"Atlas Shrugged": A Review

It’s easy to be snarky, sarcastic, degrading, and even vicious towards reviewing books. Nowhere is this more evident than with the works of writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. In particular, her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged (1957), garners praise but mostly people employ condescending rhetoric when it comes to this tome.

The book involves a world that is the “day after tomorrow.” Everywhere else besides the United States has become a People’s State. America is fast approaching that status as the economy limps on like a disabled person trying to get her balance. The overarching themes remain self-reliance, thinking, and revolution. Some argue that this book sparked the counterculture that would be seen in the 1960’s. Ironically, this work shows a tale in sweeping and rapturous detail of the ideas of not just looking out for number one but realizing that as long as there are other people in a society, it is proper to meet with and trade with them, value for value.

Enter railroad executive Dagny Taggart. The beautiful woman with the mind to match her physique, she struggles to find meaning in a world going mad, as it seems. She finds childhood friend and copper playboy Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián D’Anconio and steel magnate Henry “Hank” Rearden on a quest to solve mysteries. From cigarettes and a classical tune and a powerful motor to a shady figure who seems to be draining the brains of the USA, Dagny finds her way into the places that she never expects. Especially, she takes her role seriously in running her railway all while wondering who in the world is John Galt?

Miss Rand explores and expounds upon her philosophy the most here, but it is the spectacle and the story that take center stage in all of this. She always said that she approached books both to read and write “for the story” “like a child.” Here, she secures her roles as showcasing the ideal man. Atlas makes the best of her consistency by making it proper to display that the theories that she once held as a young girl would become manifest in her middle age and remain through to her death.

But Atlas is about life. It is about the singular vision of ensuring that rational self-interest and capitalism are virtues and everything that is the opposite of these ideas represents the ideas which attempt to butcher individualism.

This book glorifies the human spirit, not in a mystical way but in illustrating the idea of the fiber of men and women who hold up the world and decide to shrug from the ideas of listlessness, indifference, and despair.

As Dagny stands as a train rolling along, the other figures remain the tracks that keep her on the rails. What makes the book especially great is the notion that it is fully integrated. As clarity comes out of the murkiness of the characters and the plot, the sense of what makes this book special is the theme and what Miss Rand coined the “plot-theme.” Her style is original and is as reliable as the steel featured in the story. In the novel, various characters stand in contrast to the heroes and it is not just the “good versus the bad” but the infighting and misunderstandings of the saviors of the book.

For all the vitriol and rancor and laughing and pointing fingers that this book receives, it should be made clear that it is about love. This whole book espouses Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy which Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute Dr. Yaron Brook calls it “the philosophy of love.” It is not about entering gas chambers or living evil lives but discovering the might of knowledge and happiness despite the conditions around people who want to grow and live.