Culture And Society

Watch Now: A Discussion on Ayn Rand’s We the Living

Last week, the Cato Institute hosted a theatrical reading of selected scenes from Ayn Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered. In the panel discussion that followed, ARI’s Onkar Ghate commented on several topics, including Ayn Rand’s development as a writer, the difference between teaching philosophy and dramatizing it in a novel, and the value of a plot that’s driven by conflicts between good people.
Culture And Society

Director Ann Ciccolella Discusses Upcoming Theatrical Reading of Ayn Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered

“Trump’s election motivated me to bring Ayn Rand’s story of life in Soviet Russia to Washington, D.C.,” said Ann Ciccolella, the Austin Shakespeare artistic director who is the organizing force behind the upcoming theatrical reading and panel discussion of scenes from Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered at the Cato Institute on July 11. “As actors bring to life scenes from Rand’s play, I expect their salience, given today’s authoritarian trends, will ring out.”
Government And Business

We the Living: Ayn Rand’s Anti-Egalitarian Novel

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living. In her foreword to the novel, Rand explains that although the book is set in 1920s Soviet Russia, We the Living is not a historical novel: it “is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time” and its goal is to show what “the rule of brute force does to men and how it destroys the best.”
ARI News

Teacher Interest in Ayn Rand Novels Increases

Thanks to generous support from donors, ARI provides free copies of Ayn Rand’s works to teachers throughout the United States and Canada. Compared to the prior year, the 2014 – 15 school year marked a dramatic increase in books distributed. Nonfiction requests — including Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Philosophy: Who Needs It — reached an all-time high.
ARI News

Introducing: Ayn Rand’s The Unconquered

Almost seventy years after the publication of Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, Dr. Robert Mayhew is releasing never-before published versions of Rand’s theatrical adaption of the novel “The Unconquered”: With Another, Earlier Adaptation of “We the Living.”

Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
View Article
Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
View Article