Anthem

Summary

Anthem is a short dystopian novel set in a future collective society that has lost electricity, science and even the word "I". People are known by names such as Equality 7-2521 and refer to themselves only as "we". Councils assign every person's work, forbid preferences and friendships, and treat any thought or act done alone as the gravest sin. The story is told as the secret journal of Equality 7-2521, written by candlelight in a forgotten tunnel. Equality 7-2521 is taller and quicker of mind than his brothers and longs to be a Scholar, but the Council of Vocations makes him a Street Sweeper. Clearing ground near the edge of the city, he and his friend International 4-8818 discover a tunnel from the Unmentionable Times, the era before the collective. There Equality conducts experiments in secret and rediscovers electric light. He also falls in love with Liberty 5-3000, a young woman working in the fields, whom he calls the Golden One, though such preferences are forbidden. Believing his discovery will be welcomed, Equality takes his glass box of light to the World Council of Scholars. The Scholars are horrified that one man has thought alone, and they threaten to destroy the invention. He seizes it and flees into the Uncharted Forest, where exiles are expected to die. Instead he finds that he can live by his own effort. The Golden One follows him. The two discover a house from the Unmentionable Times, filled with books, and in them Equality finds the word he has been missing: "I". In the closing chapters the narrator takes the name Prometheus and names the Golden One Gaea. He resolves to build a home for those who will follow and to restore the knowledge of the past, and the book ends with the word he calls sacred: "EGO". Rand wrote Anthem in 1937, and it was first published in England in 1938. She revised the text for the American edition of 1946, and the Project Gutenberg text used here reflects that later version. The novella introduces themes that dominate Rand's later novels, the creative individual against the collective and the identification of the self as the source of value, in the form of a brief fable that many schools teach.

Top Lessons

• Language shapes thought

  In Anthem the loss of the word "I" makes it hard even to think of oneself as an individual. Rand uses the device to dramatize her claim that the self is the foundation of value.

• Discovery and authority

  The Scholars reject electric light because it was found without their permission. The novella asks what happens to knowledge when it must be approved by consensus.

• Rand's individualism

  The ending states Rand's view that a person's own happiness is the purpose of his life and that no one exists to serve others. Students can examine the argument carefully and test it against other ethical traditions.

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