The Virtue of Selfishness
Cover of the 1964 Signet Books edition
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| Author | Ayn Rand |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Ethics |
| Publisher | New American Library |
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Publication date
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1964 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 173 (Centennial edition) |
| ISBN | (Centennial edition) |
| OCLC | 183461 |
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism is a 1964 collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. Most of the essays originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter. The book covers ethical issues from the perspective of Rand's Objectivist philosophy. Some of its themes include the identification and validation of egoism as a rational code of ethics, the destructiveness of altruism, and the nature of a proper government.
The idea of creating a collection of Rand's essays initially came from Bennett Cerf of Random House, who had published two of Rand's previous books, Atlas Shrugged and For the New Intellectual. Rand proposed a collection of articles to be titled The Fascist New Frontier, after a Ford Hall Forum speech she had given criticizing the views of President John F. Kennedy. Uncomfortable with Rand's comparison of Kennedy to Adolf Hitler, Cerf asked that Rand choose a different title essay. She rejected this request and dropped Random House (as well as ending her friendship with Cerf), choosing New American Library as the publisher for her new book. The Virtue of Selfishness not only bore a different title, it also did not include her piece on Kennedy. He had been assassinated before it was released, making the point of the essay moot.
The book contains 19 essays, 14 of them written by Rand and five by Branden, plus an introduction written by Rand. All but one of the essays had previously been published in The Objectivist Newsletter, a magazine that Rand and Branden had launched in 1962. The exception was the book's first essay, "The Objectivist Ethics", which was a paper Rand delivered at the University of Wisconsin during a symposium on "Ethics in Our Time". "The Objectivist Ethics" explains the foundations of Rand's ethical theory. Her other essays engage a variety of ethical topics, often challenging common perspectives on such issues as compromise and moral judgment. Branden's essays, such as "Counterfeit Individualism" and "The Psychology of Pleasure", present a more psychology-focused view of morality.
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