In The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand is a great man who destroys himself by means of his power-seeking. In many ways, he is strikingly similar to a Nietzschean "Ubermensch"--the overman or aristocratic superior man who "deserves" to rule others. Such a master of men, Nietzsche asserts, demonstrates that he is beyond the conventional precepts of good and evil, not merely by refusing to sacrifice himself to others but by gaining dominance over them.

Despite major flaws, Nietzsche opposes statism, collectivism and racism; he is a brilliant polemicist against Christianity and, more broadly, the self-sacrifice tradition.

What are his fundamental theories? Which of his ideas did Ayn Rand share and which did she reject? What of value can an Objectivist learn from his thinking? And why, despite his antipathy to the ideas underlying National Socialism, do modern intellectuals smear him as the philosophical cause of the Nazis?

These are the questions this course will answer.