Hayek's Road to Serfdom #1 on Amazon Today

Philosophically, there are a number of technical points that Rand was wrong about. It's hard to blame her for them, but one is almost forced to because she took herself seriously as a philosopher. (On the other hand, most of the points are of little practical interest.) Chief among this are her failed attempts to rationally justify both knowledge and morality, neither of which are satisfactory in the end. Her grasp of the history of philosophy is poor--she claims Kant as her nemesis while appropriating large parts of Kant's ethics, for instance. These are not entirely unrelated faults--on the points of epistemology where she is able to correctly identify her disagreements with Kant, she fails to grasp the reasons Kant is right and she is wrong.

Her epistemological system (as expressed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not clearly either descriptive or prescriptive in its outlook--it seems to attempt both, risking incoherence in the process. As a descriptive work, it comes across as an amateur's guess at cognitive psychology, written without a hint of empirical data. As a prescriptive work, it falls short (Rand talks a lot about concepts but doesn't make one hint towards the subject of propositions) and is hampered by the same free-floating departure from empirical reality that hold it back on descriptive terms.

For Rand as a novelist, I have to question anyone whose idea of a dramatic climax is a 30 page speech about philosophy. I'm not even going to make a joke about the rough sex, because all things considered the rough sex kind of fits into the general atmosphere of her books. She's actually a fairly clear writer if you're predisposed to read logically and literally.

There's a lot good to be said about Ayn Rand, and she's not an entirely bad stop on the path of someone's intellectual development. But as a final destination one can do much better.

(Although, part of me would prefer it if you were wrong...)