Walter Block and Ayn Rand: A Comparison
Walter Block and Ayn Rand: A Comparison

Author(s): Edward Younkins
Subject(s): Economy, Political Philosophy, Special Branches of Philosophy
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Walter Block; Ayn Rand; Objectivism; Libertarianism;
Summary/Abstract: Walter Block (WB) had a relationship with Ayn Rand (AR) and her philosophy of Objectivism. Walter had been a left liberal until he met Ayn Rand at a presentation she gave at his college and shortly thereafter attended between six and eight gatherings at Rand’s home to discuss Objectivism with her and her main followers including Barbara and Nathaniel Branden, Leonard Piekoff, and Alan Greenspan. After those visits and after reading two books, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, he converted to laissez-faire capitalism. He loved the inspiring economics that they were supporting but said that he was not interested in areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and so on. Although WB was enchanted by Objectivist economics, he was repulsed by the cultism that he observed and experienced at various meetings that he attended. As a result, he stopped attending such meetings for a while, returned later, but was still not happy with a lot of what he saw and heard. Later, as a PhD student at Columbia University, he met the libertarian anarcho-capitalist, Murray Rothbard, talked with him, and was converted to anarcho-capitalism. He had found his intellectual home. Despite that, he has gone back to read Atlas Shrugged approximately every ten years.

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