Today marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged and, over at RealClearPolitics, Robert Tracinski has an excellent essay on the historical significance of the novel, and the ideas that it embodies:
The most radical aspect of Atlas Shrugged is that Ayn Rand found suspense, heroism, and profound philosophical meaning in the achievements of the entrepreneurs and industrialists who were reshaping the world.
Atlas Shrugged was written in an age of creeping global socialism. Extrapolating from the trends of the day, Ayn Rand projected a future in which most of the world’s nations are collapsing into the poverty and oppression of socialist “people’s states,” while America itself is collapsing under the weight of an increasing government takeover of the economy.
She saw the dramatic potential in asking a single question: what would happen if the innovative entrepreneurs and businessmen–after decades of being vilified and regulated–started to disappear? The disappearance of the world’s productive geniuses provides the novel’s central mystery, both factually and intellectually.
(…)
The factual question is: where did all of these people go? Why did they give up their work? Is there someone or something that is causing them to disappear?
The philosophical question raised by this plot is: what is the role of the entrepreneurs and innovators in a society? What motivates them, what are the conditions they need in order to work, and what happens to the world when they disappear? The factual mystery is integrated with the novel’s deepest philosophical question: what is the moral status of the businessman and industrialist?
Capitalism unleashed an extraordinary burst of scientific and technological innovation and of human creativity–yet this had largely gone unrecognized as a phenomenon with any moral or intellectual significance. Ayn Rand was the first to celebrate the accomplishments of the James Watts and Andrew Carnegies and Thomas Edisons and to recognize in their productive energies an example of moral heroism.
The whole essay is worth a read, as is the book. For me, the book was the beginning of an intellectual journey that continues to this day and, for me, it set in stone the idea that the free market is good not just because it works, which it does, but because it is morally right.
Tracinski goes on to say:
Most intellectuals have accepted the old altruist caricature of self-interest as brute criminality, as if the only choice we face is between forms of sacrifice: sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others or sacrificing others to ourselves. Yet this caricature is thoroughly refuted by the history of capitalism. The philosophy of altruism gives us a choice between two moral models: Mother Theresa or Al Capone. Yet where is the room in this philosophy for a Bill Gates, a Thomas Edison, or any of the thousands of other figures who populate the history of capitalism, building their own fortunes through the creation of new ideas and products?
For the first time, Ayn Rand recognized the reality and significance of these men and drew a profound moral lesson: that genuine self-interest means, not the short-range conniving of the brute, but the creative thought and productive effort of the entrepreneur.
Ayn Rand’s detractors sometimes dismiss her novels as “unrealistic,” but it is today’s mainstream intellectuals who frequently seem as if they are wandering around in a fog of unreality, missing the monumental lessons of two centuries of history.
The era of encroaching global socialism has since given way to an era of global capitalism, which is beginning to transform the lives of billions of people across the globe, from Eastern Europe to India to China. But there is no one to help them understand what capitalism is, its deepest personal meaning for their lives and values, and why it is good.
Well, not exactly, there is Atlas Shrugged
Cross posted at The Liberty Papers
