Individual Sovereignty and Ayn Rand

America's Founding Fathers challenged the institution of the state as the ruler of the individual. Man’s right to exist for his own sake, wrote philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand, was their guiding principle, and they were "determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the 'unaided' power of their intellect."

Those Founders, she wrote, knew man as "an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life." From the Lockean concept of "popular sovereignty," differing from both Hobbes and Rousseau, where he laid the premise that the legis­lature was only empowered to legislate for the general welfare, the Founders discovered a political axiom.


Whether Locke meant to imply that sovereign power was only in the legislature or in the people, Jefferson and others concluded it was in the individual, the only political entity capable of thought, and the one ultimately responsible for his own welfare, and each must be the one in whom the primary authority rests. Without his consent, there can be no legislative body.


Black's Law Dictionary says sovereignty is "The state of condition of being free from dependence, subjection, or control." But under the U.S. Constitution, the people create a deliberate dependence on their governments to protect the rights they also claim to be able to recover when and if they should so decided to change their form of government. This implies directly that they freely submit some of their sovereignty to their government. That which is freely submitted is the power Locke called "popular sovereignty".

References from the Ayn Rand Lexicon:

1. For the New Intellectual
2. The Virtue of Selfishness 

Black's Law Dictionary; Fourth Edition

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