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In her 1967 book An Existentialist Ethics, Hazel E. Barnes devotes a chapter to comparing Objectivism to Existentialism.
Ayn Rand has made her own position on existentialism very clear. In her essay, "For the New Intellectual," she writes, "The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism." Despite all this, the popular images of the Rand hero and the Existentialist have something in common. Both are commonly held to be totally selfish and solitary individuals who acknowledge no authority save their own arbitrary whims, whose human relationships are motivated solely by immediate self-interest, who recognize no responsibilities. If we forget about these popular distortions and leave the level of overgeneralization, we find that the task of comparing to two is surprisingly complex. There are a few precise similarities; there are some obvious sharp divergences. [….]
It would not be a distortion to say that both Objectivism and existentialism call for the assertion of the free individual against those theologies and those oppressively conformist societies which seek to make him deny his unique self in the interests of ready-made social molds and values. Both oppose a psychology which would reduce man to the animal level or to a mechanistic pattern of stimulus and response. They are equally opposed to the soul-body dichotomy of traditional theology. Objectivists and existentialists argue that every person is responsible for what he has made of his life Each man is ultimately a free choice. In so far as they claim that man himself is his own end and purpose, both may properly be called humanistic. This is an impressive list of parallels. One might easily suppose that with the sympathetic sharing of such fundamental premises, the general similarity in their over-all positions would outweigh any differences in detail.
Only what emerges is not a common point of view. It is not merely that Rand and Sartre differ as to how the individual should go about engaging his freedom and asserting his newly discovered self. One discovers that somehow words have not meant the same things in these descriptions. The self and its freedom do not mean for Rand what they mean for Sartre. If we examine these basic premises and starting points closely, we find that only one is left standing as a common landmark. That is the rejection of God or of any form of belief in an eternal spiritual world beyond the human. Man remains the author of his own destiny, the creator of his own values.
From An Existentialist Ethics, pp. 124-125. Omissions from the text are shown with bracketed ellipses. All other punctuation and spelling is from the original.
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