She recognized an intellectual kinship with John Locke in political philosophy, agreeing with Locke's ideas that individuals have a right to the products of their own labor and have natural rights to life, liberty, and property.? Unlike Locke, she found the basis for individual rights in man's nature as a being whose survival depends upon his independent exercise of reason.? She agreed in a general way with the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and reported her approval of specific philosophical positions, including some of Baruch Spinoza and St. Thomas Aquinas.?
In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to 36 East 36th Street (across from the J.P. Morgan Library) in New York City, the city she most loved and admired. From 1965 to her death in 1982, she resided at 120 East 34th Street. In New York, she formed a group (jokingly designated "The Collective") which included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Leonard Peikoff, all of whom had been profoundly influenced by The Fountainhead. Rand launched the Objectivist movement with this group to promote her philosophy.?
The group originally started out as an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy; later the Collective would proceed to play a larger, more formal role, reading Atlas Shrugged as the manuscript pages were written and promoting Rand's philosophy through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), established by him for that purpose. Many Collective members gave lectures at the NBI and in cities across the United States, while others wrote articles for her publications, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction and non-fiction works, and by giving talks at several prominent universities, including Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan. "The Objectivist Newsletter, later expanded and renamed simply The Objectivist, contained essays by Rand, Branden, and other associates ... that analyzed current political events and applied the principles of Objectivism to everyday life."[14] Rand later published some of these in book form.