"Ayn Rand believed that philosophical ideas shape a society's culture and politics. "The battle of philosophers is a battle for man's mind," she said. "If you do not understand their theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them" (Philosophy: Who Needs It, 1974). Though Rand had little regard for contemporary academic philosophers, she did write several articles about the discipline, commenting on philosophers' methods as well as on their philosophical ideas.
In 1971, Harvard philosopher John Rawls published his Theory of Justice to great acclaim, and Rand responded in "An Untitled Letter" (The Ayn Rand Letter, January 29-February 26, 1973). Rawls's book was notable for the baldness with which he stated his egalitarian principle of justice: that people may reap the benefits of their ability and effort only on terms that also benefit the least able. Rand of course denounced the altruist and egalitarian character of the principle, which she saw as a rationalization for envy—"the hatred of the good for being good."
In her essay, Rand admitted that she had not read and did not intend to read Rawls's book and declared that she should therefore be understood as commenting only on the positions ascribed to Rawls in Marshall Cohen's lengthy review in the Sunday New York Times. Critics have attacked Rand for adopting that approach to the work, and it is a dubious technique even when made explicit. At the same time, however, critics of Rand have not acknowledged that she was nonetheless able to describe, precisely and essentially, Rawls's method of argument. Nor have they acknoweldged, though it is now a generation later, how presciently Rand's was able to foresee the book's future—drawing on nothing but a book review and her own profound understanding of the way bad ideas spread:
Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader's critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence The Critique of Pure Reason....
Within a few years of the book's publication, commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, "clarifying" and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map,….
Within a generation, the number of commentaries will have grown to such proportions that the original book will be accepted as a subject of philosophical specialization, requiring a lifetime of study—and any refutation of the book's theory will be ignored or rejected, if unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators, a task which no one will be able to undertake.
Which is exactly what has happened with A Theory of Justice."
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