Abstract:  Sciabarra responds to critics of the second edition of his book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical: Wendy McElroy, who reviewed the book for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (July 2015), and Shoshana Milgram and Gregory Salmieri, whose most recent criticisms appear in A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016). Sciabarra defends both his historical and methodological theses, situating the book within a trilogy of works that define and defend "dialectical libertarianism," which eschews utopian thinking and embraces a fully radical mode of inquiry. Sciabarra argues that dialectics---the art of context- keeping---figures prominently throughout Rand’s literary and philosophical corpus.

This article is available as a pdf here, by permission of Pennsylvania State University Press. Additional points in response to these critics are discussed in Sciabarra's essay, "Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism" in The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019) and in "The Rand Transcript Revealed", The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 21, 2, December 2021: 141-229.