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By Root 1525 0

of his first book, Human Conduct, he carried it to her apartment and they talked until morning. As the clock struck eight, she made him breakfast and waved him off to his publisher’s office, calling, “Good premises!” instead of “Good-bye,” which deeply touched him, he recalled. Hospers, who became the first Libertarian Party candidate for president of the United States in 1972 and was the author of the classic primer Libertarianism, liked to recall that he learned free-market principles at the great woman’s knee. He fell in love with the “uncompromising rigor” of her arguments, her piercing eyes, and her deep Russian voice, “which could warm you and freeze you by turns,” he wrote.

He wasn’t always able to make clear to her how her ideas fit in a historical context or introduce her to new concepts. At that period, “She read almost no philosophy at all,” he said, and she gave the impression that her ideas “had come full-blown from her head, or from the head of Jove.” They had political differences. He, a methodical thinker with a social conscience, expressed doubt that the freedom to think gave a majority of people the freedom to shape their lives; a cripple can’t will himself to walk, he argued, or a poor person transcend a lifetime of risk-averse or self-defeating habits in a day. (She ceded the point about walking but reminded him that with determination people do overcome seemingly impossible odds and even rise to leadership positions—not adding, “as I did.”) He also argued that truth and falsehood, or good and evil, cannot always be established with certainty by reason: Additional facts are sometimes needed to draw conclusions. For example, “All swans are white” remains true only as long as no one discovers a black swan; afterward, a new truth must be constructed. Rand agreed that new facts may sometimes create new truths but insisted that fundamental concepts, such as, “A thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature,” remain permanently and self-evidently true. Their spirited exchanges resembled those she’d had with Paterson in the 1940s, except that, by this time, Rand’s conceptual framework was set and nothing would alter her thinking.

Hospers had the unusual privilege of meeting with her alone. But he also sat in on a number of NBI lectures and even gave one or two himself. At one lecture he attended, on aesthetics, which was his academic specialty, he was almost shouted down when, speaking from the floor, he tried to defend the artistry of William Faulkner and Pablo Picasso, which the speaker had casually “relegated to the fcrap-heap.” After a few such experiences, he concluded that Rand’s movement was overrun with sheep, “shivering, scared children who dared not say the wrong thing lest they incur her wrath,” he wrote in a memoir. He said as much to her in a 1961 letter. What do you gain from your followers’ “undigested agreement” with you? he asked. Her reply was revealing. “‘Undigested agreement’ does not interest or concern me,” she answered coldly. “Through all the years I spent formulating my philosophical system, I was looking desperately for ‘intelligent agreement’ or at least for ‘intelligent disagreement.’ I found neither. … What I am looking for [now] is ‘intelligent agreement.’ “If she didn’t find it, she could go into a rage.

As their friendship entered its second year, Hospers noticed that she lost patience with him quickly. This was especially true after he politely refused to issue a public condemnation of his friend and colleague Sidney Hook. For her, this was disloyalty; she saw the realm of ideas as a battlefield, he observed, where people must continually put their lives and livelihoods at risk. He knew he was supposed to want to join the ranks of the converted; the more time she expended on a person, the more agreement and allegiance she expected. “Any hint of thinking as one formerly had, any suggestion that one had backtracked, was treated with indignation,” Hospers later wrote. Even mild criticism—say, about the philosophical imprecision with which she sometimes used important words