Speaking Freely (MP3 download)

By Ayn Rand

Between 1967 and 1976, broadcast journalist Edwin Newman interviewed hundreds of leading figures for his weekly NBC television program Speaking Freely.

In this wide-ranging 1972 interview (available as an audio download), Rand discusses the connections between contemporary culture and philosophy, singling out the influence of 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant on attitudes toward reason, morality, and science. She also explains why she thought she was living in an “age of envy” characterized by hostility to man’s rational faculty and independent judgment (an assessment she had made a year earlier in an article for her magazine The Objectivist called “The Age of Envy,” July/August 1971). Rand also identifies connections between Kant’s thinking and the ecology movement that had emerged in the late 1960s.

Here you will find Rand’s thoughts on a variety of other issues, including:

• The proper role of government
• Pollution control laws
• Evidence that the scientific method is being undercut in modern culture
• The legitimacy of labor laws, such as those setting maxiumum hours in a work week
• The relation between labor legislation and unemployment
• The effects of capitalism wherever and whenever it’s been tried throughout history
• The philosophic ideas that undermine capitalism
• The importance of the separation of church and state
• The incompatibility of faith and reason
• Rand’s assessment of liberals and conseratives in her day
• How Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964 displayed the “bankruptcy of conservatism”
• The Women’s Liberation movement
• How modern drug culture is a symptom of a greater cultural problem
• Whether drugs should be legalized

An edited version of this interview can be found in Objectively Speaking, a collection of Rand’s interviews edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz.