Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged

The impact of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) can be seen in the results of a Library of Congress survey in the 1980s, in which the respondents were asked which book had had the biggest influence on them. The second most often cited was Atlas Shrugged (after the Bible). Rand further developed in this, her last novel, a philosophy that she called Ob?ectivism an advocacy of capitalism and individualism, and a renunciation of socialism and collectivism of all kinds, which she saw as inhibiting creativity. Rand's previous novel The Fountainhead (1943; film, 1949) had been very popular. Atlas Shrugged, however which has elements of mystery and science fiction established her as a cult figure (Sciabarra, 2003). The chief character is Dagny Taggart, a woman who runs a transcontinental railroad and finds that her ?ob is made almost impossible by various levels of bureaucracy and collectives that thwart individual initiative. Longing for a utopia devoted to enterprise, free of any government control, she finds by chance such a settlement in Galt's Gulch, Colo. Galt's Gulch re?ects the cornerstone of communism, which declares, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Instead of this, the community substitutes, "I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine (Bradford, 2002).

By the time Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, Rand had achieved worldwide fame for offering a controversial, integrated, secular defense of capitalism. In Atlas Shrugged , she presented the rudiments of a systematic philosophy that she later termed Ob?ectivism. Her philosophy rested on the premise that reality is what it is, independent of what human beings think or feel, and that reason is the only means of knowing it. Rand defended ob?ective values, viewing human life as the standard by which to ?udge good and evil. Essential to her ethical egoism is the doctrine that human beings can and should exist as independent equals, neither sacrificing others to themselves nor themselves to others. For Rand, the “trader principle,” giving value for value, is the only appropriate social maxim (Sciabarra, 2004). Because human beings must be free to pursue the values that sustain their own lives, the doctrine of individual rights is indispensable to ensure freedom within a social context. Rand shared with many classical liberals and modern libertarians this commitment to individual rights and the rule of ob?ective law. She argued that, to protect the individual's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, a government monopoly on the coercive use of force was necessary—through the establishment of courts, the police, and the military. Because capitalism, in her view, was based on the “trader principle” and on the principle of nonaggression (i.e., that no human being should attain values by initiating the use of force against others), she maintained that it was the only social system consonant with a genuinely human existence (Sciabarra, 2004).

John Galt tires of being told that the work of his mind must go ...