If honesty is one of the most widely praised virtues, our next virtue is one of the least commonly advocated: independence. The ideal of the self-made man has lost its luster in a world in which, we are told, we are all interdependent. When it is advocated, the value of independence is typically regarded as more prudential than moral. And those who sometimes praise independence tend to labor under conceptions of independence that have nothing in common with Rand's, hailing the “independent spirit” of an avant-garde artist who offers difference for its own sake, for example, or extolling the independence of the “leader” whose primary mission consists simply of accumulating followers. A greater number of people regard independence as a threat – to the authority of the church or the good of the community, for instance. Many religions demand submission and obedience, the antipodes of independent thought. “No man is an island” has become a secular truism, offering a warning to anyone thought to be driving in too independent a direction.

Nearly all of Rand's treatment of independence occurs in her fiction. Independence is the central theme of The Fountainhead's seven-hundred-plus pages and it figures prominently throughout Atlas Shrugged, as well. Having probed its roots and ramifications in depth in those works, Rand gives independence little explicit elaboration in her nonfiction. Because I cannot assume that my readers will have read Rand's fiction, I will make only brief references to episodes or characters that illustrate Rand's view.