The old girl, still kickin': Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's massive ideological novel, turns 50

National Review, Nov 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

WHAT DOES THIS BOOK HAVE?

I come not to bury libertarianism--my shovel isn't big enough--and in any case my guess is that it will continue to coexist awkwardly but more or less peaceably with conservatism, since the two philosophies, for all their differences, still have enough common enemies to make frequent common cause possible. What I find more interesting is that despite (or because of) its literary and intellectual inadequacies, Atlas Shrugged continues to be read and to have an impact on its readers, not all of whom are pimply teenagers. The list of influential figures who admit to having been swayed by it includes such heavy hitters as Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas. John Stossel, whose appearances on ABC's 20/20 have made him one of the most widely known right-of-center journalists in America, recently declared that Atlas Shrugged had played a major part in effecting his conversion to libertarianism.

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One word: Why?

In 1982 I found it sufficient merely to say that "Ayn Rand's novels have had some kind of effect on their more intelligent readers out of all proportion to their (minimal) inherent good sense." The implication, if memory serves, was that this effect could be expected to diminish as full-fledged conservatism sank ever-deeper roots in the American body politic, and that Rand and her books would come in time to be viewed as historical curiosities. No such luck. Atlas Shrugged is 50, a year younger than me, and both of us, amazingly enough, are still here and still prospering.

To celebrate our mutual survival, I reread "Farewell, Dagny Taggart" the other day and Atlas Shrugged immediately afterward. It had been a decade since I'd last revisited the tale of John Galt's triumph over the forces of collectivism, venality, and general wussiness, and even longer since I'd laid eyes on any of my early pieces for NR. Hence I was both surprised and relieved to find that "Farewell, Dagny Taggart" wasn't nearly as jejune as I'd remembered. Still, it never quite gets around to answering the question I posed in the last paragraph: "Just what is it about Atlas Shrugged that appeals to otherwise intelligent people?"

Bennett Cerf came closer than anyone else to answering this question when he said in 1968 that Rand "tells a hell of a story." Why are America's brightest minds vanishing one by one? Where are they going? And who is John Galt? If the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged doesn't make you long to know the answers to these questions, then you're not the sort of person for whom blockbuster novels are written.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Chambers was wrong about one thing: Rand really was a kind of artist. As she said in a 1946 notebook entry:

   I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer.
   But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the
   means to the last ... This is why, I think, the idea of writing a
   philosophical nonfiction book bored me. In such a book, the purpose
   would actually be to teach others, to present my idea to them. In a
   book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of
   world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a
   secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to
   the extent that, they can.