Next Meeting: Tuesday March 30th from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

We will be covering Ayn Rand's Essay "Collectivized Rights." Click HERE for the text.


The Preamble of the UN Charter claims to derive its authority from the “the sovereign equality of all its Members.” Article 51 also speaks of the right to “collective self-defense” of each of its members, as Article 55 speaks of the importance of “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”

Can every nation or people be said to have rights, in the same way that every individual can be said to have rights? Is there a basis for the claim that economic, racial, ethnic, sexual groups enjoy special rights? This week we will discuss Ayn Rand’s essay, “Collectivized Rights,” in which she claims that there are no such rights independent of the rights of individuals.

. . .

“The notion of ‘collective rights’ (that notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) mean that ‘rights’ belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the ‘right’ to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.”
—Ayn Rand, “Collectivized Rights.”

Material to be discussed:
• “Collectivized Rights,” pp. 439-45 in *The Ayn Rand Reader*

o Full text online: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_collectivized_rights

Also, for future meetings you will need to order the book "The Ayn Rand Reader" Which is where many of our future discussions will come from.

click HERE for the link to order the book.