"Objectivism" by Ayn Rand,1967

Ayn Rand,was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher,playwright, and screenwriter.
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She is known for her two best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.
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Born and educated in Russia, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935-1936. She first achieved fame with her novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943,which in 1957 was followed by her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged.
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Rand's political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individual rights (including property rights) and laissez-faire capitalism, enforced by a constitutionally-limited government.
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She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism,including fascism, communism, socialism, and the welfare state,and promoted ethical egoism while condemning altruism.
She considered reason to be the only means of acquiring knowledge and the most important aspect of her philosophy,stating :

"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism;
and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.
If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently,
all the rest follows".
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Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness;
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a.that individual persons are in direct contact with this reality through sensory perception;
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b.that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive and deductive logic; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest;
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c.that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalism;
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d.and that the role of art in human life is to transform man's widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond emotionally.
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Rand originally expressed her philosophical ideas in her novels The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and other works. She further elaborated on them in her magazines The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter, and in non-fiction books such as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness.
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The name "Objectivism" derives from the principle that
human knowledge and values are objective:
they are not created by the thoughts one has,
but are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by man's mind.
Rand chose the name because her preferred term for a philosophy based on the primacy of existence, existentialism, had already been taken.
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