The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

In the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, a social movement known as the New Left emerged as a major cultural influence, especially on the youth of America.

It was a movement that embraced flower-power and psychedelic consciousness-expansion, that lionized Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and launched the Black Panthers and the Theater of the Absurd. In Return Of The Primitive (originally published in 1971 as The New Left), Ayn Rand, bestselling novelist and originator of the theory of Objectivism, identified the intellectual roots of this movement.

She urged people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to uphold, instead, a philosophy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and technological progress. Editor Peter Schwartz, in this new, expanded version of The New Left, has reorganized Rand's essays and added some of his own in order to underscore the continuing relevance of her analysis of that period.

He examines such current ideologies as feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism and argues that the same primitive, tribalist, anti-industrial mentality that animated the New Left a generation ago is shaping society today.

Author: Ayn Rand
Publisher: New American Library
Published: 01/01/1999
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.30w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780452011847

About the Author
Born February 2, 1905, Ayn Rand published her first novel, We the Living, in 1936. Anthem followed in 1938. It was with the publication of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) that she achieved her spectacular success. Rand's unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are put forth in three nonfiction books, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtues of Selfishness, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. They are all available in Signet editions, as is the magnificent statement of her artistic credo, The Romantic Manifesto.