Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com112FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944–1957my theme in The Fountainhead. It has to start further back—with thefirst axioms of existence.” She confessed to Paterson that the effort wasmuch harder than she had anticipated. 30Rand’s turn to Aristotle reflected her sense that individualism as apolitical philosophy needed to be reconstituted from the ground up.The rise of Communism and fascism had convinced her that nineteenth-centuryliberalism, as she noted in the margins of The Roadto Serfdom, “had failed.” This sense that established ideologies werebankrupt was widely shared. Indeed the rise of totalitarianism hadtriggered a crisis in liberal political theory, for it called into questionlong held assumptions about human progress and rationality. As tensionsbetween the United States and Russia grew, intellectuals acrossthe political spectrum sought foundations that could bolster and supportAmerican democracy in its battle with Soviet Communism. Thesudden popularity of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,who emphasized the innate sinfulness of mankind, reflected the urgentsearch for meaning that characterized the postwar era. Others lookedto 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 theyblamed for the collapse of the West. They had a high-profile convert inUniversity of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, who a decade earlierhad discovered in Aristotle a resource for the development of soundpolitical ideas. 31 Rand too would embrace ancient philosophy as theantidote to modern political ills.As she began to educate herself about philosophy Rand turned toPaterson for a durable frame of reference. In New York Paterson hadranted against Kant, Hegel, and Marx, quoting instead Aristotle andthe dictum “A is A.” 32 Now, as she read Aristotle and Plato, Rand toldPaterson, “I think of you all the time—of what you used to say aboutthem,” and her first notes for the project were filled with allusions toPaterson’s ideas and opinions. Both Paterson and Rand rejected the ideathat man, like an animal, was controlled by instincts and subconsciousdrives. Instead they envisioned human nature as rational, voluntary, anddefined by free will. “Man does not act to its kind by the pure instinct ofspecies, as other animals generally do,” Paterson wrote in one of her lettersto Rand. She also asserted that any philosophical defense of liberty