Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

A Philosophical and Literary Companion

Edward W. Younkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754655336
• eBook ISBN: 9781317176558
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

Since its publication in 1957 Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand's novels, has never been out of print and has received enormous critical attention becoming one of the most influential books ever published, impacting on a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business, and political science among others. More than a great novel, Atlas Shrugged is an abstract conceptual, and symbolic work that expounds a radical philosophy, presenting a view of man and man's relationship to existence and manifesting the essentials of an entire philosophical system - metaphysics, epistemology, politics and ethics. Celebrating the fiftieth year of Atlas Shrugged's publication, this companion is an exploration of this monumental work of literature. Contributions have been specially commissioned from a diversity of eminent scholars who admire and have been influenced by the book, the included essays analyzing the novel's integrating elements of theme, plot and characterization from many perspectives and from various levels of meaning.

PART 1
An Overview

Chapter 1

Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Philosophical and Literary Masterpiece

Edward W. Younkins

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged presents a comprehensive statement and detailed illustration of Ayn Rand’s original and perceptive philosophical ideas and inspiring moral vision. This long, complex novel has sold nearly six million copies. Respondents to a joint Library of Congress-Book of the Month Club survey in 1991 hailed the book as second only to the Bible in its significant impact on their lives. In addition, a 1998 Random House/Modern Library readers’ poll placed Atlas Shrugged at the top of their list of the greatest novels of the century.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a story of human action on a monumental level. In it Rand skillfully ties physical actions to important human values. Although the author also deals with mental portraiture and analysis, her primary concern is with human action. She selects and integrates actions and events that dramatize the theme of the novel which is “the role of the mind in human existence” (Rand 1975, 81). Atlas Shrugged is a “story about human beings in action” (Rand 2000, 17). Rand thinks in essentials in uniting all the issues of the actions in the novel. Her concern is with values and issues that can be expressed in action. The story’s plot action is based on the integration of values and action and of mind and body. Rand thereby shows actions supporting wide abstract principles.

For Rand, the right philosophy is necessary to create the right story. Atlas Shrugged embodies Rand’s Objectivism and introduces readers to ideas they might not otherwise encounter. Rand uses the story of Atlas Shrugged as a vehicle for manifesting her ideas, bringing philosophy to life through character and plot.

A Conflict of Visions

The story takes place in a slightly modified United States. The country has a head of state rather than a president and a National Legislature instead of a Congress. The time is ostensibly the not-too-distant future in which American society is crumbling under the impact of the welfare state and creeping socialism (most other nations have already become Communist People’s States). The story may be described as simultaneously anachronistic and timeless. The pattern of industrial organization appears to be that of the late 1800s, with large capital-intensive corporations being run and owned by individual entrepreneurs. The mood seems to be close to that of the depression-era 1930s. Both the social customs and level of technical knowledge remind one of the 1950s. The level of government interference and political corruption is similar to that of the 1970s (Merrill 1991, 60; Gladstein 2000, 40–41).

The story is an apocalyptic vision of the last stages of a conflict between two classes of humanity—the looters and the non-looters. The looters are proponents of high taxation, big labor, government ownership, government spending, government planning, regulation, and redistribution. They include politicians and their supporters, intellectuals, government bureaucrats, scientists who sell their minds to the bureaucrats, and liberal businessmen who, afraid of honest competition, sell out their initiative, creative powers, and independence for the security of government regulation. The non-looters—the thinkers and doers—are the competent and daring individualists who innovate and create new enterprises. These prime movers love their work, are dedicated to achievement through their thought and effort, and abhor the forces of collectivism and mediocrity. The battle is thus between non-earners who deal by force and profit through political power and earners who deal by trade and profit through productive ability.¹

Rand’s Entrepreneurial Heroes

The plot is built around several business and industrial executives. The beautiful Dagny Taggart, perhaps the most heroic female protagonist in American fiction, is the operating genius who efficiently runs Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, which was founded by her grandfather. Her brother James, president in title only, is an indecisive, incompetent, liberal businessman who takes all the credit for his sister’s achievements. Dagny optimistically and confidently performs Herculean labors to keep the railroad running despite destructive government edicts, her brother’s weaknesses, the incompetence of many of her associates, and the silent and inexplicable disappearance of society’s competent industrialists.

As both society and her railroad are disintegrating, Dagny attempts to rebuild an old Taggart rail line. In the process, she contacts Hank Rearden, a self-made steel tycoon and inventor of an alloy stronger and lighter than steel. Rearden, Dagny’s equal in intelligence, determination, and sense of responsibility, becomes her ally and eventually her lover. They struggle to keep the economy running and ultimately discover the secret of the continuing disappearance of the men of ability (Gladstein 63–9; Merrill 68–73).

Who Is John Galt?

John Galt, a messiah of free enterprise, is secretly persuading thinkers and doers to vanish mysteriously one after the other—deserting and sometimes sabotaging their factories before they depart. Galt explains how desperately the world needs productive individuals, but how viciously it treats them. The greater a person’s productive ability, the greater are the penalties he endures in the form of regulations, controls, and the expropriation and redistribution of his earned wealth. This evil, however, is only made possible by the sanction of the victims. By accepting an undeserved guilt—not for their vices but for their virtues—the achievers have acquiesced in the political theft of their minds’ products. Galt masterminds his plan to stop the motor of the world by convincing many of the giants of intellect and productivity to refuse to be exploited any longer by the looters and the moochers, to strike by withdrawing their talents from the world by escaping to a secret hideout in the Colorado Rockies, thus leaving the welfare state to destroy itself. The hero-conspirators will then return to lay the groundwork for a healthy new social order based on the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.

Galt, the mysterious physicist who is also a philosopher, teacher, and leader of an intellectual movement, has invented a motor that can convert static electricity into useful but inexpensive kinetic energy. He chooses to keep his invention a secret until it is time for him and the other heroes to reclaim the world.

For two-thirds of the novel, Galt exists only as a plaintive expression—Who is John Galt? He has been in hiding, working underground as a laborer in the Taggart Tunnels, while recruiting the strikers (Gladstein 65–8; Merrill 73–4).

Other Heroes

One of the key hero-characters is Francisco d’Anconia, aristocrat, copper baron, and former lover of Dagny, who prefers to destroy his mines systematically rather than let them fall into the hands of the looters. Another is Ragnar Danneskjöld, a philosopher turned pirate, who avenges the work of Robin Hood by raiding only public, nonprofit, commerce ships in order to return to the productive what is rightly theirs. The Randian view is that Robin Hood robs from the strong and deserving and gives to the weak and worthless. Robin Hood, the most immoral of all human symbols, reflects the idea that need is the source of rights, that people only have to want—not to produce, and that men have claim to the unearned but not to the earned (Gladstein 65–71).

Galt’s Gulch

The men of ability fade out of the picture and are labeled traitors and deserters by Dagny and Hank, who remain fighting at their desks. Ironically, because they haven’t been told of the conspiracy, Dagny and Hank are even battling their natural allies—the ex-leaders of the business world who have gone on strike.

Dagny pursues one of the deserters by plane to a valley deep in the Rockies, crashes, and accidentally discovers John Galt’s headquarters—the Utopian free-enterprise community created by the former business leaders along with several academicians, artists, and artisans. They have set up Galt’s Gulch (also known as Mulligan’s Valley) as a refuge from the looters and moochers of the outside world.

Galt’s Gulch is the hidden valley that is the Atlantis of Atlas Shrugged. This paradigm and microcosm of a free society consists of a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man’s self-interest. Here, productive men who have gone on strike are free to produce and trade as long as they observe the valley’s customs. In this secret free society, enshrouded by the crumbling interventionist one, each individual is unencumbered in the pursuit of his own flourishing and happiness (Sechrest 2007; Bostaph 2007).

Dagny is the last hero, except for Hank, to reach Galt’s outpost. While there, Dagny listens to the logic of Galt and his associates and falls in love with Galt, who represents all that she values. Inspired by the vision of Rearden, who continues to search for her and battle the looters, she decides to return to a world in shambles. Dagny and Hank refuse almost to the end to accept Galt’s plan and stubbornly fight to save the economy.

Galt’s Speech

A national broadcast by Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State, is interrupted by Galt who, in a three-hour speech, spells out the tenets of his philosophy (Rand 1957, 923–79). Among his many provocative ideas is the notion that the doctrine of Original Sin, which holds man’s nature as his sin, is absurd—a sin that is outside the possibility of choice is outside the realm of morality. The Fall of Adam and Eve was actually a positive event since it enabled man to acquire a mind capable of judging good and evil—man became a rational moral being. Another provocative idea is that both forced and voluntary altruism are evil. Placing the welfare of others above an individual’s own interests is wrong. The desire to give charity, compassion, and pleasure unconditionally to the undeserving is immoral.

Galt explains that reality is objective, absolute, and comprehensible and that man is a rational being who relies upon his mind as his only means to obtain objectively valid knowledge and as his “basic tool of survival.” The concept of value presupposes an entity capable of acting to attain a goal in the face of an alternative. The one basic alternative in the world is existence versus non-existence. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.” An organism’s life is its standard of value. Whatever furthers its life is good and that which threatens it is evil. It is therefore the nature of a living entity that determines what it ought to do.

Galt identifies man’s life as the proper standard of man’s value and morality as the principles defining the actions necessary to maintain life as a man. If life as a man is one’s purpose, he has “a right to live as a rational being.” To live, man must think, act, and create the values his life requires. In other words, since a man’s life is sustained through thought and action, it follows that the individual must have the right to think and act and to keep the product of his thinking and acting (i.e., the right to life, liberty, and property).

He asserts that since men are creatures who think and act according to principle, a doctrine of rights ensures that an individual’s choice to live by those principles is not violated by other human beings. All individuals possess the same rights to freely pursue their own goals. These rights are innate and can be logically derived from man’s nature and needs—the state is not involved in the creation of rights and merely exists to protect an individual’s natural rights. Because force is the means by which one’s rights are violated, it follows that freedom is a basic good. Therefore, it follows that the role of government is to “protect man’s rights,” through the use of force, but “only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use” (Ghate 2001; Gladstein 98–106; Stolyarov 2007).

The Melodramatic Climax

Galt follows Dagny back to the world and is captured by the looters. In an attempt to save the crumbling economy, they offer him the position of Economic Dictator, which he promptly refuses. They torture him, but the torture machine breaks down. Then, in a melodramatic confrontation, Galt is rescued by the Utopian entrepreneurs, and the looters are vanquished.

Galt and Dagny return to the valley, rewrite the Constitution, and add a clause stating that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade. At the end of the novel, just before going back to rebuild the world, Galt symbolically traces the sign of the dollar in the air.

Creators versus Looters

Ayn Rand’s monumental Atlas Shrugged, presents the businessman in a realistic, favorable, and heroic image by emphasizing the possibilities of life in a free society, the inherent ethical nature of capitalism and the good businessman, the strength and self-sufficiency of the hardworking man of commerce, and the value of the entrepreneur as wealth creator and promoter of human economic progress. Atlas Shrugged shows the businessman’s role as potentially heroic by celebrating the energy and opportunity of life for men of talent and ambition to make something of themselves. This great novel teaches that acts of courage and creativity consist of following one’s sense of integrity rather than in blind obedience and in inspiring others instead of following them. Atlas Shrugged portrays the business hero as a persistent, original, and independent thinker who pursues an idea to its fruition. Rand’s 1957 masterpiece dramatizes the positive qualities of the businessman by showing the triumph of individualism over collectivism, depicting business heroes as noble, appealing, and larger than life, and by characterizing business careers as at least, if not more, honorable as careers in medicine, law, or education.²

Atlas Shrugged aids in moving from abstract principles to realistic business examples. Atlas Shrugged provides a link between philosophical concepts and the technical and practical aspects of business. Philosophy is shown to be accessible and important to people in general and to business people in particular.

The only way for man to survive in society is through reason and voluntary trade. Atlas Shrugged focuses on the positive and shows readers what it takes to achieve genuine business success and how to create value.

Rand, like Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, holds an agent-centered approach to morality and concentrates on the character traits that constitute a good person. Reading Atlas Shrugged prompts people to reflect on what is constitutive of a good life. Rand’s heroes are shown to hold proper principles and develop appropriate character traits. The villains in the novel provide examples of what happens to people when they hold faulty principles (or compromise certain important principles) and fail to develop essential virtues.³

Atlas Shrugged illustrates that there are good and bad businessmen and that businessmen don’t always act virtuously. There are two kinds of businessmen— those who lobby government for special privileges, make deals, as well as engage in fraud and corrupt activities. Then there are the real producers who succeed or fail on their own.

Rand’s business heroes are independent, rational, and committed to the facts of reality, to the judgment of their own minds, and to their own happiness. Each of them thinks for himself, actualizes his potential, and views himself as competent to deal with the challenges of lif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figure
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: An Overview
• Part 2: Philosophy
• Part 3: Literary Aspects
• Part 4: Aesthetics
• Part 5: Political Economy
• Part 6: Human Relationships
• Part 7: Characterization
• Part 8: History
• Index