what Objectivism is, it is your job to tell them
that it is.” Such limited horizons did little to satisfy right-wing students,
particularly those chafi ng with enthusiasm for anarchism.
The demise of NBI, if anything, accelerated the transformation of
Objectivism into a bona fi de movement, rife with competing schools who
all cited Rand in support of their position. Anarchists were challenged
by “minarchists,” supporters of a minimal state, who closely followed
Rand’s arguments about government in “The Nature of Government,”
an essay from The Virtue of Selfi shness. In this essay Rand argued that
government performs a vital social function by “placing the retaliatory
use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively
defi ned laws” (italics in original). Governments permited individuals
to live in peace and to form long-term contracts, knowing they would
be objectively enforced. Rand was adamant that anarchism, “which is
befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom,” could not work.
To claim that man could live without a state was naïve, she insisted.
Even a society of completely rational and moral men would still require
“objective laws” and “an arbiter for honest disagreements among men.”
Nonetheless, both sides of the anarchist-minarchist debate insisted only
they understood the true implications of Rand’s political philosophy. 16
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