Atlas Shrugged (1957). Content and Description

After 12 years of writing, Rand finished her 1,160- page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. In all likelihood because of the success of The Fountainhead, Rand’s novel was published only months after its completion in March 1957. Although Rand considered Atlas Shrugged her greatest artistic achievement and a major statement of her evolving epistemology, the intellectuals of her day tended to view the book with a good deal of hostility. Initial reviews tended toward the savage: Some labeled the novel “execrable claptrap” or “grotesque eccentricity.”

One wit found it “longer than life and twice as preposterous.” In fact, the conservative critic Whittaker Chambers, quoted later in this article, stated that one could discern the command on every page, “To a gas chamber—go!” This is far more indicative of the extreme hostility the book evoked than any careful reading of its text. In fact, Galt’s speech, the climax of the novel, explicitly prohibits such horrors, stating, “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate . . . do you hear me? No man may start—the use of physical force against others.” Fair or not, such reviews created initial sales so disappointing that Random House assumed the book would be a commercial failure.

As the title suggests, the novel is based on the premise that Atlas, of Greek myth, finally abandons his task of holding up the entire weight of the world. In this case, Atlas is represented by the world’s self-made inventors, financiers, scientists, industrialists, and artists, among others: the creative elite represented by Kira Argounova in We the Living, Equality 7-2521 in Anthem, and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. This time, however, these people are recruited to go on strike by the most intellectually creative and independent of them all, John Galt.

Among those who “shrug off” the weight of the world’s moochers by giving up power, position, and wealth for humbler jobs are Francisco d’Anconia, who destroys his own family’s copper mines while pretending to be no more than a worthless, globetrotting playboy; Quentin Daniels, who leaves a promising career as a scientist to become a night watchman; Calvin Atwood, who leaves behind his own Light and Power Company to become a shoemaker; Dr. Hugh Akston, teacher and mentor to Galt, who leaves his position as head of a university’s Philosophy Department to work in a roadside diner in Wyoming; Ragnar Danneskjold, a philosopher turned pirate, sinking government relief ships; and the woman he finally marries, Kay Ludlow, a beautiful actress who goes on strike by retiring from the movies to protest the rapid decline of the world’s artistic standards. While Galt occupies the apex of the elite pyramid in this novel, he is one of the last characters we meet.

Once again, as in The Fountainhead, Rand uses foils to great and pointed effect. Dagny Taggart and James Taggart, for instance, represent two contrasting positions in their family railroad; while James heads his family’s company, he is actually one of the “moochers” of the novel, who takes credit for the achievements of his sister, Dagny, who carries the true burden of responsibility for keeping the trains rolling and accident-free in a rapidly disintegrating society. Hank Rearden and his brother, Philip, on the other hand, represent true and false creativity. Hank, the inventor, lets himself be condemned as heartless because of his dedication to his work, while Philip condemns his older brother’s materialism while living off his money.

While so many of their creative peers are mysteriously disappearing, people like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden struggle to keep things working. Once Hank has invented his own metal, both stronger and lighter than steel, it becomes inevitable that he and Dagny meet. She needs his product and is the only one in her company brave enough to believe the evidence of her own mind and purchase the new material. When Rearden first sees Dagny, he feels strong sexual desire. Taught to revile such base feelings, Rearden responds to his own desire for Dagny with self-loathing.

Lillian and Dagny also serve as perfect foils. Lillian pours all her energy into being the well- supported wife of a man she does not love, using his own guilt to “control” him passively. Alternately, Dagny is kinetic and creative, answering Rearden’s desire with her own.

Dagny and Hank spend most of the novel trying to solve the mystery of the vanishing “movers and shakers” while struggling to survive in and support a more and more collectivized America, whose mystifying slogan has become “Who is John Galt?”

While looking for Galt—the “destroyer” who is draining the world of its creative energy—Dagny is also seeking another man, an inventor who created a revolutionary motor she has found abandoned. Ironically, Dagny discovers that John Galt is the inventor of the mysterious machine when she crashlands her small plane in Galt’s Gulch. A utopia for independent thinkers Galt has established in the Colorado Rockies, Galt’s Gulch is where the strikers now live and thrive, out from under the world’s crushing burden.

The use of foils also helps to propel the plot toward its climactic scenes: At the opposite end of the moral spectrum from Galt’s former philosophy professor and mentor, Dr. Hugh Akston, is Dr. Robert Stadler. Akston and Stadler had been colleagues at Patrick Henry University and competitors for the loyalty of their students Galt and his first two “followers,” Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold. Stadler, the world’s greatest physicist, advocates that force is the only practical motivator of human behavior. When he becomes a stooge for the government by supporting the creation of their State Science Institute, Galt leaves his graduate studies in protest. Eventually, Stadler and another scientist, Floyd Ferris, compose two halves of an evil entity. Stadler provides the scientific understanding necessary for Ferris create deadly new weapons for the government.

Fittingly, Stadler dies in an explosion his research helped to create. Ferris, who becomes top coordinator of the State Science Institute, creates the “Ferris Persuader,” a torture device later used on Galt in an attempt to force him to join the government and fix everything that is falling apart. But, his fellow strikers, Dagny Taggart among them, rescue Galt before he can acquiesce.

As Dominique Francon does in The Fountainhead, Dagny Taggart “marries up,” so to speak; Francisco d’Anconia is her first love and the first to join John Galt’s strike, giving up Dagny and destroying his own copper mines to do so; after she loses Francisco, Dagny’s next lover is Hank Rearden; finally, she becomes John Galt’s mate, after serving for a time as his cook and maid. Eventually, the lights of New York City go out, indicating that Galt’s strike has succeeded; Galt decides that it is time for the strikers to reenter society and repair things, this time on their own terms.

Despite its championing of free enterprise and disdainful portrait of a welfare state, Atlas Shrugged evoked strong hostility from some critics. Whittaker Chambers, one of America’s foremost conservatives at the time, stated in his National Review article published by William F. Buckley, Jr., that Rand was “advocating philosophical materialism, and, implicitly, the dictatorship of a technocratic elite.” Rand responded to this charge during a speech at Princeton University, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” where she attacked conservatives for their defense of tradition and conformity. They, in turn, were alienated by her defense of atheism and infidelity. Despite these heated exchanges, many political analysts now see a gradual incorporation of her defense of laissez- faire capitalism in current conservative arguments.

Unfortunately, the novel is so intent on expounding upon its epistemology, even going so far as to name its chapters after Aristotelian principles, such as “A is A,” that it leaves itself open to charges of being rhetoric poorly disguised as a novel. Clearly, Galt’s speech, suspending as it does all characters, action, and story for its nearly 60-page length, is a departure from what many consider to be good storytelling. To be fair, however, other novels held in high esteem such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Richard Wright’s Native Son use a similar strategy.

As has been pointed out previously, it is only logical that Rand abandoned fiction writing at this point to devote her full energies to expanding and defending her new philosophy in such publications as the Objectivist Newsletter, the Objectivist, and, after her break with Nathaniel and Karen Branden, in the Ayn Rand Letter.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. As Rand did in real life, her character Dagny Taggart seems to defend her affair with the married Hank Rearden as morally justified. Is her defense a good example of feminism? Why or why not? In traditional 19th- and 20th-century literature, for instance, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, women tend to pay the ultimate penalty for sexual malfeasance. Some women writers, on the other hand, such as Ayn Rand, make it a point to contradict that literary cliche. Try constructing a feminist or literary defense for such behavior.

2. Rand wrote in her 1957 introduction to Anthem that its fabled dystopia was not far off. Do you think Rand could apply that historical defense to Atlas Shrugged, as well? (For more information on this, see question 2 after the discussion of Anthem)

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
“Ayn Rand.” In Ethics: Ready Reference Series. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1994.
Ayn Rand: A Sense ofLife. Directed by Michael Paxton. Performed by Sharon Gless, Michael S. Berliner, Harry Binswanger, and Sylvia Bokor. 1998. DVD. Image, 1999.

“The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism.” Available online. URL: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer. Accessed January 27, 2007.

“The Ayn Rand Society: A Professional Society Affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division.” Available online. URL: http://www. aynrandsociety.org/. Accessed February 14, 2007.

Berger, Peter L. “Adam Smith Meets Nietzsche.” New York Times Book Review, 6 July 1986, p. 13.
Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Anchor Books, 1987.
Branden, Nathaniel. Who Is Ayn Rand? An Analysis of the Novels of Ayn Rand. New York: Random House, 1962.

“The Cato Institute.” Edited by Andrew Mast. Available online. URL: http://www.cato.org/special/three- women/rand.html. Accessed February 14, 2007.
Chambers, Whittaker. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, 20 December 1957, 594-596.