In the sweeping character of her generalizations, and in her commitment to the practical realization of her ideals, Rand was fully within the Russian Silver Age literary and philosophic tradition. Like most of Russia's great literary figures, she was an artist, social critic, and non-academic philosopher who constructed a broad synthesis in her battle against the traditional antinomies in Western thought. Like most of Russia's indigenous philosophers, she presented an exhaustive, all-encompassing theoretical totality. And like Russia's radicals, she sought to uproot contemporary power relations in all their social and institutional manifestations. Seeking to overturn the welfare-warfare state that she called the "new fascism," Rand traced reciprocally reinforcing relationships of power across psychology, ethics, culture, education, ideology, sex, race, politics and economics---and advocated an integrated revolution in all these spheres.

The article goes on to discuss the crucial impact of Friedrich Nietzsche on the Russian Silver Age---on Symbolist poets, on Marxist revolutionaries, on religious idealists, and on Ayn Rand herself. Sciabarra concludes that Rand was not merely a Russian Radical; she was also a supremely American one. For in her work, there is the notion of a genuine human and humane community, one that is neither mystical nor statist, but founded on the moral autonomy of the individual and the virtue of voluntary, uncoerced trading of value for value---the animating principles of the American way of life.