Abstract

ABSTRACT The author disagrees with Aaron Weinacht’s contention that Ayn Rand brought nihilism to America. Rand wrote about issues that concerned nihilist thinkers such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii, but she reacted in a profoundly different way to those issues. The differences are not merely political–insofar as the nihilists were socialist and Rand was a capitalist; they were much deeper.