"What is Capitalism?" by Ayn Rand, List 1

Today’s frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn—that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism.

Implicitly, uncritically, and by default, political economy accepted as its axioms the fundamental tenets of collectivism.

The fact that the principal “resource” involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any.

The morality of altruism was one; the growing dominance of political statism among the intellectuals of the nineteenth century was another.

Psychologically, the main reason was the soul-body dichotomy permeating European culture: material production was regarded as a demeaning task of a lower order, unrelated to the concerns of man’s intellect, a task assigned to slaves or serfs since the beginning of recorded history.

But a nobleman was as much chattel of the tribe as a serf: his life and property belonged to the king.

(The king could and did expropriate the estates of recalcitrant noblemen throughout the course of Europe’s history.)

Europe’s predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by a king, to the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by “the people” —i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chief into slavery to the tribe.

That notion has not been challenged to this day; it represents the implicit assumption and the base of contemporary political economy.

At this point, I quoted it only as a succinct example of the tribal premise that underlies today’s political economy.

It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin.

Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is that which fits economic equations.”

Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come.

I shall remind you that “rights” are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context, that they are derived from man’s nature as a rational being and represent a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.