Objectivisme
Ayn Rand, originally Alisa Rosenbaum (1905-1982), was a Russian-American writer. Famous primarily for her novels that gained worldwide and enduring success, she is also renowned for her philosophical framework called Objectivism, which maintains a lasting influence on popular thought. Her ideas were partially predetermined by her own biography –  her father’s business was seized by Bolsheviks in 1917, which dramatically changed her family’s way of life. She left communist Russia for the United States in early 1926. Rand was driven by the idea of men’s need for rational morality, a morality code which would oppose any collective, religious, mystical or emotion based moral concepts. A person’s life was understood by Rand as a standard of value, with reason as the only guide to action, and thus the highest moral purpose was the achievement of one’s own happiness. The fundamentals of Rand’s philosophy: reality as “an objective absolute”, primacy of reason, the ethics of selfishness and the moral defence of 'laisséz-faire' capitalism, were developed through her public lectures, books and newsletters.