Machan was born in Budapest. Machan's father hired a smuggler to get him out of Hungary when he was 14 years of age and he came to the United States three years later, in 1956. By 1965, Machan graduated from Claremont McKenna College. He took his Masters of Arts in Philosophy at New York University from 1965 to 1966, and his Ph.D in Philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara, 1966–1971. In 1970, with Robert W. Poole, Jr. and Manuel Klausner, he purchased Reason magazine, which has since become the leading libertarian periodical in America. Machan edited Reason for two years and was the editor of Reason Papers, an annual journal of interdisciplinary normative studies, for 25 years. He was a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1992–1993 and taught at universities in California, New York, Switzerland, and Alabama. He lectured in Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Republic of Georgia, Armenia, and Latin America on business ethics and political philosophy. He sat on the advisory boards for several foundations and think tanks, and served on the founding Board of the Jacob J. Javits Graduate Fellowship Program of the U. S. Department of Education. Machan was selected as the 2003 President of the American Society for Value Inquiry, and delivered the presidential address on 29 December 2002, in Philadelphia, at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, titled "Aristotle & Business." He was on the board of the Association for Private Enterprise Education for several terms. Machan was an adviser to Freedom Communications, Inc. on libertarian issues from 1996 to 2014. Machan wrote a memoir, The Man Without a Hobby: Adventures of a Gregarious Egoist. On 24 March 2016, he died at the age of 77.
Academic work
Machan's work usually focused on ethics and political philosophy, specifically natural rights theory, as in works such as Individuals and Their Rights and Libertarianism Defended. He defended the arguments of Ayn Rand for ethical egoism, and also wrote frequently on business ethics, a field in which he deployed a neo-Aristotelian ethical stance whereby commercial and business conduct gain their moral standing by constituting extensions of the virtues of productivity and prudence. He argued that the field presupposes the institution of the right to private property in the works, The Business of Commerce, Examining an Honorable Profession, and A Primer on Business Ethics, both with James Chesher, and The Morality of Business, A Profession of Human Wealth Care. His full ethical position was developed in his book Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being, and it is applied in, among other books, Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society. Machan also wrote in the field of epistemology. His main focus was to challenge the conception of human knowledge whereby to know that P amounts to having reached a final, perfect, timeless, and finished understanding of P. Instead, Machan developed Ayn Rand's contextual conception of human knowledge, but also draws on the insights of J. L. Austin, from his paper "Other Minds", and Gilbert Harman, from his book Thought, in works such as Objectivity. Machan worked on the problem of free will and defended a secular, naturalist notion of human initiative in his books The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner and Initiative: Human Agency and Society. Machan argued against animal rights in his widely reprinted paper "Do Animals Have Rights?" and in his book Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite, but he also wrote on the ethics of animal treatment in his book Putting Humans First. He was also a skeptic as to whether governments are able to help with global warming and whether human beings have made significant contributions to climate change. On 1 May 2011, Machan was featured in a three-hour interview on C-Span 2's In Depth program as its selection of an author from the Western United States of America. Machan has argued in a 2008 article that unilateral American intervention has done more harm than good.
