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1957, novel, Random House

Atlas Shrugged

In a United States sliding into collectivism, the country's most productive people begin to disappear. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and industrialist Hank Rearden fight to keep their companies running, until they learn that the disappearances are a strike led by John Galt.

Rand's last and longest novel, and the fullest statement of her philosophy in fiction.

Source

Number 4 in our suggested reading order: The long one. Read it after The Fountainhead, when you know what Rand is building towards.

Characters

Ideas it carries

  • Objectivism

    Rand's name for her philosophy as a whole.

  • Primacy of existence

    Existence comes first; consciousness perceives it but does not create it.

  • Reason

    The faculty that identifies and integrates what the senses provide; for Rand, man's only means of knowledge.

  • Rational self-interest

    Each person's own life is their highest value, pursued by reason and without sacrificing others.

  • The trader principle

    Dealing with others by voluntary exchange of value for value.

  • Productiveness

    Creating the values one's life requires; one of the virtues in Rand's ethics.

  • Non-initiation of force

    No one may start the use of physical force against others.

  • Laissez-faire capitalism

    A social system based on individual rights, including property rights, with government separated from economics.

  • The sanction of the victim

    The good enabling evil by accepting its moral judgement of them.

Lines from it

  • “Who is John Galt?”

    Part One, Chapter I (the novel's opening line).

  • “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

    John Galt. Part Three (the oath of the strikers, repeated in Galt's speech).

  • “Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.”

    Francisco d'Anconia. Part Two, Chapter II (Francisco's money speech).

  • “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

    Ayn Rand. Afterword, "About the Author".

Essays on it