Ayn Rand and the civilisation of the enlightenment

Ayn Rand is not among the authors Stefano Bruno Galli usually engages with in his research. The professor at the University of Milan stated this frankly at the beginning of the fifth lecture of the John Galt School, thanking the students for giving him the opportunity to approach a thinker who is enjoying renewed attention in Italy as well. In recent years, a kind of “Rand mania” has spread: readers, scholars and academics have rediscovered in Rand’s thought an unexpected freshness and a vigor now rare in the defence of freedom.

Viewed in the full breadth of her work, Ayn Rand can hardly be described as a political writer stricto sensu. Her intellectual profile escapes the usual categories: she was a novelist and polemicist, the builder of a moral system, and a radical interpreter of capitalism and American individualism. The doctrinal foundations of Objectivism appear robust in many respects, though there are also gaps and theoretical inconsistencies, some of which emerge in biographical contradictions. For this reason, Galli invited his audience to look at Ayn Rand with clarity, aware that many intellectuals display a fracture between their lives and the values they profess.

Being free is a state of mind

The most famous example of such inconsistency remains Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The founder of modern pedagogy, author of Émile in 1762, entrusted the five children he had with Thérèse Levasseur, his companion and later wife, to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris. In Intellectuals, the British essayist Paul Johnson built a long indictment of the discrepancies of the modern intellectual class, showing how often those who claim to educate the world fail when faced with ordinary responsibilities. Ayn Rand does not entirely escape this kind of scrutiny. Her personal weaknesses existed and should be considered without reticence, because they help us understand where the historical figure diverges from the marble image constructed by her admirers.

The most authentic temperament of Ayn Rand is to be found in her novels. Her essays arrange knowledge within rigid boundaries, assigning it a prescriptive function. In her literary work, by contrast, thought breathes more naturally. Her protagonists possess a symbolic force that no treatise could have conveyed with equal effectiveness. Howard Roark, Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden and John Galt turn philosophy into action, maintaining an unshakable fidelity to their own judgment. The writer prevails over the theorist whenever individual freedom ceases to be a proposition and becomes the destiny of her characters.

To situate Ayn Rand properly, Galli suggested turning to intellectual history, a discipline developed in Anglo-American universities and grounded in a transversal approach to the history of political ideas. In Italy, the traditional term is “History of Political Doctrines”: a noble but austere expression, burdened by a theological coloring. The word “doctrine” evokes an ordered body of principles, a compact apparatus, an interpretive structure called upon to explain the State, constitutional powers and freedoms. Understood in a strict sense, it is a perspective that tends to gather around a few great names: Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Sieyès, Marx, Weber, Schmitt.

In the English- and French-speaking worlds, by contrast, the formula “political thought” prevails. It points to a heterogeneous background made up of mentalities, values, languages, collective representations and social cultures. From the postwar period onward, the history of mentalities and cultural history helped French universities dig beneath the surface of institutions. In the United States, Arthur O. Lovejoy gave decisive impetus to the history of ideas, examining the circulation of concepts across different eras, disciplines and contexts. The Journal of the History of Ideas, founded in 1940, arose from the need to understand ideas as historical organisms, subject to continual change.

A different but partly convergent path was followed by Reinhart Koselleck. Born in 1923 and marked by the experience of National Socialism, war and service in the Wehrmacht, Koselleck developed Begriffsgeschichte, the history of political concepts. In his method, words such as “crisis,” “progress,” “utopia” and “history” are semantic nuclei that pass through time and take on new functions. To study a concept means to follow its diachronic evolution, grasp its metamorphoses and understand the moment when it becomes decisive for a political community.

Applying this approach to Ayn Rand allows us to identify an aspect that has been far too underestimated: the influence exerted on her by the Enlightenment. Objectivist philosophy is usually interpreted through the prism of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution, American exile, the Cold War and anti-communism. But its deeper background belongs to the European civilisation of the Enlightenment: the centrality of reason, the challenge to superstition, confidence in the knowability of reality, and the conviction that man can free himself from tutelage through the autonomy of judgment.

Ayn Rand’s Russia, overwhelmed by the Bolshevik seizure of power, saw the proliferation of post-Marx interpretations of Marxism. Every Marxist wanted to present himself as the true heir of the master, while Marxian ideology became the ideology of the party-state. The young Alisa Rozenbaum experienced firsthand the horrors of collectivism: the expropriation of her father’s pharmacy, the subordination of the individual to the State, and the destruction of economic freedom and private life.

Galli recalled the historical sequence running from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dominated by the Republican presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Before the Great Depression of 1929, the United States went through a phase of powerful industrial development, accompanied by rising employment, growing productive capacity and a significant improvement in the average standard of living. For Rand, the America of the 1920s was a civilisation projected toward the future, far removed from the European disease of totalitarianism and the Soviet nightmare of the planned economy.

Meanwhile, Europe was being gripped by totalitarian deviations. Fascism and National Socialism would take on increasingly pervasive forms of total political mobilization. In the Soviet Union, Stalinism would reveal the demonic face of power through forced planning, the repressive apparatus, mass surveillance and figures such as Lavrentiy Beria, emblem of the regime’s police ferocity. Rand’s philosophical universe was born from the contrast between American capitalism, seen as a benevolent promise of production and freedom, and real socialism, which she regarded as the administration of fear.

After the Second World War, 1956 marked another decisive turning point. The twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev’s report inaugurated de-Stalinisation. Stalin’s death, three years earlier, had deprived the system of its supreme interpreter. Yet ideological structures can survive the disappearance of those who embodied them. Václav Havel, future president of the Czech Republic, shrewdly understood the nature of post-totalitarianism: a form of domination less spectacular than classical Stalinist terror, yet capable of infiltrating daily life through bureaucracy, conformism, linguistic censorship and the repression of dissent. Post-totalitarianism can even seem harsher than original totalitarianism, because it operates after the tragedy while preserving and normalising its essential structures.

Even under dictatorial regimes, silent forms of dissent can survive. Havel spoke of the need to “live in truth”; Václav Benda, within the milieu of Charter 77, formulated the idea of a “parallel polis,” a network of cultural spaces capable of preserving freedom in a context marked by official lies. The refounding of the political community begins in minimal places and through initiatives that power cannot fully possess.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, belongs to this same atmosphere of crisis in Western civilisation before collectivism. In it, Rand theorizes the centrality of man and the ownership of individual rights. Happiness becomes the moral objective around which human existence is organised. It is pursued through productive success within a laissez-faire capitalism founded on reason. The men of the mind - the producers and inventors - abandon a society that exploits their work and morally condemns them. The withdrawal of the entrepreneurs reveals how deeply the world depends on those who design reality.

A reference to Carlo Cattaneo could not be missing. In Notizie naturali e civili sulla Lombardia, published in 1844, the author described Lombard prosperity as the result of productive intelligence, a sense of individual risk, a spirit of self-denial and sacrifice to work. Although Cattaneo’s homo faber and Rand’s productive hero do not arise from the same tradition, they share a fundamental point: civilisation develops when individual intelligence meets the freedom to act. Man, happiness, reason, productivity: these are the words through which the semantic convoy of Objectivism unfolds.

Ayn Rand admired John Locke and his theory of the state of nature. In Locke, there are individual rights that are unavailable to the State, rights that political power must guarantee rather than create. The triad “life, liberty and property” precedes public authority and defines the limits of its legitimacy. The Lockean State is a State of reason and freedom, called upon to protect individuals from violence, not to morally direct society. This classical liberal root occupies a place of primary importance in Rand’s formation.

Alongside Locke stands eighteenth-century Europe, toward which Rand looked with particular sympathy. Through the Letters Concerning the English Nation, Voltaire depicted the image of a dynamic commercial society, marked by tolerance, an emerging bourgeoisie and fewer constraints than in continental Europe. Enlightenment culture established itself through the centrality of reason. Science, commerce, criticism of authority and emancipation from superstition became components of one and the same confidence in man.

The frontispiece of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie is an eloquent iconographic representation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Before becoming the monumental enterprise we know, the project arose from an encounter with Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. The publisher André Le Breton initially conceived it as a French translation, but the work then acquired an ambition of its own. Diderot mainly oversaw the humanistic and philosophical sections; d’Alembert guided the mathematical and scientific side.

In the frontispiece, Truth is wrapped in a veil and surrounded by a light that disperses the clouds of superstition. Behind her, the Ionic temple evokes the heritage of classical antiquity. Reason and Philosophy stand beside Truth; Religion remains subordinate to them; an allegorical figure lifts the veil that prevents reality from appearing in its clarity. It is hard to conceive of an image better suited to representing the heart of the Enlightenment: removing the veil, dispelling shadows, subjecting every authority to the judgment of the individual.

For Rand, everything must pass through reason. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had already transformed man’s relationship with nature; the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century turned that achievement into a program of intellectual liberation. Rand radicalised this inheritance until it became incompatible with every form of mysticism, collectivism and subordination of the individual to higher powers.

Her relationship with Kant was one of open hostility. The philosopher of Königsberg had defined the Enlightenment as man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, entrusting to the motto sapere aude the formula of modernity. Rand, however, saw in Kantian criticism a dangerous split between mind and reality, going so far as to call Kant one of the most dangerous thinkers in history: she attributed to him the beginning of a philosophical trajectory destined to culminate in German idealism and its political consequences.

The sequence Kant-Hegel-Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin represented, for Rand, the conceptual line through which idealist abstraction would nourish the ethical State, eventually culminating in Soviet-style communist totalitarianism. The State must never become an ethical subject. From a moral point of view, it remains an artificial construction, legitimate only within strict limits. If it confines itself to protecting rights, guaranteeing security and enabling contractual freedom, it performs a necessary function. When the State arrogates to itself the task of redeeming man, correcting society, levelling “starting conditions” and distributing public virtue, it becomes a threat. Ayn Rand’s Enlightenment leads to an unequivocal conclusion: reason liberates man only when it is removed from the State’s claim to administer his life.

Lorenzo Cianti studies Political Science and International Relations at Roma Tre University. He writes for Italy’s oldest opinion magazine L'Opinione delle Libertà, as well as for the online magazine Atlantico Quotidiano and the Mises Institute. He writes about economical, philosophical cultural and political topics. 

This article previously appeared on the website of L'Opinione https://opinione.it/politica/2026/05/11/lorenzo-cianti-ayn-rand-e-la-civilta-del-lumi/