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The racist syndrome: Sartre, Rand, and the will to concreteness

Roderick T. Long

DRAFT – WORK IN PROGRESS

Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand were exact contemporaries – born the same year (1905), and dying

just two years apart (Sartre in 1980, Rand in 1982). Each was shaped intellectually by the experience of

having suffered under a totalitarian régime – Sartre under the Nazis, Rand under the Soviets. Each was

not only a philosopher but also a popular novelist and playwright, a cultural critic, a political activist, and

co-founder of an influential intellectual journal.1 Moreover, it was as philosophers that they were and did

all these other things. Neither saw philosophy as an ivory-tower enterprise; both Sartre and Rand were

“public philosophers” whose philosophical commitments led them to a direct engagement with the issues

of the day. And they both believed in the social relevance not only of moral and political philosophy, but

likewise of the seemingly more arcane strata of metaphysics and epistemology. Sartre would have

endorsed Rand’s doctrine of “the supremacy of actual living over all other considerations,” and her

insistence that “philosophy has to be … brought up to the realm of actual living. (I say intentionally

brought up to it, not down.)”2

Yet Sartre and Rand are not often thought of as kindred spirits. Rand never referred to Sartre except

with contempt, and Sartre, so far as I can tell, never referred to Rand at all. It’s unclear whether he had

even heard of her – though Hazel Barnes, the translator of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, did devote a

chapter of her book An Existentialist Ethics to a Sartrean critique of Rand’s philosophy.3 As for Rand,

what little information she actually possessed concerning Sartre she seems to have derived from such

secondary sources as William Barrett’s Irrational Man and Hector Hawton’s The Feast of Unreason.4

Certainly what she did know of Sartre, she did not like. Nevertheless, there turns out to be an intriguing

consilience between Sartre’s and Rand’s views on the nature of racism.

For both thinkers, racism is not an isolated tendency but rather part of an overall mindset, a racist

syndrome: as Sartre puts it, it is not “a molecule that can enter into combination with other molecules of

any origin whatsoever without undergoing any alteration.”5 Both thinkers also agree that racism is not

just a moral problem but above all a cognitive one; racism represents an error in the racist’s cognitive

functioning. Yet in saying this, Sartre and Rand do not propose to absolve the racist of responsibility; on

the contrary, the racist’s cognitive error is a voluntary one, and is condemnable as such.

The similarities between Sartre and Rand lie not in their suggested methods of combating the racist

syndrome – one recommends censorship and Marxist revolution, the other Montessori education and

libertarian capitalism – but rather in their diagnosis of its nature and cause.

The racist syndrome – p. 1

Sartre regards it as a mistake to think of racism as merely an “opinion.” In Anti-Semite and Jew he

draws our attention to the shaky logical character of the justifications that racists offer for their attitudes.

(For historical reasons, Sartre focuses primarily on the case of anti-Semitism, but he notes 6 that his

analysis can be applied to every sort of racial and ethnic prejudice; elsewhere7 he offers a strikingly

similar analysis of colonialism.) Sartre tells the story of a woman who claimed to distrust all Jews

because some Jewish furriers once ruined her furs.8 As Sartre points out, this would be an equally good

(or bad) reason for distrusting all furriers. The fact that it was their Jewishness, rather than their furrier-

ness or some other characteristic, that she chose to seize upon and generalize shows that <Jew> was

already a suspect category for her. The incident didn’t motivate her prejudice; it merely served to

rationalize and reinforce a pre-existing attitude. Racist attitudes are not conclusions based, well or badly,

upon evidence; racism for Sartre is not an opinion but a passion.

From Sartre’s point of view, however, passions are not mere feelings; an emotion is not a “pure and

inexpressible quality as is brick-red,” but is rather a “structure of consciousness.” 9 Nor are passions

things that just happen to us; rather they are modes of consciousness that we choose to enter, often as a

form of self-deception or “bad faith.” In Sartre’s words:

When the paths traced out become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can no longer live in so urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However, we must act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connection between things and their potentialities were ruled not by deterministic processes, but by magic.10

Rand agrees with Sartre that emotions are not mere feelings but instead represent modes of cognitive

functioning; and she also agrees with him that we are responsible for our emotions. 11 In this respect

Sartre and Rand both stand in the Hellenic tradition of moral psychology. But where Sartre follows the

Stoics in thinking of passions as voluntary deformations of awareness, Rand is closer to Aristotle in two

ways: first, she regards emotions as embodying judgments that can be either true or false (whereas for

Sartre and the Stoics emotional awareness always falsifies);12 and second, she regards our control over our

emotions as indirect, as something to be achieved through a kind of habituation. For Rand, emotions are

“the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious …. Man’s emotional

mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program – and the programming

consists of the values his mind chooses.” His emotional habits will be determined by whether he

“chooses his values by a conscious process of thought – or accepts them by default, by subconscious

associations … social osmosis or blind imitation.”13 Nevertheless, both Sartre and Rand see our

emotional responses as the product, direct or indirect, of our free will.


For Sartre, free will is the freedom to create oneself. There are no set guidelines to which we can

appeal to justify our choices; there is no eternal standard, either within us in the form of a fixed human

nature, or without us in the form of a divine authority. And hence we are fully responsible for whatever

we do, and we can never have an adequate excuse. In Sartre’s famous example, going off to fight the

Nazis is not a decisive reason to abandon your mother; and staying home to take care of your mother is

not a decisive reason not to go instead and fight the Nazis.14 Hence we can never have the luxury of

saying, “I had to do that, so I can’t be blamed for the consequences.”

The burden of boundless freedom and boundless responsibility can be an uncomfortable one, and

many attempt to flee from it or deny it. This, Sartre thinks, is the origin of racism. The racist is afraid to

face the implications of personal choice and so is attracted to a viewpoint according to which who the

good guys are and who the bad guys are is determined not by choice but by birth. He chooses “the

permanence and impenetrability of stone” and “a Good which is fixed once and for all, beyond question,

out of reach; he dares not examine it for fear of being led to challenge it.”15

In his short story “Childhood of a Leader,” Sartre describes a group of young racists as being

“finished with the wanderings and uncertainties of their age, they had nothing more to learn, they were

made.”16 The budding anti-Semite, Lucien, desires to emulate the psychological imperviousness of his

idol, Lemordant:

Lucien often contemplated with a full satisfaction that voluminous, pensive head, neckless, planted awry on the shoulders: it seemed impossible to get anything into it, neither through the ears, nor the tiny slanting eyes, pink and glassy: “man with convictions,” Lucien thought with respect; and he wondered, not without jealousy, what that certitude could be that gave Lemordant such a full consciousness of self. “That’s how I should be; a rock.”17

Sartre also portrays Lucien as longing to be able to see his own back,18 and “regrett[ing] not being another

person to be able to caress his own flesh like a piece of silk.” 19 In other words, Lucien wants to see

himself as an object, finished, solid, complete, rather than as a center of freedom, indefinite, never settled

once and for all. Hence Lucien’s attraction to the racist worldview, where birth and blood rather than free

choice are the determinants of character and destiny.

Rand agrees with Sartre in linking racism with an evasion of one’s own freedom:

That man is self-controlling and responsible is neither moral nor immoral; that is an actual fact of nature – just like water seeking its own level. But for man to recognize that he is self-controlling and responsible, and to act accordingly – that is moral. It is possible for him not to recognize it; is possible for him to try to act as if he were a robot by nature – that is what most of mankind is doing right now.20


And when you lack “the confidence to make choices,” Rand infers, you will naturally be led to identify

with “an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined

[by] your body chemistry.”21

To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.22

For Rand, as for Sartre, the world of the racist is one in which the characters and actions of human beings

are “fixed” and “given,” without the possibility of choice.

Rand’s conception of free choice is different from Sartre’s, however. As Hazel Barnes points out, the

difference can be summed up in the contrast between Sartre’s slogan “existence precedes essence” and

Rand’s slogan “existence is identity.”

“Existence is identity.” “Existence precedes essence.” There is the heart of the difference. Rand’s view of man retains the old acorn theory. Man’s potentialities may be hidden, but they resemble the embryo oak tree. The question is simply whether the individual will be, as it were, a bigger, stronger oak or a more feeble one. Everyone knows what a good oak tree ought to be and how to judge it. Oak tree nature and human nature are equally limiting. Sartre has pointed out that it is precisely this ideal pattern which is in question. Being a man means deciding what man will be.23

Rand, unlike Sartre, aligns herself with the Hellenic tradition in holding that human beings, like

everything else, have a fixed and definite nature, and that a proper understanding of this nature will

provide us with moral guidelines.24 “The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity. …

[M]an is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of

his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes ….”25 For Rand, our freedom lies not

in creating ourselves but in the extent of our willingness to be aware of the facts that should guide us.

Man’s conscious mind observes and establishes connections among his experiences; the subconscious integrates the connections and makes them become automatic … The process of forming, integrating and using concepts is not an automatic, but a volitional process …. It is not an innate, but an acquired skill …. [T]he method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge – the method by which his mind deals with its content [ – ] programs his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently, lamely or disastrously his cognitive processes will function.26

In Rand’s view, the racist syndrome originates in a voluntary failure to master the conceptual level of

cognitive development:


Learning to speak does not consist of memorizing sounds – that is the process by which a parrot learns to “speak.” Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words …. [A child’s] full, independent conceptual development does not begin until he has acquired a sufficient vocabulary to be able to form sentences – i.e., to be able to think …. Up to that time, he is able to retain the referents of his concepts by perceptual, predominantly visual means; as his conceptual chain moves farther and farther away from perceptual concretes …. his own choice and motivation are crucial at this point. [Many] switch from cognition to imitation, substituting memorizing for understanding …. learning, not concepts nor words, but strings of sounds whose referents are not the facts of reality, but the facial expressions and emotional vibrations of their elders.27

To grasp and deal with [perceptual] concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development – on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects – and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstractions from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation.28

What Rand calls the anti-conceptual mentality is a mentality that has chosen a policy of “passivity in

regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles.”29 The fact

that this passivity is voluntarily chosen does not mean that educational and social factors are irrelevant;

on the contrary, “a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of

one’s rational faculty easier or harder.”30 And Rand has much criticism to offer of the social factors that

she thinks make it harder. In similar vein, Sartre emphasizes that although agents in society make free

choices, nevertheless “if we can change the perspective of choice, then the choice itself will change.” 31

Still, in the end, both thinkers agree that social factors “can neither force a man to think nor prevent him

from thinking.”32 An anti-conceptual mentality, in Rand’s words, is “a mentality which decided, at a

certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further.” Instead, like the

sight-lovers in Plato’s Republic, such a mentality confines itself to the “immediately given, directly

perceivable concretes of its background,” and “treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts.”33

Indeed, Rand’s description of arrested conceptual development sounds remarkably like the self-

imprisoned denizens of Plato’s Cave, who respond with confusion and hostility to Socrates’ attempts to

lead them from the concretes in which they are immersed to the abstract principles behind them:

A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space – and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.34


This anti-conceptual mode of cognitive functioning can only work “so long as no part of it is challenged.

But all hell breaks loose when it is – because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that

mind’s whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic

to malice to hatred.” Hence the anti-conceptual person will find the fields of ethics and philosophy

especially threatening, Rand says, because the comprehension and application of philosophical principles

“requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first,

rudimentary links.”35 (Nor, she suggests, will they excel in the arts; this in fact is why, in the

entertainment field, sequels and spin-offs so often fail to live up to the original – because anti-conceptual

mentalities attempt to copy the perceptual concretes of the original, rather than the ideas behind those

concretes.)36

This failure to master the conceptual level is of course a matter of degree. Some master it more fully

than others, or master it in one area of life but not in another. 37 But to the extent that someone does

embody the anti-conceptual attitude (and it is an attitude that Rand regards as alarmingly widespread), to

that extent such a person is not actually thinking at all.

[A]s an adult, he has to use concepts, but he uses concepts by a child’s perceptual method. He uses them as concretes, as the immediately given – without context, definitions, integrations or specific referents …. To what, then, do his concepts refer? To a foggy mixture of partial knowledge, memorized responses, habitual associations, his audience’s reactions and his own feelings, which represent the content of his mind at that particular moment. … In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.38

Rand is claiming that the people she is criticizing do not actually possess the abstract concepts

corresponding to the words they use. If this claim seems incredible, we may find it less so once we

realize what Rand thinks is involved in possessing an abstract concept. Rand writes:

In order to think at all, man must be able to perform this cycle: he must know how to see an abstraction in the concrete and the concrete in an abstraction, and always relate one to the other. He must be able to derive an abstraction from the concrete [and] then be able to apply the abstraction …. Example: a man who has understood and accepted the abstract principle of unalienable individual rights cannot then go about advocating compulsory labor conscription …. Those who do have not performed either part of the cycle: neither the abstraction nor the translating of the abstraction into the concrete. The cycle is unbreakable; no part of it can be of any use, until and unless the cycle is completed …. A broken electric circuit does not function in the separate parts; it must be unbroken or there is no current ….39

In other words: We don’t have the abstraction and then see if we can apply it to the concrete; rather, the

ability to apply it to the concrete is part of having the abstraction.40 So those who can’t apply it, don’t

really count as having it. An anti-conceptual mentality may appear to be “able to participate” in a


“discussion or rational argument,” but “the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone

from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred …. [H]e remembers the event, i.e., a discussion,

not its intellectual content. … Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no

processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns.”41

For Rand, the anti-conceptual mentality is the syndrome of which racism is a particular manifestation.

Racism is not the only form the syndrome can take, and what form it does take will certainly be

influenced by social factors. Rand and Sartre both agree that the existing economic and political structure

makes racism more likely by promoting class conflict, thus breaking society into competing groups who

see their interests as being in competition with the interests of other groups. 42 For Sartre, the problem is

too much capitalism; for Rand, the problem is not enough capitalism. This is because Sartre accepts the

Marxist analysis of class conflict in terms of differential access to the means of production, while Rand

accepts the classical liberal analysis of class conflict in terms of differential access to political power. 43

But in Rand’s view, whatever the social factors, racism represents an especially natural mode of

expression for the anti-conceptual mentality.

The link between anti-conceptualism and racism is an attitude that Rand calls tribalism. An anti-

conceptual person’s subconscious “stores and automatizes … not ideas, but an indiscriminate

accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental

file folders. This works, up to a certain point – i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons

whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required.”44

The anti-conceptual mentality “can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes”; hence

they seek to belong to a world in which they “do not have to deal with abstract principles,” which are

instead “replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given.” 45 Hence,

although some anti-conceptualists become “lone wolves,”46 most feel drawn to some sort of

communitarian group identity.

Within the limits of their rules (which are usually called “traditions”), the inhabitants of such worlds are free to function – i.e., to deal with concretes … unhampered by the “intangibles” of theory – and to feel safe. Safe from what? Consciously, they would answer: “Safe from outsiders.” Actually, the answer is: safe from the necessity of dealing with fundamental principles (and consequently, safe from full responsibility for one’s own life). … If his professed beliefs – i.e., the rules and slogans of his group – are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang – the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological:47 to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. … “Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are


his protection – from the dreaded realm of abstract thought. … The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group … not to the group’s beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group’s members and leaders. Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders. Thus a physical qualification – the accident of birth in a given village or tribe – takes precedence over morality and justice.48

1 Sartre founded Les temps modernes in 1945 with his intellectual associate and sometime lover Simone de Beauvoir; Rand founded The Objectivist Newsletter (later The Objectivist) in 1962 with her intellectual associate and sometime lover Nathaniel Branden. (Rand’s journal ceased publication after nine years, but exercised an incalculable influence on the American libertarian movement.)2 Ayn Rand, journal entry for 15 May 1934, p. 72; in Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 70-73.3 Hazel E. Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), ch. 6.4 William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958); Hector Hawton, The Feast of Unreason (London: Watts & Co., 1952). Rand cites Barrett in “Don’t Let It Go, Part II,” p. 20, Ayn Rand Letter 1, no. 5 (1971), pp. 19-22, and both Barrett and Hawton in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., eds. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 60-61.5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 8.6 Ibid., p. 54.7 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized”; in Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 48-53.8 Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 11-12.9 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Emotions: Outline of a Theory,” p. 250; in Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, trans. Wade Baskin (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1965), pp. 189-254.10 “Emotions,” pp. 228-229.11 In a still further parallel, Sartre and Rand agree about the kind of psychological need that emotions can fulfill – the need to experience our longterm goals in an immediate form:

Sartre: “[T]he joyous subject behaves rather exactly like a man in a state of impatience. … He is informed that he has acquired a considerable sum of money or that he is going to see again someone he loves and whom he has not seen for a long time. But although the object is ‘imminent,’ it is not yet there, and it is not yet his. … [E]ven if the longed-for friend appears on the platform of the station, still it is an object which yields itself only little by little … we shall never get to the point of holding it there before us as our absolute property .… Joy is a magical behavior which tends by incantation to realize the possession of the desired object as an instantaneous totality. … To dance and sing for joy represent symbolically approximate behavior [by which] the object … is possessed at one swoop – symbolically. Thus it is, for example, that a man who has just been told by a woman that she loves him, can start dancing and singing. By doing this he abandons the prudent and difficult behavior which he would have to practice to deserve this love and make it grow, to realize slowly and through a thousand little details (smiles, little acts of attentiveness, etc.) that he possesses it. … He grants himself a respite; he will practice them later. For the moment, he possesses the object by magic; the dance mimics the possession.” (Sartre, “Emotions,” pp. 235-6; cf. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), p. 25.)

Rand: “Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values – a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him … the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals. … [H]e needs a moment … in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. … the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of


When the person who is seeking a group identity is uncomfortable with the abstract, conceptual level of

awareness, he will naturally be attracted to a concrete, perceptually delimited group: “The simplest

collective to join, the easiest one to identify … the least demanding form of ‘belonging’ and of

‘togetherness’ is: race.”49

But all forms of ethnic prejudice, whether strictly racist or not, derive from the same root:

Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia – the fear or hatred of foreigners (“outsiders”). … Tribalism [is a] reciprocally reinforcing cause and result

metaphysical joy ….” (“Art and Sense of Life,” pp. 37-38; in Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 34-44.)12 This oversimplifies the Stoic view somewhat; Stoics distinguish two sorts of emotional or quasi-emotional state: pathos, which embodies false evaluative judgments, and eupatheia, which does not. However, nearly all the states ordinarily recognized as emotions fall under pathos rather than eupatheia, on the Stoic view; indeed, it is a matter of exegetical dispute whether an eupatheia is genuinely a kind of emotion, or is rather something the Stoic sage has instead of an emotion.13 Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” pp. 30-31; in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Penguin, 1965), pp. 13-39.14 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” pp. 42-45; in Essays in Existentialism, pp. 31-62.15 Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 53-54.16 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Childhood of a Leader,” pp. 132-133; in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1975), pp. 84-144.17 Ibid., pp. 126-127.18 Ibid., pp. 95, 141.19 Ibid., p. 122.20 Ayn Rand, letter to Rose Wilder Lane, December 1946, p. 355; in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 352-356.21 Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” p. 118; in Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 115-129.22 Ayn Rand, “The Missing Link,” p. 38 in Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (Penguin: New York, 1984), pp. 35-45.23 Existentialist Ethics, p. 128.24 Though such guidelines will not necessarily be something “everyone knows” – partly because understanding human nature is a more complicated business than understanding oak-tree nature, and partly because we have special motivations to misunderstand human nature. 25 Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” p. 26; in Philosophy: Who Needs It, pp. 23-34.26 Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” pp. 192-194; in Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 187-239.27 Objectivist Epistemology, pp. 13-21.28 Ayn Rand, “The Missing Link,” p. 38.29 Ibid ., p. 38.30 Ayn Rand, “Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” p. 102; in Voice of Reason, pp. 100-114.31 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 48.32 “Cultural Value-Deprivation,” p. 102.33 “Missing Link,” p. 38.34 Ibid., pp. 39-40.35 Ibid., p. 40.


of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars.50

The “ways of living” they transmit from generation to generation consist in: folk songs, folk dances, special ways of cooking food, traditional costumes, and folk festivals. Although the professional “ethnics” would (and did) fight wars over the differences between their songs and those of their neighbors, there are no significant differences between them … if you’ve seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you’ve seen them all. … Now observe the nature of those traditional ethnic “achievements”: all of them belong to the perceptual level of man’s consciousness. All of them are ways of dealing with or manipulating the concrete, the immediately given, the directly perceivable.51

Rand’s observation that a preference for the concrete over the abstract is central to the racist

syndrome is seconded by Sartre. For Sartre, of course, the reason is the racist’s fear of his own freedom,

a fear that expresses itself in a flight from the indefinite to the definite, from the indeterminate to the

determinate. But Sartre agrees that the racist takes comfort in “ancestral wisdom” and “tried customs”

and “attaches himself to a tradition and to a community.” Hostile to any sort of “abstractions,” he “has a

36 Ayn Rand, “Perry Mason Finally Loses”; in Ayn Rand Letter 2, no. 22 (1973), pp. 225-228.37 “[T]o the man of pseudo-self-esteem, reality appears as a threat, as an enemy; he feels, in effect, that it’s reality or his self-esteem – since his self-esteem is purchased at the cost of evasion, of entrenched areas of blindness, of cognitive self-censorship. This is why a man may be perfectly rational and lucid, in an area that does not touch on or threaten his pseudo-self-esteem – and be flagrantly irrational, evasive, defensive and stupid, in an area which is threatening to his self-appraisal.” (Nathaniel Branden, “Pseudo-Self-Esteem,” Objectivist Newsletter 3, no. 5 (1964), pp. 17-20.) Hence a racist need not manifest an aversion to conceptual functioning in every area of life.38 “Comprachicos,” pp. 217-218.39 Ayn Rand, journal entry for 4 May 1946, p. 481; in Journals, pp. 478-482.40 Roderick T. Long, “The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism,” p. 416; in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 2 (2001), pp. 395-448.41 “Comprachicos,” p. 218.42 Sartre: Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 148-150.

Rand: “Racism,” pp. 150-153, in Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 147-157; “A Nation’s Unity,” Ayn Rand Letter 2, no. 1 (1972), pp. 121-124; “A Nation’s Unity, Part II,” Ayn Rand Letter 2, no. 2 (1972), pp. 125-128; cf. “Progress or Sacrifice,” p. 9, in Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Column, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Schwartz (New Milford: Second Renaissance, 1998), pp. 9-11.43 cf. Roderick T. Long, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class,” in Social Philosophy & Policy 15, no. 2 (1998), pp. 303-349.44 “Missing Link,” p. 39; emphasis added.45 Ibid., p. 40.46 Ayn Rand, “Selfishness Without a Self,” p. 46; in Philosophy: Who Needs It, pp. 46-51.47 “Psycho-epistemology” is Rand’s term for “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” (“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” p. 18; in Romantic Manifesto, pp. 15-24.)48 “Missing Link,” pp. 40-42.49 “Racism,” p. 151.50 “Missing Link,” p. 42.51 “Global Balkanization,” p. 120.


fundamental incomprehension of the various forms of modern property: money, securities, etc.” and “can

conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land based on a veritable magical rapport.”52

Rand and Sartre also agree that the racist syndrome is above all an expression of the racist’s fear of

the responsibilities of freedom. Rand describes the anti-conceptual mentality as a “longing for the

effortless, irresponsible, automatic consciousness of an animal,”53 while Sartre concurs that racists “do not

want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate.”54 But it is not just unearned knowledge but

unearned merit that the racist craves. On this point Rand and Sartre sound remarkably similar. Here is

Rand:

[R]acism has only one psychological root; the racist’s sense of his own inferiority. Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge – for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment – and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem ….The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe.55

And here is Sartre:

The anti-Semite has no illusions about what he is. He considers himself an average man, modestly average, basically mediocre. … This man fears every kind of solitariness [and] attaches himself to a tradition and to a community – the tradition and community of the mediocre. … By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite. … an aristocracy of birth. There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing. … To this end [the anti-Semite] finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be superior? … The anti-Semite is not too anxious to possess individual merit. Merit has to be sought, just like truth; it is discovered with difficulty; one must deserve it. … Now the anti-Semite flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of rock, he chooses for his morality a scale of petrified values.56

One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s analysis of sexism: “Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to

manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own … by the mere fact of being born

a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race.”57

52 Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 22-23.53 Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 15.54 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 19.55 “Racism,” p. 149.56 Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 22-28.57 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (Mineola: Dover, 1997), p. 80.


Discussing a French anti-Semite’s claim that no Jew, no matter how intelligent, is capable of

understanding Racine, Sartre writes: “But the way is open to me, mediocre me, to understand what the

most subtle, the most cultivated intelligence, has been unable to grasp. Why? Because I possess Racine –

Racine and my country and my soil.”58 Rand likewise notes “the claim of a German brute to the status of

a superior because his race has ‘produced’ Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.”59 Like Sartre, she dismisses

any such claim to borrowed ethnic or national merit as a fraud:

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements – and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.60

An idea, simple or complex, cannot be held in half by two men, working together as a Siamese-twin unit or collective. A man cannot say in reference to his ideas: “I’ve only got the nouns and adverbs – my brother Joe’s got the verbs and adjectives – we think kinda like a team.” An idea is not a jig-saw puzzle whose pieces can be scattered among various participants, while a mystical super-entity – the collective – puts the picture together …. An idea, an intelligible mental conception, is held in its entirety in the mind of one man. Another man may hold the same idea – in its entirety and in his own mind.61

For Rand as for Sartre, the desire for automatic self-esteem leads the racist to deny the reality of free

will, believing instead that “a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born,

by physical factors outside his control.”62 This denial of free will, in turn, only further reinforces racial

hostility: “If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable

way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way – then no communication, no

understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred.”63

On both the Sartrean and the Randian view, there exists a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing

relationship between the racist’s desire to evade his own freedom, and the violent oppression perpetrated

by racist régimes. In an analysis of colonialism, Sartre writes:

How can this elite of usurpers, conscious of their mediocrity, justify their privileges? Only one way: diminish the colonized in order to exalt themselves, deny the status of human beings to the natives, and deprive them of basic rights. … [T]hey must harden, give themselves the opaque consistency and impermeability of stone; in short they in turn must dehumanize themselves.64

58 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 24.59 “Racism,” p. 149.60 Ibid., p. 148.61 Ayn Rand, “The Rational Faculty,” journal entry for 22 August 1945, p. 306; in Journals, pp. 305-310.62 “Racism,” p. 146.63 “Global Balkanization,” p. 127.


Likewise Rand’s student Leonard Peikoff offers a Randian analysis of the Nazi Holocaust:

The guards were well-clothed, well-fed, and ideologically trained. But they, too, were being processed and shaped. The prisoner was learning to submit to absolute power. The guard (or administrator) was learning to wield it, with everything this requires, and destroys, in the wielder.With every causeless punishment he inflicted, whether in response to an order or on his own

initiative, the young guard was negating the idea of a man as a sovereign, rights-possessing

entity; he was negating it not only in the prisoner’s mind, but in his own. With every unthinkable

atrocity he committed, the guard was negating his former sense of morality …. With every insane

rule and switching contradiction he enforced or invented, the guard was schooling himself in

senselessness …. The opponents of consciousness were fighting to extinguish it in their victims

and in themselves.65

Both Sartre and Rand develop the Hegelian idea of the dependence of the oppressor on the oppressed. 66

Concerning colonialist oppression, Sartre writes:

Oppression is, first of all, hatred of the oppressor toward the oppressed. Only one limit to this enterprise of extermination: colonialism itself. It is here that the colonists meet their own contradiction: along with the colonized, colonization, the colonizers included, would disappear. The system wants the death and the multiplication of its victims at the same time.67

Similarly, Rand’s fictional protagonist John Galt tells his would-be oppressors:

I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.68

Interestingly – given Sartre’s sympathy for Marxism, versus Rand’s loathing for it – the two thinkers

agree that the racist’s preference for the concrete over the abstract explains why the racist syndrome is

more closely associated with right-wing versions of collectivist ideology, like Nazism, rather than with

left-wing versions of collectivist ideology, like Marxism. Sartre tells us that Marxists define their

64 “Colonizer and Colonized,” pp. 51-53.65 Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: New American Library, 1983), pp. 248-52.66 For Rand’s development of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, see Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 300-311.67 “Colonizer and Colonized,” p. 52.68 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 963.


opponents by their actions, by their position in the structure of production and exchange, rather than by

racial or ethnic features; for the Marxist, “what constitutes the bourgeois is his bourgeois status, that is, an

ensemble of external factors,”69 and if the bourgeois class does not embrace communism, “it is because its

very situation as a privileged class prevents it from doing so, not because of some indefinable interior

demon which compels it to do evil.” If individual members of the bourgeois class break away and join

the communist cause, as Marx and Engels themselves did, “they will be judged by their acts, not by their

essence.”70

Unlike Sartre, Rand opposed left-wing and right-wing forms of collectivism equally, but she agreed

that – at least before the rise of the New Left, which she regarded as anti-intellectual – left-wing

collectivists had been “the representatives of the intellect … if not in the content of their ideas, then at

least in form, method, and professed epistemology”; they claimed to base their views on “reason, logic,

science,” while right-wing collectivists upheld tribalist custom.71 The “common denominator” of

political conservatism, for Rand, is “a folksy, ‘cracker-barrel,’ mass-oriented kind of anti-intellectual

reliance on faith (‘the heart’) and on ‘tradition.’”72

During the Russian Revolution, Rand herself spent her early teens in a small town in the Crimea that

kept changing hands between the two opposing armies. She recalls: “When it was occupied by the White

Army, I almost longed for the return of the Red Army, and vice versa. … The Red Army stood for

totalitarian dictatorship and rule by terror. The White Army stood for nothing; repeat: nothing. In answer

to the monstrous evil they were fighting, the Whites found nothing better to proclaim than the dustiest,

smelliest bromides of the time: we must fight, they said, for Holy Mother Russia, for faith and

tradition.”73 Sartre writes in similar terms of the motives of the French conservatives who favored a “yes”

vote to establish an autocratic régime under Charles de Gaulle:

Look around you: the ‘yesses’ and the ‘noes’ are on display everywhere: on walls, in provincial newspapers, in L'Express. The ‘no’ vote states its reasons, explains its choice, it is impassioned geometry. The ‘yes’ votes are sighs: they abandon themselves to grand dreams, to grand sentiments, to grand words, to that flood of tears which has often preceded the setting up of dictatorships. A dismal enthusiasm: against Reason, ‘yes’ invokes the reasons of the heart that the Reason knoweth not – but their heart is not in it.74

69 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 37.70 Ibid., p. 42.71 Ayn Rand, “The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” p. 85; in Voice of Reason, pp. 85-99.72 Ayn Rand, “It Is Earlier Than You Think,” p. 50; in Objectivist Newsletter 3, no. 12 (1964), pp. 49-52.73 Ayn Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” p. 138; in Voice of Reason, pp. 137-148.74 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Frogs Who Demand a King,” p. 97; in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, pp. 96-119.


Anti-conceptual mentalities – the mentalities that are predisposed toward racism – are more likely to

be attracted by right-wing forms of collectivism, Rand writes, because the left-wing forms are too

conceptually demanding:

Marxism is an intellectual construct; it is false, but it is an abstract theory – and it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities. It requires a significantly high level of abstraction to grasp the reality of “an international working class” – a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the next town as fully real.75

One result of this difference is the greater tendency of right-wing collectivists to focus on personalities

rather than principles. As I have written elsewhere:

[Socialists] tend to think of business power as an institutional or systemic problem; but [populists] are more likely to see it in personal terms, as a matter of wickedness in high places. Hence, [populists] are more prone to conspiracy theories than are [socialists]. But seeing social problems as deriving from the immorality of individuals rather than from system-wide incentives makes [populists] more amenable to the idea that the system might work if good people took it over; it also makes them more susceptible to the suggestion that perhaps it is the wrong ethnic or cultural groups that have gotten in power.76

Likewise, Sartre observes that right-wing collectivists “behave toward social facts like primitives who

endow the wind and the sun with little souls. Intrigues, cabals, the perfidy of one man, the courage and

virtue of another – that is what determines … the course of the world.”77 In similar terms, Rand writes

that those who “are able to deal only with immediate concretes … are compelled to substitute men for

ideas.”78

The concrete-bound pragmatist mentality cannot fight for an abstract goal. It cannot fight for anything in the realm of ideas, only against something. To fight for, means to struggle to bring something into existence, which requires the power of abstraction; to fight against, means to oppose something which is there already. But even to fight against an existing idea requires the promulgation of ideas. What can one find as a substitute, which is there already and which – one has been taught – is unaffected by ideas? Men. For many years past, the ideological policy and argumentation of most of the political Right has been one solid ad hominem. Republican candidates me-too’d the Democrats, adding only the claim that they, the Republicans, would do the job better, because they were better, kindlier, more experienced, or more folksy men.79

75 “Global Balkanization,” p. 126.76 Long, “Libertarian Theory of Class,” pp. 331-332.77 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 37.78 Ayn Rand, “Ideas v. Men,” p. 319; in Ayn Rand Letter 3, no. 15 (1974), pp. 315-320.79 Ayn Rand, “Brothers, You Asked For It!, Part II,” p. 191; in Ayn Rand Letter 2, no. 15 (1973), pp. 191-194.


Echoing Plato’s parable of the Cave, Rand speaks of “emerging from a dank cave where concrete-bound

children whimper about the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ character of government officials, to a hillside where

adults are still able to deal with abstractions and to remember the concept ‘tyranny.’”80 Like Plato’s

Gyges with his ring, the anti-conceptual mentality tends to think of morality in the concrete perceptual

terms of reward and punishment: “[Mother] will beat me if I steal the cookies and will kiss me if I don’t.”

For Rand, as for Plato, this is a sign that one has not yet “entered the realm of abstraction from

abstractions.”81

Rand sees elements of the racist syndrome in a number of features of right-wing collectivism, from the

promotion of family values – Rand dismissed “[t]he worship of the ‘Family’ [as] mini-racism, like a

crudely primitive first installment on the worship of the tribe”82 – to the concern to protect linguistic

purity:

Language is a conceptual tool …. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. … But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders. … The tribalists clamor that their language preserves their “ethnic identity.” But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect [provides] an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist’s stagnant consciousness. … [T]o the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication [but] a symbol of tribal status and power.83

Rand also saw former Alabama governor George Wallace as a textbook example of the link between anti-

conceptualism and right-wing collectivism. In 1968, she wrote:

George Wallace represents the emergence of an open fascism in this country …. Observe the symptoms: racism … a primitive, undefined nationalism … militant anti-intellectuality … the constant appeal to “the little people” or “the plain people” or “us folks” … and force, the explicit and implicit reliance on the “activism” of physical force as the solution to all social problems. … He is merely paying occasional lip-service to the Constitutional tradition of this country, purely as tradition, which he neither understands nor supports. … When he denounces “Big Government,” it is not the unlimited, arbitrary power of the state that he is denouncing, but merely its centralization ….84

80 “Ideas v. Men,” pp. 319-320.81 Objectivist Epistemology, p. 218.82 Ayn Rand, “The Age of Mediocrity,” p. 5; in Objectivist Forum 2, no. 3 (1981), pp. 1-11.83 “Global Balkanization,” pp. 121-122.84 Ayn Rand, “The Presidential Candidates, 1968,” pp. 468-469; in Objectivist 7, no. 6 (1968), pp. 465-470.


In Rand’s view, however, this difference between left-wing and right-wing collectivism holds more in

theory than in practice. After all, she points out, Red Russia had its anti-Semitic pogroms just as White

Russia did; but under the Soviets these pogroms were called “political purges.” In Rand’s view, any

collectivist régime, whatever its official ideology, will inevitably be attracted to racism: “the mystique of

racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state.”85 Unlike Sartre, who for a good many

years tried to defend the policies of Stalin and Mao, Rand sees no essential difference between the

conduct of communist régimes and of fascist ones. Indeed, Rand thinks that even the democratic welfare

state inadvertently promotes racism and every other form of tribalism by “disintegrat[ing] a country into

an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges

at the expense of one another”86 – whereas Sartre, by contrast, charges that a color-blind, libertarian

approach like Rand’s, that “recognizes neither Jew, nor Arab, nor Negro, nor bourgeois, nor worker, but

only man [and] resolves all collectivities into individual elements …. wants to separate the Jew from his

religion, from his family, from his ethnic community, in order to plunge him into the democratic crucible

whence he will emerge naked and alone, an individual and solitary particle like all the other particles.”87

One final difference between Sartre and Rand with regard to the racist syndrome concerns the proper

attitude toward uncertainty. Sartre writes:

How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubts on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is “open”; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension. But they wish to exist all at once and right away.88

As Sartre sees it, the racist syndrome arises from a lack of willingness to live with uncertainty; insistence

on certainty is self-deception. But for Rand, it is not the insistence on certainty per se, but the insistence

on automatic, effortless certainty that constitutes self-deception. Sartre describes the rational mentality as

“tentative” and “open”; but Rand objects to the phrase “open mind” because it is generally used to fuse

together two ideas that Rand regards as quite distinct: “an objective, unbiased approach” on the one hand,

and “perpetual skepticism” or “holding no firm convictions” on the other.

85 “Racism,” pp. 149-150.86 Ibid., p. 152. For the reciprocal relationship Rand sees between racist psychology and political oppression, see Sciabarra, Russian Radical, pp. 341-8.87 Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 55-57.88 Ibid., pp. 18-19.


A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices – and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. … What objectivity [requires] is not an “open mind,” but an active mind – a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind … does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them.89

Thus where Sartre portrays Lemordant the racist as hard and inflexible like granite, in Rand’s fiction it is

the heroes who are granite-like, with harsh angular names like Dagny Taggart, while the villains are

tentative and amorphous and have soft squishy names like Wesley Mouch. In criticizing Hannah

Arendt’s view90 that the chief flaw of Nazism is that its proponents were “too consistent” and tied

themselves up in a “strait jacket of logic,” Rand retorts that it is a “terrible error … to assume that

undercutting man’s self-confidence will turn him into a mild, humbly benevolent citizen, and that

destroying his confidence in reason will make him peacefully tractable. … The great miscalculation of the

twentieth century … is the notion that evil is the product of a self-confident mind, while doubt and

uncertainty protect society from the ambitions of tyrants. … Who would fight against evil and tyranny

when he can be certain of nothing – neither of what is evil nor of his own value?”91 For Sartre,

epistemological self-confidence is the road to racism; for Rand, it is the road away from it.

NotesI am grateful for comments I received when presenting an earlier version of this paper at an Auburn Philosophical Society Roundtable on Racism.

89 Ayn Rand, “Philosophical Detection,” p. 21; in Philosophy: Who Needs It, pp. 12-22.90 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), pp. 351, 457, 470-473.91 “Age of Mediocrity,” p. 7.


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