Andrew Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He has taught Philosophy at the State University of New York at Purchase, Marist College, Hunter College, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and other New York-area universities. He was selected as “Teacher of the Year” at both SUNY Purchase—and at Marymount College. In 2016-17, he was a Visiting Professor at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), where he taught Business Ethics.
He lectures regularly on college campuses, including at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Oxford University (the U.K.), Yale University, the United States Military Academy at West Point, Columbia University, UCLA, Georgia Tech, Northwestern University, and numerous others. He speaks at many other venues, including—but not limited to—Objectivist conferences, Students For Liberty (SFL) conferences, and events sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism (CISC), and the Bastiat Society. Internationally, he has lectured in Greece, England, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Canada, Israel, Bermuda, Guatemala, Armenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Moldova, the Bahamas, and additional countries. His areas of expertise include Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s novels, the nature of heroism, the history of capitalism and its moral superiority to other systems, and application of the principle of individual rights to a broad array of topical issues, including health care, abortion, gun ownership, immigration, and the war on drugs. He also lectures at high schools, both in the New York area and nationally, regarding Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy.
He is the author of The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic, and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire (University Press of America, 2005), Objectivism in One Lesson: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Hamilton Books, 2008), Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (University Press of America, 2010), and Capitalist Solutions: A Philosophy of American Moral Dilemmas (Transaction Publishers, 2011). He has also written the CliffsNotes for three Ayn Rand titles–Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. Additionally, he has published numerous essays, many in The Objective Standard, for which he is a contributing editor, and many in other publications, including op-ed essays for Forbes.com. His op-eds have appeared in—among other newspapers— the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press. His essay, “Is There a Cure for the Collapse of the U.S. Education System?” was published in the September 2019 issue of USA Today Magazine. In 2013-14, he was the Hayek Research Fellow at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, where he taught courses in Economics and in Political Science and, principally, researched and wrote the first draft of his new book, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters.
His novel, A Dearth of Eagles, published in May 2017, tells the story of a Bulgarian writer/freedom fighter in 1988-89, who struggles resolutely to help dissidents escape from Communism to freedom—and even more resolutely to publish serious stories about heroes in a modernist literary culture that rejects heroism for anti-heroism.
Dr. Bernstein formerly co-hosted a weekly blogtalk radio program, Objectively Speaking, and has been interviewed on hundreds of radio shows—including by such legends as Barry Farber, Bob Grant, Mark Scott, and others—and appeared on several prominent TV news shows, including Neil Cavuto’s.
Dr. Bernstein can be reached via e-mail: andyswoop@gmail.com
Website: andrewbernstein.net