12/9/21

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.