Leonard Peikoff - Early Involvement in Objectivism

Early Involvement in Objectivism

Peikoff first met Ayn Rand through his cousin Barbara Branden (then Barbara Weidman) in California when he was 17. He reports that this meeting with Rand made him aware of the profound importance of philosophy. When Rand later moved to New York City, Peikoff decided to study philosophy at New York University. While studying at NYU, he frequently discussed philosophy privately with Rand in depth across a range of issues.

Peikoff, along with Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Barbara Branden, and a number of other close associates, who jokingly called themselves "The Collective," met frequently with Rand to discuss philosophy and politics, as well as to read and discuss Rand's forthcoming novel, Atlas Shrugged, in her Manhattan apartment. In 1958 Branden founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute to promote Objectivism through lectures and educational seminars around the United States. Among its first lecturers were Peikoff and Greenspan. NBI soon had representatives all over the U.S. and around the world.

In biographical interviews with Rand recorded in the early 1960s with Barbara Branden, she stated that it was her discussions with Peikoff and Allan Gotthelf which motivated her to complete an extended monograph on concept-formation, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Rand would later include Peikoff's essay on the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy" in the first hardcover edition of the work in book form. Peikoff was also an active participant in Rand's 1969-71 "Workshops" on the monograph, along with a number of other professional philosophers, as well as subsequent, smaller philosophy workshops at Rand's apartment.

Following the dissolution of NBI in 1968, Peikoff continued to give private lecture courses on a variety of topics to large Objectivist audiences, and recordings of these have been sold for many years. His lecture courses include: The History of Philosophy (in two "volumes" of lectures), An Introduction to Logic, The Art of Thinking, Induction in Physics and Philosophy, Moral Virtue, A Philosophy of Education, Understanding Objectivism, The Principles of Objective Communication and Eight Great Plays. Rand endorsed his 1976 lecture series on Objectivism as the best exposition of her philosophy, the only one she knew to be accurate.

Peikoff's first book, The Ominous Parallels, was both an Objectivist explanation of the rise of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and a warning that America was being led down the road to totalitarianism because of far-reaching philosophical and cultural parallels between Weimar Germany and the present-day United States. In her "Introduction," Rand declared it to be the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than herself.