Ayn Rand named Objectivism only because existentialism was already taken
Ayn Rand wanted to call her philosophy existentialism, since it rested on the primacy of existence over the mind. Another school had already claimed that label, so she settled on Objectivism instead, reflecting her view that knowledge and values are real features of the world that people discover rather than invent.
Rand first laid out the system through fiction, above all The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957, and only later in essays, periodicals and nonfiction books. After her, the philosopher Leonard Peikoff, her chosen intellectual heir, gave it a more formal shape and described it as a closed system: its basic principles were fixed by Rand, though new applications could still be worked out.
The structure starts from three axioms: existence, consciousness and identity. Existence exists, and to exist is to be something specific with particular attributes, which Rand summed up as A is A. Consciousness, in her account, is always awareness of something outside itself, so the mind discovers reality rather than creating it. She treated these as inescapable in a clever sense: anyone arguing against them has to rely on them to make the argument. Even causation, for Rand, follows from identity, since things act the way they do because of what they are.
From there she built a theory of knowledge grounded entirely in perception. The senses themselves, she held, cannot err; an optical illusion is a mistake in how the mind interprets what is seen, not a failure of sight. Knowledge beyond direct perception requires deliberate effort, concept formation and logic, which ruled out faith, revelation and feeling as routes to truth. A sincere belief in dragons, as one illustration goes, does not put dragons into the world.
Ethically, the system holds that pursuing one's own happiness is life's proper moral aim, and that the only social order consistent with this is laissez-faire capitalism with full respect for individual rights. Most academic philosophers have ignored or rejected Rand's work, yet it has kept a lasting following among American conservatives and right-libertarians.
Source: Objectivism
