by Ayn Rand
Edited by Robert Mayhew

Ayn Rand was convinced of the life-or-death importance of ideas. Consequently, every intellectual statement she encountered elicited a passionate response from her. When reading books or articles, she conveyed such responses, to herself, in the form of margin notes (or marginalia). Now, in this volume, they are conveyed to all.

These notes are not idle jottings, but a trove of serious, pithy observations—many on issues she never publicly addressed. In her inimitable approach to ideas, Ayn Rand typically takes a writer's statement, questions it, translates it, dissects it, explains its implications—and then demolishes it.

She comments on hundreds of selections from over 20 authors, from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Bishop Fulton Sheen. (There is also a section of marginalia on Supreme Court decisions and on magazine clippings—including her response to a questionnaire called "What is Your Love Quotient?") Some of her subjects include: the irrationality of contrasting the "logically possible" with the "empirically possible"; the contradictions in von Mises' concept of "praxeology" and of value-free economics; how Henry Hazlitt's moral code corrupted his defense of capitalism; Barry Goldwater's "false dichotomy of freedom vs. life"; how liberals "distort Aristotle, the father of the U.S.A., into a totalitarian statist." Both her notes and the text to which they refer are contained in this intellectual gold mine.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One: Philosophy

Aristotle, John Herman Randall
A History of Philosophy, vol. 1, Wilhelm Windelband
The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Etienne Gilson
Immanual Kant: His Life and Doctrine, Friedrich Paulsen
Communication, Organization, and Science, Jerome Rothstein
How to Think Creatively, Eliot Hutchinson
An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, John Hospers
Three unpublished essays by John Hospers
The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
Envy, Helmut Schoeck

Part Two: Economics

Human Action, Ludwig von Mises
Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises
The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek
The Great Idea (Time Will Run Back), Henry Hazlitt

Part Three: Politics and Culture

This Little Band of Prophets, Anne Fremantle
Brainwashing in Communist China, Charles Hunter
Communism and the Conscience of the West, Fulton Sheen
The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
Ten Thousand Commandments, Harold Fleming
The Antitrust Laws of the U.S.A., A. D. Neale
The Language of Dissent, Lowell Mason
The Incredible Ivar Kreuger, Allen Churchill
Four Supreme Court Decisions
Newspaper and magazine clippings

Index

(Softcover; 231 pages)