Preface

This book is for those who want the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals.

It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.

The full system is implicit in these excerpts (particularly in Galt’s speech), but its fundamentals are indicated only in the widest terms and require a detailed, systematic presentation in a philosophical treatise. I am working on such a treatise at present; it will deal predominantly with the issue which is barely touched upon in Galt’s speech: epistemology, and will present a new theory of the nature, source and validation of concepts. This work will require several years; until then, I offer the present book as a lead or a summary for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence. They may regard it as a basic outline; it will give them the guidance they need, but only if they think through and understand the exact meaning and the full implications of these excerpts. I am often asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher.

The answer is: both. In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. This involves another choice: whether his work is his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or whether he originates a philosophical framework of his own. I did the second.

That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term. For those who may be interested in the chronological development of my thinking, I have included excerpts from all four of my novels. They may observe the progression from a political theme in We the Living to a metaphysical theme in Atlas Shrugged.

These excerpts are necessarily condensed summaries, because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means of the events of the story. The events are the concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations. When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I do not mean to imply that my full system is still to be defined or discovered; I had to define it before I could start writing Atlas Shrugged. Galt’s speech is its briefest summary. Until I complete the presentation of my philosophy in a fully detailed form, this present book may serve as an outline or a program or a manifesto. For reasons which are made clear in the following pages, the name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.

—AYN RAND

October, 1960