Reply to the Critics of Russian Radical 2.0: The Dialectical Rand

Sciabarra responds to critics of the second edition of his book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical: Wendy McElroy, who reviewed the book for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (July 2015), and Shoshana Milgram and Gregory Salmieri, whose most recent criticisms appear in A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016). Sciabarra defends both his historical and methodological theses, situating the book within a trilogy of works that define and defend "dialectical libertarianism," which eschews utopian thinking and embraces a fully radical mode of inquiry. Sciabarra argues that dialectics—the art of context-keeping—figures prominently throughout Rand's literary and philosophical corpus.