Peter Schwartz

Peter Schwartz (born 1949) is an American journalist. He is an Objectivist and writes opinion pieces and books from that viewpoint.

Career A former chairman of the board, and currently a distinguished fellow, of the Ayn Rand Institute, Schwartz writes and lectures on a variety of topics, including environmentalism, foreign policy, political philosophy and ethics. He received a Master of Arts in journalism from Syracuse University and has taught advanced writing classes at the Ayn Rand Institute's Objectivist Academic Center.

He is the author of In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice Is Unjust and Destructive; The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America; Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty; and The Battle for Laissez-Faire Capitalism. He also writes on current issues for his blog, PeterSchwartz.com.

His articles have been published in The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, ForbesOnline, Huffington Post and the Hartford Courant.

He was the founding editor and publisher of The Intellectual Activist (1979–1991), a periodical that covered political and social issues from a pro-individual rights perspective. From 1987 to 2003, he was president and editor-in-chief at Second Renaissance Books, a book publisher and distributor.

Schwartz edited two collections of essays by Ayn Rand: The Ayn Rand Column and 1999's Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, for which he was also a contributing author. In Return of the Primitive Schwartz included an essay entitled 'Multicultural Nihilism' in which he characterized lifeism as a prejudice of evaluating of life over death. He was also co-editor, with Marlene Podritske, of Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed. The Writing Process Capitalism and Selfishness Clarity in Conceptualization: The Art of Identifying “Package-Deals” Barriers to Cognition The Epistemology of Altruism The “Diversity” Delusion The Virtue of Selfishness: Why Achieving Your Happiness Is Your Highest Moral Purpose America's Foreign Policy: Self-Interest vs Self-Sacrifice Free Minds and Free Markets