Lehigh Preserve Institutional Repository An analysis of the randian political scientific concepts. Merkel, Thomas Allen 1983 Find more at https://preserve.lib.lehigh.edu/ This document is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AN ANALYSIS OF THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS By Thomas Allen Merkel A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in Government Lehigh University 1983 ProQuest Number: EP76195 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 This thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. 7?/-v-, /r, fit3 Date Profess or in Charts Chairman of Department -11- "TABLE OF CONTENTS" Certificate of approval ii "AN ABSTRACT OF AN ANALYSIS OF THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS"... 1 Main text 3 PART A: "A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS .3 Section I: "How Ayn Rand Left the 'Ugliest Country'" 3 Section II: "How She Judged the Americans" 6 PART B: "A TERMINOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SUBJECTS"... 18 Section I: "Definition of ' Concepts '" 19 Section II: "Definitions of Meanings, Means, and Meaningful and Meaningless Perceptions and Expressions" 31 Section III: "Definitions of Things as Such, and Entities and Attributes" 35 Section IV: "Definitions of Existences, Actions, Motionless Absolute Things, and Movers" 40 Section V: "Definitions of Causes, Effects, Reflex Movers , and Conceivers" 46 Section VI: "Definition of Societies" . 62 Section VII: "Definitions of Governments as Such, and Political Governments" 65 Section VIII: "Definition of Political Scientific Concepts" 73 Section IX: "Definition of This Analysis as a Refutation, and as an Objective Relationship".... 92 PART C: "THE ESSENTIAL ANALYSIS OF THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS" 97 Section I: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Things Exclusively Retaliating in Their Respective Locations" 97 iii Section II: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Retaliations" 101 Section III: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Entities to Which Things May be Delegated"" 105 Section IV: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Means" 107 Section V: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Things Having Authorities, as Things Belonging to or Composed of Laws, and as Things Having Purposes" 109 Section VI: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Rights" 112 Section VII: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Societies, Systems, and Economies" 141 Section VIII: "Refutation of Her Notions of Political Governments as Things Other Than Societies, Nations, Countries, Rights, Systems, States and Economies" 163 PART D: "CONCLUSIONS OF THE ANALYSIS" 185 Section I: "A Causal Explanation of the Randian Political Scientific Concepts" 185 Section II: "Judgement of the Randian Political Scien- tific Concepts by Aristotelian Standards" 220 Section III: "'Uses' of the Randian Political Scientific Concepts" 231 Section IV: "A Note on the Identification of the Randian Political Scientific Concepts" 236 "NOTES" 239 "REFERENCE LIST" , 297 "VITA" 303 iv "AN ABSTRACT OF AN ANALYSIS OF THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS" The Chesis is, essentially, that the Randian political scientific concepts (which are the apparent concepts of political governments by Miss Ayn Rand) are not political scientific concepts (are not concepts of political governments), and are not concepts of anything (are not concepts at all). The thesis is, therefore, a refutation (since a refutation is an identification of at least one falsely supposed "concept"), and the refutation is primarily through Miss Rand's own "fundamental philosophical prin- ciples"—through her own true definitions of "things", "entities", "actions", "attributes", "existences", "concepts" and "meaningless notions". She denied that political govern- ments are entities, and that any attributes (such as con- cepts, and other actions, which clearly are attributes) can belong to anything that is not an entity—yet she ascribed attributes to her political governments (which she denied are entities). Whereas she correctly held that "metaphysical", "epistemological" and other fundamental concepts by any conceiver must precede any true political scientific concepts by that conceiver, yet she "arrived at" her 1 political scientific concepts first—and then afterwards, she "unclergirded" them with their apparent metaphysical and epistemological conceptual fundations. There is included in the thesis a causal explanation of the Randian political scientific concepts, which is essentially that they are the effects primarily of her "altruistic, mystical, collectivist" Russian persecutors and of her "individualistic, scientific, capitalist" American business associates. She held that "the pleasure- pain mechanism" in a human body is the inescapable, unalterable, infallible "basis of evaluative knowledge"— so that, by that standard, her "political scientific con- cepts" must be identified as "the necessary consequence, and ultimate practical application" (as she herself put it) of her "Horatio Alger"-like struggle to success in America. Her "political scientific concepts" had to be effects, for she held that all false, meaningless "concepts" are effects. The thesis also involves a "biographical introduc- tion" and a "terminological introduction"; moreover, it contains many quotations of Rand's own expressions, so that the subjects being analyzed are amply demonstrated to the reader. A widely representative, though not nearly exhaus- tive, listing of primary and secondary sources is appended. 2 PART A: "A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE RANDIAN POLITICAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS" Since the subjects of this analysis are certain attributes (are the apparent political scientific concepts) that belong to the late, renowned literatist Mrs. Ayn Rand O'Connor, therefore this analysis must begin by way of this identification of "Miss Rand" (as she is usually called): Section I: "How Ayn Rand Left the 'Ugliest Country'" I left in 1926 alone. In complete loathing. For the whole country, and including the Tsarist period. It is the ugliest, and...most mystical country on earth. She was born in St. Petersburg, on February 2, 1905. Her parents were liberal mercantile Jews; they pro- vided their children with considerable travel and enter- tainment until the Revolution, but not with any religious training. By thirteen years of age, Ayn considered herself an atheist (and she continued to do so, apparently, until her death). She was a precocial mathematical talent, and might have been an engineer; but, at nine years of age, she "specifically, consciously chose" a literary career. She immediately began to write plots and char- acterisations for her future works—and she became, and 3 remained, as she put it: "single-tracked", or "completely devoted to a specific, conscious purpose". During her youth in Russia, she had no friends— because her interests were entirely intellectual and professional, rather than "social and .recreational"— because she was unwilling to become a "normal young Russian woman", because she did not like "ordinary boys", and because even those adults who admired her "for her intelligence" were, nevertheless, repelled by her "unre- mitting intensity". It is not suprising that she devel- oped, at an early age, a "profound hatred" for all the "irrational, collectivistic, incompetent" Russians—and an equally deep desire to meet real human counterparts (out- side Russia, of course) of the "scientific, individualis- tic, heroic" characters projected by her favorite Romantic novelists (such as the character "Enjolras", the Parisian insurrectionist dubbed "the marble lover of liberty", in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo). At twelve, when she first met Russian Marxists, she immediately rejected their "loathsome immorality" (which she later identified as "Altruism, the collectivist 'morality'", or, "the collectivist ideal of the sacrifice of all to all") as leading to "nothing but evil, regard- less of any methods, details, decrees, policies and pious platitudes" . Thus, she did not excuse the Marxists as 4 "zealously impractical", or "utopian", or theologically- heretical "misguided moral idealists"; rather, she identi- fied them as immoralists. But she "despised equally" the various Russian Whites (and especially, the Tsar and the devotees of his "horrid religion"). During the Revolution and the Civil War, she neither assisted nor resisted the Reds and various Whites. While she remained in Russia, she kept secret her opinion that "I don't want to fight for the people, I don't want to fight against the people, I don't