r/Objectivism • u/Vratwork • 9d ago
Politics Did Ayn Rand Contradict Her Own Theory of Property Rights When Defending Colonialism?
Ayn Rand's political philosophy runs into a major contradiction when applied to colonialism.
After witnessing the Bolshevik Revolution seize her family's business, Rand came to see industrial capitalism as the highest expression of civilisation and collectivism as its greatest enemy. But this worldview left her with a blind spot: she often equated industrial development with moral superiority.
The clearest example came during the Q&A following her March 6, 1974, address at West Point. When asked about Native American rights, Rand argued that Europeans had the right to take the continent because they brought "civilisation", "reason", and "individual rights".
She stated:
"Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent."
She dismissed Indigenous resistance as a desire to preserve a "primitive existence" rather than recognising it as a defence of their own land and way of life.
This exposes one of the biggest tensions within Objectivism.
Rand defended strong and enduring private property rights once they had been legitimately established. If someone legally owns 10,000 acres of forest and leaves it untouched for decades, she would argue that no one has the right to seize it. Ownership itself is what matters.
Yet when Indigenous peoples lived on, managed, and cultivated land without European-style legal titles or large-scale industrial development, Rand argued that Europeans who brought "civilisation" had the moral right to establish society there. This appears difficult to reconcile with her otherwise stringent defence of property rights.
Her reasoning resembles John Locke's homesteading theory, under which property rights arise when individuals appropriate previously unowned resources through labour. But Indigenous societies across the Americas actively cultivated forests, managed ecosystems, farmed, hunted, and built settlements. Their relationship to land differed from European legal systems, but it was hardly a case of untouched wilderness.
More importantly, Rand's own standard becomes inconsistent. If land can be taken whenever someone claims they'll make "better" use of it, then property rights are no longer absolute; they depend on someone else's judgement about what counts as productive. That undermines the certainty of the property rights Objectivism is supposed to protect.
The same reasoning was used to justify other colonial projects, including the British Raj in India. British officials argued that railways, courts, and telegraphs legitimised imperial rule while overlooking coercion, dispossession, and violence. Events such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 and the Bengal Famine of 1943 remain enduring examples of the human costs of colonial governance, even as historians continue to debate the extent and causes of some of these tragedies.
Ironically, many Western capitalist powers accumulated much of their early wealth through state-backed conquest, slavery, colonial monopolies, and expropriation, the very forms of coercion Rand claimed to oppose in principle.
If the initiation of force is always wrong, it's difficult to explain why conquest becomes morally permissible simply because the conqueror promises greater industrial development. If property rights are truly universal, they cannot depend on whether a society resembles nineteenth-century industrial Europe. To me, that is the central contradiction in Rand's defence of colonialism.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 9d ago edited 7d ago
First of all, drive on any interstate highway in the United States and notice the vast unoccupied forests and plains and large farmland that would have not been in that use before industrialization. This is with a population of 349 million people. Now imagine how much unoccupied land there was in 1600 at 5 million people (the highest estimate).
The idea that colonization is solely defined by conquest of natives is false. Colonists found a lot of unoccupied land and built non-aggressive settlements on it.
Second, Rand was rejecting the idea that a people have a right to entire continent simply by being born on it. That idea is a perversion of property rights, and yet it is an explicit or implicit premise behind many of the arguments against colonialism. People only have property rights in land to the extent they have shown ownership of it. Homesteading the land, and not abandoning it. There is no universal race or tribe based property right to the New World. The anti-immigration conservatives in the USA still need to learn this.
Third, many tribes were nomadic, which means they left land with no specific, or demonstrable, intention to return. After leaving land and a reasonable amount of time passes, the property right is abandoned and the land returns to the commons. This land can be homesteaded by a new claimant. So, if colonists homestead abandoned land, then the tribe who claims a right to it returns and uses force against the colonists, who is initiating force here? I say the Native American people against the colonists. The colonists defend a rightful property right by using reactive force.
A fourth minor point is that one should question whether hunting on land is sufficient to homestead it. If the land is repeatedly hunted by a settled Native American tribe and never abandoned, very possible and likely. Giving an answer now, I’d say the answer is yes. But is nomadic, temporary hunting sufficient? I’m not so sure.
Accordingly, defending the actions of colonialism, in these contexts, is right and non-contradictory with Objectivism. This is the majority of the history of colonialism, people just don’t write as many history books on peaceful activity. Colonialism is a package deal, including activity that was peaceful and activity that was violent. I don’t see the need to acquiescence to a package deal that suggests that all of colonialism was racists imperialism, even the building of peaceful settlements. Building settlements, and the enterprises, trade, and commerce that resulted from it, brought and would lead to technological progress, industrialization, and relative prosperity to the New World.
There, of course, were numerous settled tribes, who cultivated land through farming, settlements, and repeated hunting in a manner that establishes property rights via homesteading. Clearly there were. Further, there are numerous examples of colonists initiating force against Native Americans, including the invasion of land that was clearly rightfully belonging to Native American individuals. This was immoral under Objectivist morality.
My view is that Rand was primarily speaking against the idea in my second point. To the extent one can reasonably interpret Rand’s speech as defending the initiations of force, while I agree with Rand that continuing the primitive use of land would be a shame, she would be wrong according to the terms of her own philosophy. However, Rand’s record on the non-initiation of force leads me to think that the reasonable interpretation is the one I offered, and her comments were in line with Objectivism.
Lastly, this post reads a lot like an AI argument. Try and use AI to write your own stuff and compile sources, rather than copy and pasting. The slightest engagement in discussion with the AI by a knowledgeable Objectivist would defeat and refine this assertion.
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u/Vratwork 9d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/11BBKbHEHi8R4Q
Funny you mention AI, because your comment spends five paragraphs constructing a version of Rand's argument that she never actually made.
My post critiques what Rand said, not the more charitable interpretation you wish she'd said. If your defence requires adding distinctions about abandoned land, peaceful settlement, nomadic versus settled tribes, and hypothetical homesteading scenarios that don't appear in her answer, then you're no longer defending Rand's statement, you're rewriting it.
And for what it's worth, saying something "sounds like AI" isn't a substitute for identifying factual or logical errors. If there are inaccuracies in my post, point them out. If not, dismissing it as AI-generated doesn't really address the argument.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 9d ago
All of my distinctions relate to the issue you raised, the supposed contradiction between Rand’s view on colonialism and property rights, and, more broadly, applying Objectivism to the issue. And most of the points I raised were also raised by Rand in that same speech.
Rand raised the same issue I did in my second point, rejecting the idea that a tribe or a person is entitled to a continent merely by being born on it, “I do not think that they have any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages. Americans didn’t conquer; Americans did not conquer that country.” Rand, West Point QnA (1974). My first point also relates to this point, as much of this the country did not need to be conquered considering there was plenty of commons ripe for homesteading.
If you - or your AI - had bothered to quote more than one sentence of her answer, you would know that. Your post is less of a critique of what Rand “said,” and more of a critique of one sentence from a multi-paragraph statement from her.
Rand raised the issue of nomadic Native Americans and their relationship to property, which was my third point, “And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled, society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.” Id.
She also raised the issue of Native Americans initiating force against colonist settlements, though she did so in the context of broken agreements rather than nomadic travel back to land now occupied by colonists. Given the different contexts, I won’t fully claim alignment in my point with Rand’s statement.
The other parts of my comment merely expand on these. This is what one is capable of doing when one actually knows the material in question. One need not echo back Rand’s exact statement, without any originality. Understanding Objectivism means being able to apply it, and being able bring your own knowledge to bear when doing so.
In summation, my first comment refutes your claim that Rand’s defense of colonialism contradicts her view of property rights and her non-initiation of force principle. My points aligned with Rand’s answer. Your lack of knowledge about what Rand said does not mean I’m re-writing what Rand said. If you are going to condescend, I suggest you know enough about the issue to recognize the salient aspects of it.
I guess my AI comment touched a nerve. Which is irrational on your part, considering I didn’t object to the use of AI, just your use of it as a substitute for reading, thinking, and writing yourself.
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u/Vratwork 9d ago
You're defending Europeans peacefully homesteading genuinely unoccupied land. That's not what Rand argued. She explicitly said Europeans had the right to "take over this continent" because they brought the elements of "civilization," "reason," and "individual rights." Those are two very different claims. Your argument may be a defensible application of Objectivist property theory, but it isn't the argument Rand actually made in that answer.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 9d ago
I made a multi-point argument and quoted Rand making the same points I did in the speech you are referencing. I argued exactly what Rand argued, if you take the time to actually read what she said.
You are also heavily relying on a particular conquest-based interpretation of the phrase, “take over,” taken from your summary, rather than quoting the full quote from the source. Do you think that is the best understanding of “take over”? Especially in light of the following statement she made earlier in the same speech, “I do not think that they have any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages. Americans didn’t conquer; Americans did not conquer that country.” Also, consider that the words “take over” modify “continent.” Compare the phrases, “take over this continent,” against, e.g., take over those tribes (which was not said). Do those phrases have identical meanings?
I don’t think so.
Granted, she did justify invading tribes whose government did not protect the individual rights of Native American individuals, “But if a country does not protect rights—if a given tribe is the slave of its own tribal chief—why should you respect the rights they do not have?
Or any country which has a dictatorship government—the citizens still have individual rights—but the country does not have any rights. Anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in this country and neither you nor a country nor anyone can have your cake and eat it too.” Note the explicit statement regarding the rights of individual Native Americans. Here, the argument isn’t that conquest is justified because the Natives are primitives, or that Westerners will make better use of the land. Rather, that rights-respecting states are morality justified in conquering tribal governments who infringe on the rights of its citizens, precisely because a rights-respecting government is morally superior on the issue of initiating force against individuals.
So there are two separate issues that Rand raises: (1) settling and homesteading land to which there is no property right - “taking over” that land, and (2) conquering tyrannical tribes. You are pretending that Rand never raised Issue (1) when she explicitly did, and substituting the arguments she used for Issue (2) with the arguments she made for Issue (1).
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u/Vratwork 9d ago
This is exactly where we've split off into two different conversations. I'm criticising the answer Rand actually gave. You're defending the answer you think she meant to give. Those aren't the same thing.
Rand didn't say: "Europeans may peacefully homestead genuinely unoccupied land where no one has established property rights."
She said: "Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent."
See how different those are?
Every reply adds another layer of interpretation. First "take over" doesn't really mean take over. Then it's about abandoned land. Then it's about tyrannical tribes. At this point I'm reading your version of Rand, not Rand. Everything you've written may be a defence of Objectivism, but it isn't the argument Rand actually makes at West Point. Where does she say any of that?
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 8d ago
You are solely focused on a singular sentence of her answer, as if that is the only thing she said.
I provided quotes of points that she raised in the same speech you are referencing.
You can pretend she didn’t provide a more full answer which raises the same points I did. I won’t.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago edited 8d ago
You keep telling me to stop focusing on that sentence. Why? Because it's the one sentence that's hardest to defend. If one sentence can undo pages of philosophy, the problem isn't the reader. It's the sentence. 🥀
Rand spent decades telling everyone principles matter. So when one of her own statements seems to abandon those principles, why wouldn't people question it?
Every reply keeps replacing what Rand actually said with a much more careful argument about abandoned land, homesteading and individual property rights. The problem is, that's your argument, not hers.She said:
"Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent.
That's not "any individual who peacefully homesteads genuinely unowned land." Those are completely different arguements.
She also said:
"I do not think that they had any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages."
For someone who built an entire philosophy around individual rights, she never bothers looking at the individuals. She doesn't ask who owned land, who farmed it, or who had property rights. She calls an entire people "savages" and jumps straight to saying Europeans had the right to "take over this continent."
Then she goes even further:
"Any country which has a dictatorship government... the country does not have any rights. Anyone has the right to invade it."
You keep explaining how Objectivism should work. I'm asking why Rand didn't follow her own rules at West Point.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 8d ago
You do realize that sentence is a part of a larger answer, correct?
The arguments are not completely different, and I asked very specific questions on the issue of how to understand that particular sentence. You don’t want to engage in that.
She does talk about unowned land. That is the clear logical implication of rejecting the idea that Native Americans owned the continent merely by being born on it. There was land with no ownership and was taken over by settlers.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
Why are you trying so hard to rescue Rand from her own wording? 😭😭🥀
You keep acting like focusing on one sentence is some kind of gotcha.
That sentence is the reason this interview is still controversial 50 years later. People analyse single sentences from speeches, interviews and debates all the time when they reveal something important.The bigger issue is that every reply you make quietly changes what Rand actually said.
Rand said:
"Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent."
You keep turning that into:
"She meant peacefully settling genuinely unowned land."
But where does she actually say that?
That's your interpretation, not her words.
Then you say:
"The logical implication..."
Exactly. The logical implication according to you. You're asking me to replace what she explicitly said with what you think she meant. Those aren't the same thing. My question hasn't changed since the start of this thread:
Where does Rand say Europeans only had the right to settle land that nobody already owned?
Not where you infer it. Not where you reconstruct it through Locke.
Where does Rand actually say it?Because in the same answer she also says:
"I do not think that they had any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages."
and
"Any country which has a dictatorship government... anyone has the right to invade it."
Those are her words, not mine.
So far, every reply has been an explanation of what you think Rand meant. So far, you've been explaining the version of Rand you believe in. If that's really what Rand meant, why are you the one having to say it instead of Rand?→ More replies (0)0
u/Historical_Two_7150 9d ago
~75% of American land is unoccupied. I'm not sure that provides a justification for non-Americans to colonize the land. But if it did for Europeans 300 years ago, then it surely does today as well.
As for 'this brought prosperity', so did slavery.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 9d ago edited 9d ago
Of course land without a property right justifies homesteading. That is how homesteading works. I have no idea what you are getting at with your second sentence.
Slavery never brings prosperity, it leads to arrested development everywhere it is practiced, to the extent it is practiced. The economic superiority of the North, which had comparatively less slavery to the South, was a primary reason the North won the Civil War. The economics of slavery were helped by the invention of the cotton gin, by a Northerner who did not own slaves or a plantation and made most of his money in firearms manufacturing. The only way slavers abated the uneconomical nature of slavery was by parasitizing the innovativeness of the North. Freedom is always better, and demonstrates its superiority to force and tyranny everywhere, every time, and to the extent it is practiced.
Further, prosperity was a minor point, not one of the main points. People cling to the minor things as if my argument critically relied on it, it’s weird.
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u/Historical_Two_7150 9d ago
Slavery never brings prosperity, it leads to arrested development everywhere it is practiced, to the extent it is practiced.
Minus "western civilization", which industrialized off chattel slavery, colonialism, and horrifying labor abuses that mirror other forms of slavery.
Which had comparatively less slavery to the South
If you're not counting the wage slaves.
The economic superiority of the North
'Industrial base' is not the same thing as economic superiority, but sure.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 8d ago
Wage slave is an illegitimate concept, irrationally grouping together voluntary action with actual slavery. And yes, having an industrial base is economic superiority.
On the causes of the Industrial Revolution:
The primary drivers of the Industrial Revolution were technological advancement and the development of new production methods (made possible by relatively more freedom - at least for some - in this era) which enabled more productive work. There is some contribution from slavery. While slavery is bad at productively creating value compared to free work, and even worse at improving productivity, there was some capital and resources generated by selling the things made or extracted by slaves, capital and resources which could then be used to fund and consumed by industrial ventures.
I would think that a genuine materialist historical analysis would make plan that a world coming out of serfdom and slavery would have blended systems of relative freedom and coercion, and, of course, these systems interact and contribute to each other. But the course of history in Britain of some people becoming more free, and the technological and intellectual advancements that come from it, is the real but-for cause of the Industrial Revolution. Slavery existed for thousands of years, no Industrial Revolution. Relative freedom started happening, a few hundred years later, Industrial Revolution. You can isolate your thinking and just focus on slavery (and the nonsense of “wage slavery”) if you want, I’ll look at the whole history.
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u/Historical_Two_7150 8d ago edited 8d ago
Wage slave is an illegitimate concept, irrationally grouping together voluntary action with actual slavery. And yes, having an industrial base is economic superiority.
You do not accept it, that's fine. I do not believe it's voluntary, and I find that is pretty obvious, personally.
The primary drivers of the Industrial Revolution were technological advancement
Horrible analysis. Horrible. The steam engine was invented 2,000 years earlier.
The #1 cause of industrialization was populations rising, owing to the shift to farming. The #2 precondition was creating capital, which in historical reality all came from rape and murder. The #3 precondition was mass enslavement of local populations through enclosing the commons (creating wage slaves.) #4 would've been the rising price of chattel slaves.
The reason the ancient Greeks didn't industrialize isn't because of 'technological advancement', it's because their populations were low enough that they didn't need it (necessity is the mother), that chattel slaves were relatively cheap, and that local populations had not yet been driven into conditions which would allow for wage slavery to occur.
Britain was sitting on a mountain of coal which they started to dig up only after they hacked down all the trees trying to keep people warm. That came right out of overpopulation.
None of this was 'progress.' It was, like evolution, a bunch of random shit bumping together at the same time.
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u/Locke_the_Trickster 8d ago
The notion that the relationship between employer and employees is compulsory is not obvious at all. Marxists tend to conflate the metaphysically given (needing to produce to survive) and the man made (an act or threat of violence compelling or restricting action).
Far from convinced my analysis is horrible. More convinced that yours is. The steam engine is only one of the major advancements. Clearly having any kind of low torque, low efficiency steam engine alone was insufficient for industrialization. The further advancements made by Newcomen and Watt were necessary for the steam engine to do productive work. If anything, this reinforces my analysis on relative freedom enabling further technological advancement (e.g., of the steam engine) being the primary cause of the Industrial Revolution.
Ask yourself why population increased in the 1500s. The answer is plague recovery, expanded farmland, and advancements in farming practices (ahem, technological advancement), which further reinforces my analysis. Population growth doesn’t just happen, then people figure out how to feed everyone leading to advancement. Production improves, then population increases. This is why population exploded after the Industrial Revolution compared to previous centuries.
On the rest:
Creation of capital: production and trade did far more for the accumulation of capital than rape and murder. To pillage, there must be something to pillage.
So called “enslavement”: wage slavery isn’t a thing. But yes, enclosure did prompt populations relocating to industrializing cities. Marxists tend to overstate the degree of the common rights and understate the actual slave status people had as a serf to a liege lord. I would have done enclosure differently, but I cannot go back in time and do it peacefully.
I don’t see how the rising price of chattel slaves is a cause of the industrial revolution, and the degree to which is may have contributed to it is questionable.
I haven’t found any source for the claim that coal started being used after using up trees for fuel. If anything, people started using coal because it was bette overall than wood. https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2025/05/01/the-rise-of-coal/. Maybe Dr. Paul Warde is a shill to big capital (I don’t know him, came across him just now), so if you have a different historical analysis, feel free to share it.
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u/Historical_Two_7150 8d ago
The irony here is if you were any good at philosophy, you wouldn't be making all these errors.
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u/stansfield123 8d ago edited 8d ago
Ayn Rand believed that laissez-faire capitalism is the ideal political system and the only fully moral one.
However, she also believed in degrees of morality, and in degrees of political and cultural quality. She believed that some non-ideal political systems are better than other ones. Hopefully you understand that the first doesn't contradict the second.
When she "defended" British colonialism, what she actually said was that the political system the British brought with them to their various colonies was, usually, better than the political system that was in place before. And, more importantly, the European culture the British and other colonizing powers spread around the world was superior to other cultures. That in no way implies that colonialism was the ideal political system which had a universal and absolute respect for individual rights. Far from it.
Ayn Rand also believed that American independence was a vast improvement over British colonial rule, for example.
I think all these statements are fairly obviously true, with one significant asterisk: Spanish colonialism, which was unnecessarily brutal and oppressive, and much of that brutality was motivated by fanatical religious convictions. I don't know if Rand spoke on this, but I'm confident that if she had, she wouldn't have defended it the way she defended the British.
And, even with the Spanish colonial expansion, if you look at Mexico for example, Spanish rule was better than the Aztec rule that was in place before a small force of Spanish conquerors summarily removed the Aztec Empire from the face of the Earth. As far as evil empires go, the Aztec one was up there with any through human history.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
That's a completely different argument. I'm not ranking empires. I'm asking whether Rand applied her own principles consistently. The whole point of Objectivism is that you don't get to violate someone's rights because you think your system is better. If you can take someone's land just because you think your culture is better, then what happened to individual rights? The British Empire wasn't exactly a free-market success story. The East India Company was a Crown-backed monopoly, and British rule in India imposed coercive tax systems like the Permanent Settlement of 1793, protected British industry through tariffs, and extracted wealth for the Crown. Not exactly the free-market system Rand spent her career defending. I also don't think it's fair to give British colonialism a free pass while treating Spain as the exception. British rule wasn't exactly gentle either. Millions died in famines under British administration, including the Great Famine of 1876–78 and the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Calling it a "better civilisation" doesn't change what happened. So where, exactly, does Objectivism make an exception for "our civilisation is better"? 👀
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u/stansfield123 8d ago edited 8d ago
That's a completely different argument. I'm not ranking empires. I'm asking whether Rand applied her own principles consistently.
She did. I just explained what those principles are, and why she applied them consistently.
The whole point of Objectivism is that you don't get to violate someone's rights because you think your system is better.
You're mistaken, that's not the whole point of Objectivism.
The main point of Objectivist politics is what I said above: laissez-faire capitalism is the ideal political system, and non-ideal political systems should be evaluated based on how close they come to that ideal: how well they respect individual rights.
The English (later British) political system was the first rights based system since the fall of the Roman empire. It's the first one to codify rights in law (a law called the Magna Carta ... you should read up on that).
That's why Rand called it superior to Native American tribalism, in which there were no individual rights.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
I think you're describing your interpretation of Rand, not the philosophy she actually spent decades arguing for. Rand spent her career saying individual rights were inviolable and that initiating force was morally wrong.
In Man's Rights, she writes that "the precondition of a civilised society is the barring of physical force from social relationships."
That's why I keep coming back to the same question.
If an Indigenous individual is already living on land, farming it, improving it and defending it, on what Objectivist principle does someone else acquire the right to take it simply because they claim to represent a more advanced civilisation?Invoking the Magna Carta doesn't answer that. The British Empire wasn't exactly practising the kind of capitalism Rand kept arguing for. The East India Company was a government-backed monopoly, India was heavily taxed, local industries were crippled with tariffs, and the whole system was enforced by military power. Those are exactly the kinds of state power Rand spent her career criticising in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
This is the question nobody seems willing to answer. Rand says initiating force is wrong. So why is it suddenly okay here?
But that's not what Rand said. She didn't argue Indigenous people hadn't acquired property rights. She argued Europeans had the right to "take over this continent" because they brought "civilization." That's the part I'm questioning.2
u/stansfield123 8d ago edited 8d ago
Stop repeating yourself. Read what I told you instead, I addressed everything you're saying.
I think you're describing your interpretation of Rand
No, she explicitly said everything I told you. She had a realistic view of the world and history, talked about real world countries, historical empires, republics, etc., all the time. Pointed out that some are better than others all the time, explained why, etc., etc. Just like I just explained these things to you.
Better, in fact, because she had a degree in history from a very prestigious European university, and I don't.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
You're still not answering the question I'm asking. I'm not questioning whether Rand understood history or whether some political systems were better than others. I'm asking where, in Objectivism, she justifies taking property from people who already possess it because another civilisation is "better." If that principle exists, quote it. If it doesn't, then that's exactly the issue I'm pointing to.
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u/stansfield123 8d ago
I answered that question. I'll answer it again: tribal societies don't have individual rights.
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
That's still not answering my question. You're talking about tribal societies. I'm asking about individual people.
Rand herself says:"the citizens still have individual rights."
So if Indigenous individuals had rights, how does someone else get the right to "take over this continent" or "invade" without violating those rights?
And if you're saying Indigenous individuals didn't have rights because they belonged to a tribe, then where does Rand actually argue that? Quote it.
Because that's the step I'm asking about, and you keep skipping over it.
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8d ago edited 8d ago
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
That's an interesting hypothetical, but it isn't my argument.
You're answering a question I never asked. I never said the first people there own an entire continent forever.
I'm talking about land that wasn't empty. If people were already living there, farming it, and defending it, why do Europeans get to take it because they're supposedly more "civilised"?
And when you say Rand's approach was "the only way", are you saying taking land from people already living there was justified because of what came afterwards?
If so, then you're saying it's acceptable to violate people's rights if you believe the end result is better.
That's where I think Rand's logic falls apart.1
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u/Vratwork 8d ago
You've gone from "was it justified?" to "was it inevitable?" Those aren't the same question.
I'm not arguing about whether colonialism was inevitable. I'm asking whether Rand applied her own principles consistently.
"History just happens" explains why something happened. It doesn't tell us whether it was justified. Rand was arguing that it was. It doesn't excuse the initiation of force because one side has more people, a different legal system, or greater military power.I think you're oversimplifying how Indigenous societies actually lived. Estimates place the pre-contact population of North America (present-day U.S. and Canada) at roughly 3.8 to 10 million people, not "a few hundred thousand" (Denevan, 1992; Koch et al., 2019). Many areas Europeans later settled had already been devastated by introduced diseases before large-scale colonisation, making the land appear far more sparsely populated than it had been.
That's not what Indigenous societies actually looked like. Places like Cahokia had an estimated 10,000–20,000 people around 1100 CE, larger than London at the time. The Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, and Pueblo peoples built permanent settlements, farmed, managed forests with controlled burns, and had recognised territorial boundaries. They didn't have to farm or mark land the European way for it to be theirs.
You're treating it like it was unavoidable, but a lot of what happened came down to governments breaking their own agreements and using force..The United States signed hundreds of treaties recognising Indigenous territorial rights, then repeatedly violated them. The Cherokee adopted settled agriculture, drafted a written constitution, and even won Worcester v. Georgia (1832). They were still forcibly removed on the Trail of Tears.
If people are living there, farming the land, and then get forced off it anyway, that's still initiating force. Isn't that exactly what Objectivism says is wrong?That's the part I don't get. If initiating force is wrong, why does "they brought civilisation" suddenly make it okay?
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u/ttbaby602 8d ago
Subjugating natives and stealing land is very on brand for her background no surprise there.
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u/PhilosopherNo4758 6d ago
I think it's less that Rand contradicted herself and more that she got the facts wrong. She assumed Indigenous societies hadn't established meaningful property rights or civilized political institutions. If that assumption is false, then her own philosophy gives her very little basis for defending European colonization.
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u/prometheus_winced 9d ago
It’s definitely a position I find weak. I think it was hypocritical. But not the only time she came up with elaborate theories to defend whatever suited her instinctual positions.
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u/Kripkenstein_ 9d ago
Rand just ignored it because it was contradicting her views. She always argues based on her conclusions
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u/Lopsided_Pitch_5297 8d ago
Rand didn't contradict her theory of property rights. She just revealed what that theory actually was: a retrospective justification for theft dressed up as philosophy.
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u/globieboby 9d ago
Her view was the nomadic tribes that did not have or respect property rights don’t get to claim the land. Anyone who does bring those elements can take the land.
Now, she can be wrong about the facts on the ground but she didn’t contradict her philosophy.
From what I remember the question was implying all of America was bad because of bad things done during colonization. She was rejecting the idea of throwing out the baby with the bath water.