An excerpt from the Epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.
The following is an application of Objectivism to a specialized field, history. I am offering this conclusion as a further indication of the power of ideas in man’s life. The material touched on below is discussed in the title essay of Ayn Rand’s For the New Intellectual. A detailed treatment is presented in my book The Ominous Parallels.1
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Ayn Rand’s theory of man leads to a distinctive interpretation of history. By identifying the cause of human action, her theory enables us to discover the factor that shapes men’s past—and future.
If man is the conceptual being, philosophy is the prime mover of history.
A conceptual being is …
