The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism, by David Kelley. Objectivist Center/Transaction, 2000, 128 pages.

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Ayn Rand and the Curse of Kant

by David Ramsay Steele

Libertarians generally disagree on issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics — not to mention whether there is a God and whether Jennifer Lopez can act. There are several competing candidates for "the" libertarian worldview but so far none of them has managed to acquire dominance or even to attract a majority of libertarians. Is this philosophical disunity a weakness?

Anyone who assumes that it simply must be a decisive advantage for all those engaged in a common task to first agree upon their philosophical principles should consider the example of science. The growth of scientific knowledge involves the cooperation of thousands of individuals with diverse philosophical outlooks. Great physicists, for example, have included theists and atheists, determinists and indeterminists, materialists and idealists. This heterogeneity does not seem to have hurt physics, and may have helped it. If science can get along perfectly well without agreement on philosophical matters, why should we suppose that libertarianism requires philosophical unanimity?

Objectivists, however, say that there is something wrong with the libertarian movement because it combines people with different philosophical views. David Kelley, who was booted out of the "official" Objectivist movement headed by Leonard Peikoff, because he gave a lecture to a not exclusively Objectivist libertarian audience, has become head of the broader and more tolerant Randist tendency embodied in The Objectivist Center, an alternative to Peikoff's Ayn Rand Institute. Kelleyism has now replaced Rothbardism as the main transit camp for refugees from official Objectivism. In basic political and economic policy, both the Peikoff and the Kelley organizations espouse the liberalism of Herbert Spencer and Ludwig von Mises, that is, they are unmistakably libertarian. For liturgical purposes, both decline to label themselves "libertarian."

Kelley agrees with Peikoff that there is something wrong with the libertarian movement because it is an untidy assemblage of individuals who differ with one another over philosophical issues. But if libertarians were all to agree on a single monolithic non-Objectivist philosophy, Peikoff and Kelley would be even more irritated with us. Although it may sound as though Kelley and Peikoff don't like the libertarian movement's heterogeneity, what they really object to is something different: the fact that we don't all swallow their philosophical opinions.

Kelley's pamphlet, "The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand," is a revision of the work published as "Truth and Toleration" ten years earlier. It's aimed at the Peikoff crowd and therefore devotes quite a number of pages to arguing for positions which are pretty obvious, against positions which are pretty idiotic. It has its droll moments. Kelley was excommunicated by Peikoff because he spoke at a libertarian supper club associated with Laissez Faire Books. The ARI's Peter Schwartz denounced Kelley by likening libertarians to the Soviet and Iranian regimes. Kelley observes, in poker-faced prose:

"Laissez Faire Books does not run a Gulag Archipelago of concentration camps, nor does it advocate a medieval fundamentalist theocracy. It has not issued a murder contract on an author it doesn't like. Schwartz regards these differences as superficial" (p. 36).

From Error to Hell and Back

Shoved screaming into the world, we humans jump to conclusions about it and become tenaciously attached to these conclusions. It's natural for each of us to suppose that everyone else will share our beliefs, and when we find to our dismay that they don't, the most plausible hypothesis is that they are possessed by the Devil. Peikoff believes that if someone advocates opinions which deviate from his own, then, with a few negligible exceptions such as the mentally retarded, that person must be a rotter. The same conviction possesses two-year-olds on their crabbiest days.

While Peikoff thinks that people with evil ideas have to be evil themselves, Kelley believes that bad ideas sometimes happen to good people. Like Abraham talking back to Yahweh about his modest proposal to incinerate the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, Kelley insists that not all non-Objectivists are terribly wicked, even though the great majority admittedly are. Kelley opines, for instance, that "few Marxists are innocently mistaken" (106). If we were to read all of "Contested Legacy" except for page 55, we might conclude that Kelley believes "honest error" to be extremely rare. On that page he explicitly states that it is not so rare, but the overall impression remains that it is not as common as dishonest error, whatever that may be.

Against Peikoff, Kelley insists on a distinction between evil ideas (opinions with which he disagrees) held for evil motives and evil ideas held because of "honest error." Yet Kelley's distinction is far from clear. We would know what he meant, of course, if Objectivists said that evilly motivated persons not prone to "honest error" were concealing what they really believed. But neither Peikoff nor Kelley seem to be claiming that evil convictions maintained for evil motives are not sincerely held — that the Marxist who preaches the labor theory of value is at heart convinced of marginal productivity and is artfully concealing that fact, or that the musician who stubbornly maintains that Mozart is better than Rachmaninov actually prefers Rachmaninov but won't cough up to it. I get the impression that, to the Objectivist way of thinking, it's precisely because these despicable scoundrels sincerely believe the loathsome ideas they propound that they must be steeped to the marrow in wickedness.

Peikoff offers the theory that there are "inherently dishonest ideas," by which he means ideas so vile that they could not possibly be held for honest or innocent motives. I don't think he means that the persons holding these ideas are cold-blooded con artists who pretend to believe something they know to be false. Rather, he thinks that they do sincerely believe these ideas because of some nastiness deep in their souls. This nastiness infects their brains with something called "irrationality," whereupon they quite spontaneously arrive at the nauseating non-Objectivist conclusions.

Kelley takes a more moderate position, but one essentially akin to Peikoff's. For Peikoff, once you know that someone espouses evil ideas you shouldn't attempt to communicate with that person, whereas, for Kelley, you might give him the benefit of the doubt for a while and permit him to listen to your expositions of Objectivism. Just how it can be admirable for Rand to appear on Donahue and fence coyly with its socialist host, telling him what a fine fellow he is, while it is unconscionable for Kelley to lecture a libertarian audience on why they ought to become Objectivists, is a riddle I will leave to the adepts of the most arcane rites.

This entire dispute about evil and error is puzzling. What I don't see is how Objectivism can come up with a concept of evil as something distinct from error. Why isn't any departure from Objectivism considered a kind of mistake? If morality is rational pursuit of self-interest, why isn't all immorality a matter of miscalculation? The Objectivists have taken over from the Judaic tradition the notion that capable people in possession of all the facts can willfully commit sin, not noticing that this makes little sense in their new framework of rational egoism.

Rand says that we have a choice to think or not. Yet, aside from shutting down our thinking by cutting our throats, we cannot choose not to think. Thinking itself is involuntary and inescapable, though we can to a limited extent direct our thoughts. As the lugubrious Sartre might have put it, we're condemned to think. Kelley seems to hold that the basic choice is whether to "evade" or not — maybe "not thinking" is a picturesque expression for thinking evasively. But if someone evades, which can be diagnosed from the tell-tale symptom that he does not give as much weight to Objectivist arguments as Objectivists do, why isn't that just a mistake?

Kelley talks a lot about "honest error" but the adjective is redundant. Error is always necessarily honest. A person can pretend to be making a mistake, when he's really getting what he wants. Or a person may make a "deliberate mistake," like adding some numbers and arriving at a wrong answer, because he has an intention which overrides the normal one of getting the right answer. Either of these may, according to context, be dishonest, but they are not genuine examples of error.

We could try to retrieve a coherent position from the squishy Objectivist catchphrases by saying something along the following lines: To live your life to the full requires the investment of a lot of effort, training yourself to think rationally. Some folks shirk this unpleasant work, just as some who set out to learn the piano can't be bothered to practice their arpeggios. In thus failing to invest for the future, by learning the most effective ways to think, these people are acting contrary to their self-interest, and this constitutes "evil."

Thus reconstructed, the Objectivist notion becomes perfectly coherent and very traditional, but the "moral failure" here is still nothing more than a type of mistake, and insofar as it's a mistake like that of the person who can't bring himself to saw his leg off when this is the most promising way to escape from a deadly trap, it's the kind of mistake which arouses our sympathy.

Why People Argue Badly

Rather surprisingly, Kelley claims that we can discern the presence of the irrationality and dishonesty Objectivists are concerned with by witnessing examples of inappropriate behavior in argument. "One may observe whether a person gets angry when his position is challenged, or relies on the cruder sorts of fallacies such as ad hominem or appeal to emotion, or dodges from one issue to another in response to objections" (56).

People often argue in these defective ways, and there are many books on logical fallacies and critical thinking designed to expose and correct such faulty discourse. The fact that people behave like this says nothing about the correctness or incorrectness of the views they propound: if this is what is meant by dishonest error, then there can just as easily be dishonest truth.

Why do people often argue "dishonestly" or "irrationally"? Here Kelley gestures towards an Objectivist psychoanalysis: "The way in which a person defends relativism in ethics, for example, may reveal that he is moved by hostility toward the very idea of objective standards . . . " (56). But then, if someone argues "irrationally" and "dishonestly" in support of ethical objectivism, what does that reveal?

There are at least three causes of bad arguments:

1. Most people are unfamiliar with the canons of logic and relevance. When Rand tries to argue for a position by vilifying the character of anyone who disagrees with her, there is no need to suppose that this reveals something shameful about her innermost soul. It is simply that she does not know any better.
2. The arguer may be more interested in effectiveness than in soundness. When George Orwell contended during World War II that intellectuals who opposed the war were homosexuals and therefore cowards, he clearly understood that this was not the strongest of arguments for fighting the Germans, but thought it might nonetheless have persuasive force.
3. We fall in love with our opinions; we are attached to them and feel loyalty to them. It's therefore painful to abandon our beliefs, and we are often reluctant to do so. Having a belief pulled is indeed more painful than having a tooth pulled.

Kritik to Gulag in Necessary Steps

The main reason most libertarians are not Objectivists is because Objectivist arguments are so feeble, and Kelley's pamphlet illustrates this fact very nicely. While defending his own position against Peikoff's, Kelley restates Objectivism in outline, with some added refinements. I will here criticize only one example of the familiar Objectivist claims he reiterates.

Objectivism maintains that the ideas of evil genius Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) gave rise to modern collectivism, notably the regimes of Stalin and Hitler. This theory of historical causation seems to be crucial to Objectivism. As is clear from Kelley's pamphlet, Objectivism is committed to two propositions:

• that there is (as a matter of historical fact) a tight fit between general philosophical views and political programs, and
• that this tight fit is enforced by politics coming into conformity with philosophy, and not vice versa. It follows that if philosophical views change, politics will change in a determinate direction. It is true that Kelley makes some statements which go against this theory as I have summarized it, but these statements seem to be ad hoc abandonments of the Objectivist theory, reminiscent of the ad hoc abandonments of historical materialism you get when you talk to Marxists.

The Objectivists' chief example of this historical process is their contention that the philosophical ideas of Kant led to the Gulag and to Auschwitz. And this is why they are so convinced that libertarianism must founder unless it adopts Objectivist views on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

The Objectivist historical theory as summarized by Kelley (40–41) states that ideas originating in philosophy spread to other disciplines, and then into the culture at large, where they influence the actions of politicians. In one paragraph, Kelley asserts that this process unfolds "through a sequence of necessary steps" (40). In the very next paragraph he challenges Peikoff's claim that the process is "inexorable" (41). I cannot see the difference between proceeding by necessary steps and being inexorable. For Kelley, the process must proceed by necessary steps, or Kant's ideas needn't have had such terrible consequences, and most libertarians' rejection of Objectivism needn't ensure the triumph of statism. And yet the process cannot proceed "inexorably," because, as Kelley politely puts it, "these are very strong claims about historical causation."

Just how did Kant's ideas give rise to collectivism? Kelley points out (44) that Kant was a classical liberal, that is, his political views were the same as Rand's, Peikoff's, and Kelley's. As a proponent of limited government and individual rights, Kant was not simply falling in with fashion: he was a passionate individualist who gave a prominent place in his ethics to a man's obligations to himself, who held that one ought always to view other persons as ends in themselves, who welcomed the American revolution, and who (in Part I of his "Metaphysics of Morals") developed a rigorous defense of private property.

Kelley also points out that "There have in fact been very few orthodox Kantians" (74). This fact is manifestly a problem for the Objectivist theory that Kant fathered collectivism, and so Kelley immediately adds: "Most people use this term [Kantian] to refer to ideas that share Kant's basic epistemological view about the relation of mind to reality, or his ethical view about the relation between values and duty." Not all Kelley's readers will be aware that people who are Kantians in this broader sense have also been quite few, except for Germany in the late 19th century. In the English-speaking world, adherence to Kant's distinctive views on these matters has generally been negligible. Furthermore, the few Kantians have not been in the forefront of the growth of collectivism. Kantians and Neo-Kantians have tended to be associated with classical liberalism.

Kant is acknowledged to be a great and influential philosopher, yet his influence has not primarily taken the form of having a lot of philosophers agree with his distinctive positions. That one rates a philosopher as outstanding does not mean that one buys his conclusions: many philosophers have admired Kant's arguments without accepting any distinctively Kantian tenets. This is the preponderant take on Kant: that he was a brilliant thinker whose system's fundamental postulates cannot survive critical scrutiny.¹ Kant has stimulated many philosophers to work on issues he raised and arrive at un-Kantian results. His writings have been influential, but only a small part of that influence has been to convert philosophers to his distinctive views.

By "Kant's distinctive views" I mean specific philosophical positions which are well-known as Kant's, whose attribution to Kant is not controversial, and which were not held by anyone before Kant. The most prominent is Kant's "Transcendental Aesthetic," his view that we can experience the world only by imposing certain categories on it, and that these categories, such as space, time, number, and causality, are not in the world independently of our experience, but are indispensable ordering principles we bring to the world. The vast majority of philosophers since Kant have been impressed by the way Kant argues for this somewhat startling contention, but have found it unconvincing.

The Curse of Kant

In order to defend the Objectivist claim about the dire spell cast by Kant, we have to accept that almost all the "necessary steps" must have occurred chiefly by way of thinkers who rejected everything distinctively Kantian. One way to pursue this line is to say that some people after Kant took up positions which were admittedly opposed to Kant's, but which they would not have embraced if they had not been reacting to Kant. However, this does not look credible: it is difficult, for instance, to think of any view maintained by Russell or Moore (after the 1890s, when they rejected Idealism) that they might not easily have come to if Kant had never existed. And if Kant is to be blamed for the thinking of subsequent writers who reacted against him, then we ought to blame him for Objectivism.

According to Kelley, Kant "thought the source of our duties was not society but a higher 'noumenal' self residing within every individual. . . . It was because there is no such thing as the noumenal self that later thinkers such as Hegel, who wanted to preserve the ethics of duty, turned to society as its source and object. Kant's philosophy, then, did contribute to collectivism, but the effect was indirect" (44).² Here we have an attempt to save the Objectivist theory that Kant is responsible for the rise of collectivism by arguing that, for all Kant's individualism and libertarianism, his ethical theory contained a weakness which could only have led his successors to replace this ethical theory with a more collectivist one.

Notice that Kelley is not consciously backing away from Rand, but trying to defend her. As he volunteers, "Most Objectivists, myself included, would say that collectivism is the political expression of Kantianism" (74). He accepts Rand's and Peikoff's view that "the results" of Kant were "mass death in some countries, a welfare state in others" (47). Kelley's reconstruction is that because there is no noumenal self, Hegel was bound to see this — though not to see anything else that was wrong with Kant — and was therefore bound to substitute society for the noumenal self.

Kelley here falls in with a widespread supposition: that Hegel was somehow the natural or likely next step after Kant. This facile assumption is called into question by the fact that, in his major impact on German philosophy, Kant came after Hegel. The heyday of Kant's influence arrived when German philosophy had become disenchanted with Hegel. There was, inside German philosophy, a major "Back to Kant" movement, beginning after 1850. This "Neo-Kantianism" was a diverse but almost entirely German intellectual movement which is known only patchily in the English-speaking world. Kant's following in Germany was vastly higher in 1880, and Hegel's considerably lower, than had been the case in 1830. The Neo-Kantians went "back to Kant" mainly because, like Kant, they wanted to understand the philosophical implications of modern science. They found the idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel inadequate for this purpose.³

Since the Neo-Kantian domination of German philosophy coincided with the upsurge of socialism throughout the world, some Neo-Kantians were socialists and some leading socialists looked to Kantian ethics.⁴ However, Kantian influences were generally prominent in that wing of Social Democracy which became Revisionist, maintaining the liberal values of tolerance and rational debate, and effectively accepting the continuation of capitalism. The wing of Social Democracy which led to Bolshevism stamped out Kantian influences in favor of Marxian materialism, with its striking similarity, in metaphysics, to Objectivism.

Presuppositions of Collectivism

If, then, we trace what happened historically to Kant's ideas, we are unable to find anything which looks like a step-by-step progression from Kant to collectivism. There is also another way to test the Objectivist theory: we can read the utterances of those who did espouse collectivism, and try to discern what were the arguments which made them do this. Although this is a big and complex subject, a few generalizations can be made by anyone who has read a lot of the relevant historical material and tried to grasp what was going on in people's minds at the time.

A list of the main propositions acceptance of which favored collectivism would certainly include the following: free competition always destroys itself by turning into monopoly; the commercial requirement to show a profit needlessly restricts the technical development of industry; poverty will not be reduced without government action (and then in retrospect: material progress for the poorest has been largely accomplished by government action); the free market left to itself will impoverish a large section of the population, because the market's inherent tendency is for wages to fall to subsistence; intelligently planned organization must be more efficient than leaving things to the interplay of market forces coordinated only by automatic and "unconscious" feedback; capitalism is a very recent invention and most of human history has gone on without it; and even in exceptional cases where laissez faire does lead to prosperity, it destroys the vital human sense of community solidarity, and thus fosters mental insecurity and anxiety.⁵ We can easily comprehend how these propositions might appeal to people one or two centuries ago, and we can see that anyone believing them would find it natural to conclude that collectivism would be an improvement over capitalism. As far as I can see, they owe precisely nothing to Kant or to Kantian ways of thinking.

In response to the above objections, some Objectivists may respond that modern thinkers, though overwhelmingly non-Kantian, have all advocated views which are inimical to Objectivism and are therefore just as pernicious as Kant's. Russell, for example, though decidedly anti-Kantian, held (in his most influential "logical atomist" period) that there were sense-data (that is, he maintained that the content of the experience of perceiving an object is not identical with the perceived object), and this contradicts Rand's remarks on perception and is therefore proof of Russell's pathological mental and moral condition.

It's true that Objectivists denounce all modern philosophy without exception: they have no time for the pre-Kantian metaphysical or epistemological views of Galileo, Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, or Hume. To mindless mystics like myself, these writings constitute a glorious adventure of the human intellect, but to Objectivists they are nothing but foul-smelling garbage, from which "rational men" recoil like Count Dracula from a crucifix. And Russell's approach, for example, is undeniably similar to Hume's.

However, any such response would surrender the Objectivist claim that Kant is peculiarly responsible for Soviet and Nazi mass murder. To say that all philosophy since 1274 has been leading by necessary steps to collectivism would not suit the Objectivists' case at all. It would have the embarrassing consequence that precisely those philosophers who prepared the way for classical liberalism and the acceptance of modern science would be the progenitors of collectivism.⁶ For this reason I repeatedly referred above to Kant's "distinctive" views. Positions Kant shared with earlier thinkers, however much Objectivists may gag on them, cannot be examples of Kant's uniquely diabolical influence.

Explaining Collectivism's Retreat

Another difficulty for the Object-ivist theory (as Kelley is uneasily aware) is the shift away from collectivism over the past 40 years. While we may argue about the magnitude of this shift, it has certainly happened. Deregulation, denationalization, and the abandonment of "economic planning" have been perceptible in almost every country of the world. There are certainly horrors in today's world, but there is currently nothing to equal the extraordinary organized brutality of the KGB or the Gestapo. Kelley quotes Peikoff as saying that Kant "unleashed" Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, "and all the other disasters of our disastrous age" (41). Who put the leash on them again?

During the last 40 years, distinctively Kantian ideas have not become less influential: they have been uniformly uninfluential throughout. While broadly libertarian social and political ideas have gained some ground, specifically Objectivist philosophical ideas have had no influence on the discipline of philosophy. Is there, perhaps, a lag in the influence of philosophy on politics? There was, it is true, a steep decline in Neo-Kantian following in Germany in the first three decades of the 20th century, but I hardly think Objectivists would want to attribute the retreat of collectivism in the 1980s to the advance of phenomenology and logical empiricism in the 1920s⁷ (these were the movements which supplanted Neo-Kantianism and they are both movements which nauseate Objectivists).

Kelley argues that people's experience of the reality of collectivism led to the downfall of the totalitarian regimes (47). If this kind of ad hoc adjustment is accepted, the whole Objectivist theory of historical causation has to be rejected. Kelley cannot have it both ways. Either political programs always arise by necessary steps from the dominant philosophical ideas or they don't.

Furthermore it is not true that the death of socialism was a practical adjustment independent of theory. It was the result of an ideological seachange. What we have witnessed since the "Crisis of Marxism" in the 1890s is the rebirth of libertarianism following its eclipse in the second half of the 19th century. Objectivism is a footnote to this rebirth. Neo-Kantians like Mises and Hayek and empiricists like Milton Friedman overthrew the ideological hegemony of collectivism. They did not require any help from Objectivist philosophy and they did not get any.

What may seem baffling to Objectivists is that this intellectual movement largely bypassed the discipline of philosophy. Inasmuch as philosophy has been involved, it appears to have made adaptations to the change in political direction "after the fact." But the idea that philosophy is bound to determine thinking in other scholarly disciplines is just one more honest Objectivist error. Philosophy does not occupy any such queenly station.

Philosophers No Longer the Leaders

The Objectivist theory as summarized by Kelley claims that intellectuals in disciplines other than philosophy take their direction from philosophy. Against the Objectivist theory, I want to make four assertions, the first two very general, the third and fourth more narrow:

1. Among the many factors affecting the evolution of ideas about culture, politics, and society, the influence of general philosophical ideas is not always of great weight.
2. There is no tight fit between metaphysics or ethics and politics or economics. Any metaphysical theory, for instance, is (as a matter of historical fact) compatible with any political viewpoint.
3. While ideas originating in philosophy sometimes affect thinking outside philosophy, it's also true that ideas originating outside philosophy frequently affect thinking inside philosophy.
4. Until about 200 years ago the leading philosophers were intellectual leaders of society in a way that is no longer possible.

Philosophy has always responded to developments in other intellectual areas. Kelley points out that Kant's philosophy would have been found unintelligible two centuries before Kant, because it was prompted by philosophical developments during that period (46). Of course this is true, but, even more to the point, nothing like Kant's metaphysics would have made much sense but for the revolution in physical theory wrought by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.⁸ "The Critique of Pure Reason" is an attempt to address urgent conceptual problems posed by the success of Newtonian physics.

Not only does philosophy adapt to influences from other areas, but when there is a link between a philosophical idea and a cultural or policy idea, we often notice, at least in our own day, that some very minor philosophical ripples make big waves outside philosophy. This shows non-philosophers picking somewhat obscure philosophical tendencies to suit their theoretical preferences, rather than adapting to whatever the philosophical consensus turns out. Consider the major influence the ideas of French post-modernists and deconstructionists or of T.S. Kuhn have recently had upon American academics in humanities disciplines other than philosophy. Within philosophy itself, Anglo-American or even French, these ideas are very minor fringe events.

In days gone by, the leading philosophers were indeed the leading thinkers who often set society's intellectual agenda. Leibniz invented differential calculus. Descartes devised co-ordinate geometry. Hume was the greatest historian of England prior to Macaulay. Kant came up with a theory of the formation of galaxies and solar systems — the theory now accepted by all astrophysicists. These really were the leaders of thought in their time. Since then, ineluctable specialization has taken its toll, and philosophers today are in no sense the intellectual leaders of the world. Nor is it likely that they ever will be again.

The Objectivist Theory Is Wrong in Principle

It doesn't look, then, as if Kant's ideas could have led by necessary steps to collectivism, and we can see that people have actually become collectivists — and then ceased to be collectivists — for reasons having nothing to do with Kant. But suppose that the historical facts were different. Suppose, contrary to fact, that people who accepted Kant's distinctive metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical views did show some tendency to become collectivists, and that the turning of the tide against collectivism had been accomplished by people who had some proximity to Objectivist metaphysics and ethics. The Objectivist theory of historical causation would still be unacceptable, for reasons touched upon but not consistently thought through by Kelley (41–42, 46–49).

What is meant by saying that Kant begat collectivism? It is clear what is meant by saying that thinker X fathered policy y, if in fact X advocated y, and the people who implemented y were influenced by reading X and claimed the authority of X. Even in such cases, some skepticism is in order about the putative historical causation.⁹ With Kant and collectivism, however, X was implacably opposed to y, and the people who implemented y persecuted the followers of X. An attempt might be made to fix responsibility on X by saying that X's ideas, after adjustments that were bound to be made by successors, would lead to y. This seems to be Kelley's approach, in his remark about Kant and Hegel. Here the obvious questions are: Were those adjustments (as opposed to others or none) bound to be made? And would those adjustments have to lead to y?

I have pointed out that the actual historical events do not corroborate the Objectivist theory. Now I'm looking at the principle of the thing: could any such theory be true? What Hegel meant is often debatable: let us accept for the sake of argument that Hegel did exactly what Kelley said he did. Was it necessary that a successor to Kant would adapt Kant in just the way Kelley describes? A fairly obvious alternative would have been to drop any reference to the noumena, postulating a "higher" self within the phenomenal individual. Anyone who reads Kant on ethics can see that bringing in the noumena is a bit of a makeshift: the ethical system makes sense without this move.¹⁰ Another alternative would have been to scrap Kant's approach and replace it with a different one such as some version of utilitarianism or contractarianism.

Hegel's adaptation of Kant, then, could not have been necessary. But even if we assume that it was necessary, must it then necessarily have led to collectivism, as Kelley claims? And there's no reason why someone who views "society" as the "source and object" of ethics has to be politically collectivist: those are distinct issues. (After all, Hegel was no socialist.¹¹) So to get from Hegel's ethics to collectivism must rely upon several further steps, none of which could have been necessary.¹² Furthermore, this method of historical explanation is caught in a paradox. If we say that B was bound to take A's thought in a particular direction, then we must be at a loss to explain why A himself did not take it in that direction.

In terms of historical causation, then, any system of ideas could have been developed in many alternative ways,¹³ and it is always wrong to claim that a system of ideas which found adherents at one historical period was bound to lead "by necessary steps" to a different system of ideas which was able to win adherents at a later period. A historical claim of this sort is not just mistaken in a particular case: it can never be correct in any instance.

The Objectivist theory that the courageous 18th-century libertarian thinker Immanuel Kant was the father of 20th-century collectivism does not look promising.

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1	The same consensus view applies to a number of other philosophers, notably Plato and George Berkeley.

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2	Kant distinguishes between "phenomena" (things insofar as they can be perceived) and "noumena" (things insofar as they are beyond sensory experience).

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3

Kelley says that Kant's system "was modified extensively by a long line of thinkers: Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others" (46). This falsely implies a cumulative and widening Kantian influence. Marx's metaphysics and epistemology are a development of Feuerbachian materialism, closer to Objectivism than to Kantianism. Marx's ethics is peculiar and elusive but at any rate alien to Kant's. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both provocative essayists and superb prose stylists who had a high regard for Kant and a fine contempt for Hegel, and who profoundly influenced political and artistic culture. Within philosophy they are both dead ends. And Nietzsche was mainly celebrated for precisely those egoistic, anti-Christian views which were taken over from him by Rand.

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4	See Thomas E. Willey, "Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914" (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978).

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5

These are all false propositions, but we could add many true ones, for example that Malthus's population principle is unsound (in the 19th-century English-speaking world, Malthus was the chief argument against socialism), that there is progress in human history, or that traditional institutions can be changed by the application of rational analysis, with beneficial results.

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Objectivists already have the challenging task of explaining how Aquinas, doctor of the medieval Church, was the father of individualism, despite the fact that 20th-century neo-Thomists like Jacques Maritain have been men of the left, or of explaining how David Hume, second only to Kant in the Objectivist pantheon of demons, came to be the chief ideological inspiration of the U.S. Constitution.

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7

The Davos disputation of 1929, involving Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, and Ernst Cassirer, marked a watershed in 20th-century philosophy. See Michael Friedman, "A Parting of the Ways" (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). Heidegger was a phenomenologist who later gave support to the Third Reich. Carnap, one of the founders of logical empiricism, was a revolutionary socialist. Cassirer, the last of the great Neo-Kantians, was a classical liberal and author of the superb anti-totalitarian work, "The Myth of the State."

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8	Among other non-philosophical influences which have deeply impacted philosophical thought, an obvious example is the Protestant Reformation.

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9

Nothing is more easily demonstrable than the overt and acknowledged influence of William James on the origins of Fascist thought. But it would be a leap to suggest that Pragmatism helped to bring about the political phenomenon of Fascism. I don't say it would be false, but it would be a leap, and anyone who wanted to advance it as a serious thesis would be wise to spend a few years examining the historical evidence.

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10

Kant (like Descartes and like Objectivism) accepted both physical determinism and human free will. Attempting to reconcile these, and holding that physical determinism applied only to phenomena, he supposed that individuals somehow directly apprehend the moral law in the noumenal world. This seems to be his main motive for bringing the noumena into ethics.

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11

It is a commonplace that Hegel, though he would have furiously opposed anything like Communism or National Socialism, inadvertently helped along these totalitarian movements by his glorification of the state. In no sense was this statolatry implicit in Kantianism. Nor does it arise from any special emphasis on "society." Quite the opposite: Hegel oddly departs from the liberal tradition that society exists independently of the state.

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12

Kelley also mentions but does not elaborate what he may hold as an independent historical path by which Kant's thought generated collectivism: Kant supposed that "reason is inefficacious" (74). This is a bizarrely misleading characterization. Presumably it refers to Kant's view that a certain class of metaphysical puzzles are insoluble because they lie outside any possible experience. Just why the view that some metaphysical questions ought to be abandoned as futile might lead to collectivist politics is mysterious. Kant's is not a standpoint which recommended itself to Marx or Lenin or Stalin (who on such matters essentially agreed with Rand and Kelley), and I am not aware of any attempt to connect the historical dots between Kant and collectivism in this way.

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13	Kelley seems to acknowledge this fact in some of his remarks but, as I have pointed out, this amounts to ad hoc abandonment of his main thesis.

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