which she elsewhere calls the virtue of selfishness5 and which she associates with heroism in the mode of classic nineteenth-century Romanticism.6
The core of Rand's argument is a critique of altruism that devolves into an affirmation of egoism, assigning positive moral value to such psychologically and socially charged words as selfish and negative value to terms traditionally associated with psychological comfort, such as the good of others.7 Specifically, Rand negates what she says has been the moral code taught throughout history, citing the following:
The battle of morality . . . between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in
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