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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comA ROUND UNIVERSE 153was close to finishing his doctorate and increasingly certain about hisideas. 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 field, in contrast to thevoid of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism. Apparently after hisfirst meeting with Rand, Rothbard had credulously accepted her claims tooriginality. Now he discovered that “the good stuff in Ayn’s system is notAyn’s original contribution at all.” There was a whole tradition of rationalethics, 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 libertywas only superficial, Rothbard believed. A few of his disciples continuedto meet with Rand and reported back that she claimed Communistsshould be jailed. They also introduced Rand to Rothbard’s anarchism, andhis idea of privately competing courts and protective agencies that couldreplace the state. Rand responded swiftly that state action was necessaryto hold society together. For Rothbard, an anarchist who believed the stateitself was immoral, all this merely confirmed his differences with Rand.More seriously, Rothbard teased apart Rand’s system and discoveredthat it meant the very negation of individuality. Rand denied both basicinstincts and the primacy of emotion, he wrote Cornuelle. This meant,in practice, that “she actually denies all individuality whatsoever!” Randinsisted that all men had similar rational endowments, telling Rothbard,“I could be just as good in music as in economics if I applied myself,” aproposition he found doubtful. By excising emotions, asserting that menwere only “bundles of premises,” and then outlining the correct rationalpremises that each should hold, Rand made individuals interchangeable.Therefore, Rothbard concluded, in an eerily perceptive aside, “there isno reason whatever why Ayn, for example, shouldn’t sleep with Nathan.”The proof of Rothbard’s analysis lay in the Collective, a group of lifelessacolytes who frightened Rothbard in their numb devotion to Rand. 49Always a charismatic and dominant personality, Rand now beganto codify the rules of engagement. Richard Cornuelle was among thefirst to experience this treatment. He enjoyed the certainty he found inRand, the sense that he “suddenly had an answer for practically anythingthat might come up.” He was both drawn to Rand and unsettled by her.Pecking away at his Calvinist shell, Rand would ask him psychologicallyprobing questions about sexuality and his feelings. “I think she might