Review: Ayn Rand’s Ideal

In her notebooks, Rand makes a hero of both Hickman and the fictional Renahan, who murders a church pastor instead of a child, and extols the killers’ beautiful souls, which rise and set without a trace of “social instinct or herd feeling.” Of Hickman she writes, “A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet … That boy was not strong enough.” Meanwhile, Renahan “does not understand,” she writes quite rapturously, “because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.”