Atlas Shrugged

Summary

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's longest novel and the fullest dramatization of the philosophy she later called Objectivism. It is set in an unnamed near-future United States whose economy is sliding into collapse as government controls tighten and the country's most able industrialists, scientists and artists mysteriously disappear. People shrug off every unanswerable question with a catchphrase, "Who is John Galt?" The central figure is Dagny Taggart, operating vice-president of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad, who keeps the line running while her brother James, its president, trades favors with officials in Washington. Dagny allies herself with Hank Rearden, a steel manufacturer who has invented Rearden Metal, an alloy stronger and lighter than steel. Against public denunciations and official obstruction they build the John Galt Line with the new metal and prove it on a triumphant first run. Their business partnership becomes a love affair. Meanwhile Francisco d'Anconia, heir to a great copper fortune and Dagny's first love, appears to be squandering his inheritance as an idle playboy. As new laws and directives multiply, culminating in Directive 10-289, which freezes jobs, prices and patents, more producers vanish. Dagny pursues a clue: the remains of a revolutionary motor that could draw energy from the atmosphere. Following one of the missing men, she crash-lands in a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where she finds the vanished producers living in a community of free trade. Their leader is John Galt, the engineer who built the motor and who has organized a strike of the mind: the people who carry the world, like the Titan Atlas, have withdrawn their effort from a society that, in their view, punishes ability. Dagny refuses at first to abandon her railroad and returns to the outside world. As the economy breaks down, Galt seizes the national radio to deliver a long speech setting out the strikers' philosophy. Officials capture him and try to force him to take charge of the economy; the strikers rescue him. The novel ends as New York goes dark and Galt announces that the strikers will soon return to rebuild. Readers and critics have responded to the book in sharply divided ways. Admirers treat it as a defense of reason, individual achievement and free markets; critics object to its view of altruism, its schematic characters and its length. Its sales and political influence have remained strong for more than six decades.

Top Lessons

• Ideas have consequences

  Rand builds the plot as an argument: each new law in the novel produces a visible economic effect. Readers can test whether the causes and effects she shows are persuasive and where the novel simplifies.

• Rand's ethics of rational self-interest

  The novel presents Rand's view that a person's own life is the proper purpose of morality and that trade, value for value, is the just relation among people. Understanding her argument precisely is a prerequisite for agreeing or disagreeing with it.

• Novel as philosophy

  Long speeches by Francisco and Galt state the book's ideas directly. The work invites discussion of what fiction gains, and loses, when it argues a thesis.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Rand's philosophy treats mind and body as an integrated whole and casts emotional conflict as the result of contradictory premises, a view relevant to readers interested in the history of cognitive and moral psychology.

• Part Three, Chapter VII ("This Is John Galt Speaking")

  Galt's speech presents mind-body integration and the role of reason in emotion.