Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is known to millions for her blockbuster novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In the 1960s her 'Objectivist' ideas, featuring esthetic romanticism, laissez-faire capitalism, atheism, and 'the virtue of selfishness', were promoted in an organized movement, which split apart after Rand's falling-out with her protege Nathaniel Branden. This debacle threw Rand's growing community of followers into disarray, but she continues to attract readers and to exert a major, if largely subterranean, influence on thinking and policy.

The Ideas of Ayn Rand provides, for the...