The public and acrimonious break between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden was known around the country as the 'Rand-Branden Split.' It led to a nearly fatal implosion of the original Objectivist movement. And that, of course, marked the beginning of the end for my affiliation with the Objectivist movement. In 1970, I almost certainly still thought of myself as (and here's a quaint phrase from yesteryear) a 'student of Objectivism' I was still in the process of changing my self-identification from 'student of Objectivism' to 'libertarian strongly influenced by Ayn Rand.' I had, however, rejected Ayn Rand's demand two years earlier, in 1968, that I condemn Nathaniel Branden and refuse to deal with him in any way, purely on her say-so, with no clear explanation, much less evidence, of any supposed ethical transgressions by Branden. There it is, right smack in the middle of that table of contents - an article called 'Rational Egoism' by Nathaniel Branden. The earliest issue I still own is dated Spring 1970, and it's only necessary to scan the table of contents of that issue to figure out why I might have subscribed. In fact, I'm guessing when I say I subscribed to it early in 1970 - though that does seem likely. (It still is, though under a different name - the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly - and at a rather different price: in the early 1970s, it cost five dollars a year today it costs a little less than a hundred dollars a year.)Īnyway, I'm not sure how many years I kept that subscription to The Personalist going. It was a quarterly called The Personalist, and it was published by the University of Southern California.

What I did was subscribe to an academic, scholarly, philosophy journal. But in my case, the thing I'd never done before wasn't particularly daring or dangerous it was merely unusual, perhaps even eccentric. Yes, yes, I know, people of that age often stick their necks out in such fashion. Early in 1970, at the age of 23, I did something I'd never done before.

Anarchy and utopia