Ayn Rand's style is somewhat common and childish. 1000 pages may be too big. But it is easy to read, and there is a suspens that keeps you turning the pages. The last part, the reconstruction, is slimer than I expected. As a matter of fact, I would have like to read more pages.
Ayn Rand acknowledges the positive role of money in human exchanges. She sees a relation between money and work. But she does not seem to see a relation between property and money. She thinks that money is good to gauge the value of a product. It is not clear if she is aware of the difference between money and wealth. For instance, if you own two bicycles but use only one, then one of them is more valuable to you than the other, even if it costed less originally, or if you can have a good price for the useless bicycle if you sell it. If everybody associates the same values to the same things, then nobody will be interested to sell or buy anything.
Ayn Rand states that gold is better than paper to represent money. But since the value of money depends on the ratio of the total amount of money compared to the global wealth, it does not depend on the raw material, paper or gold, of which it is made, except when the ratio is beyond a certain threshold, and in this latter case, money does not fulfill correctly its role, and should not be called "money" anymore. And because it is cheaper and more convenient to represent money by printed papers than by coins made of gold, paper seems better to me.
She does not speak positively about the Stock exchange, since it is only the evil brother, James Taggart, who plays his money, and loses most of it. It seems that the important notion of risk is not fully appreciated by Ayn Rand--the same remark can be said about other topics than economics.
Ayn Rand rejects classical philosophy except a little part of Aristotle. It is a pity, because her lack of knowledge leads her to mix up notions, and to use inapropriately some philosphical words. It seems that she does not really understand that metaphysics is what is beyond physics, that there are things that are not material, and that these things can be very important, like numbers, ideas, love, gods, etc.
Ayn Rand says that plants and animals cannot destroy themselves, but humans do. She does not give the reasons for that alleged behaviour.
She says that humans can think and animals cannot, or have very limited capabilty of thinking. And therefore, when humans don't use their brain, they retrograde to the state of animals.
She wrote her book in the years 1945-1957, at a time when there were strict moral rules. Like H. G. Wells, she is pleading for a more permissive society. E.g. Dagny Taggart loves a married man, Hank Rearden.
Ayn Rand does not describe love like Joseph Heller in "Something happened". She does not show a dissymmetry in the passions felt by a man and by a woman, whereas Heller and myself, see important differences. Her love stories are shallow and simple. They are not necessary to the book.
Dagny Taggart has three successive lovers: Fransisco d'Anconia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt. It is difficult to understand the reasons why she abandons Fransisco, then Hank. The only sensible explanation is that Dagny always prefers the richest man of the moment. Since this is not a romantic reason, I discard it, and am puzzled.
Ayn Rand does not talk about war. She assumes that people are living peacefully together. It allows her to avoid discussing means to establish peace on earth, and particularly to talk about little sacrifices made in exchange for peace, because it goes against her ideas about sacrifices (see below).
Ayn Rand says nothing about demography. It is a pity, because it is an important cause of economical and political troubles.
Ayn Rand was born in 1905 in Russia. She migrated to the USA in 1926. She knows very well what socialism is. I know it too, therefore I agree with her on everything she says regarding this subject, e.g.:
- People who are incompetent should not be allowed to tell others what they should do.
- Equalization, unification, and constraints lead to poverty.
- Conversely, differences, plurality, and freedom generate wealth; of course differences imply that there are rich and poor people, which is not ideal, but which is far better than to have poverty for everybody.
- Socialists change words. They don't call a spade a spade.
- Socialists don't accept to face reality. They don't recognize that A is A, if this does not fit with their interests.
- Socialists use force and manipulate media to achieve their goal. They don't hesitate to pay actors and provocators to make a demonstration or to organize a strike.
However this book is not the best criticism of socialism. Other writers have understood the flaws of socialism better than did Ayn Rand. And perhaps the best thing to do in order to understand socialism is not to read a book, but to spend holidays in a socialist country, e.g. North Corea (I went to Poland in 1980, and that was enough for me).
In the pages 607 to 620, Ayn Rand criticizes a variation of socialism, where redistribution is not based on the equal rights of one man with another, but on the principle of the needs of everyone. This ideology does not deny that people are different, that they are not born equal. It is an improvement over the theory of unification, because it takes into account an aspect of the real world. But it produces the same result: poverty.
This is a very interesting part of the book. Before reading it, I was not inclined to believe that a redistribution based on the needs of people, would have such bad effects. Now I know that any kind of imposed redistribution is bad, whatsoever.
Ayn Rand proposes that intelligent people leave socialist countries, because if they stay, they won't be happy, and they will sustain the looters (socialist goverment). This is what she says, but this is not exactly what the reader sees in the book, since, her heroine, Dagny Taggart refuses to leave her work until the last pages of the book. As an observer of the fall of the Berlin's wall, of the progress of China, and other socialist countries, I believe that the improvements were mainly brought by residents and not by outsiders.
Ayn Rand writes, page 930: "For centuries the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbours--between those who preached that good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it."
To me, the word 'sacrifice' means an exchange between an immediate gain for a future gain. It is not the renounciation to any gain. The value of the sacrifice depends on the risk you take and the compared values of the two gains.
To Ayn Rand, the word 'sacrifice' has a narrower meaning, as she explains it, page 945: "The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice'. Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. [...] 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious; 'sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't. If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. [...] If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is."
Ayn Rand supposes that you can know in advance the value of your future gain, and that the future gain will be less than the amount you invested. In reality, the future is often unpredicatble, and persons who believe in religion or in political ideologies, estimate that the rewards they'll get is worthwhile.
Page 945: "If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the price of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself--that is the virtue of sacrifice in full. If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate--that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice."
Ayn Rand is comparing the value of different sacrifices on the scale of 'virtue'. The word 'virtue' is not defined. Obviously, it is ironic. She takes the word 'virtue' as it is given in many religions, where altruism and fight against selfishness is considered as a virtue. I never thought of questionning the classical notion of 'virtue'. Ayn Rand's idea is new to me. I find it very interesting.
Page 945: "If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward--if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection. You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man--and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life, and of your persons is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death. [...] It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. [...] death by slow torture."
Ayn Rand assimilates 'virtue' with death. The logic she uses is a little pernicious, because without explanations, she is drifting: the notion of 'zero reward' is equated to 'zero' and then to 'death'. There are missing links, but you can imagine them easily if you have read the previous 900 pages. She does not mention Jesus Christ, why? Perhaps she does not want to have any trouble with Christian fanatics. Perhaps she knows that Jesus Christ was not seeking death, and never asked others to sacrifice their lives. His death cannot be explained by a will of self-sacrifice, but by many other reasons such as: other people wanted Him to die, He did not fear death because He knew He will live again, and because He knew it was a part of the message He had to deliver, etc.
Her refusal of sacrifice leads her to the promotion of selfishness. She does not examine selfishness. If she had done it, perhaps she'd find that selfisheness is also not a true virtue, and this would have lead her to a contradiction. Although Ayn Rand has written a book called The virtue of selfishness, the heroes in Atlas shrugged does not look like being very selfish.
Conclusion:
This book is not perfect. Sometimes it looks like the long whining of a young lonely animal trapped in the snow. Winter is too long, and summer too short. Nevertheless, Ayn Rand brings interesting ideas, changing the way I see my life, therefore I highly recommend this book.
Posted by: Marco on Mon, Jun 18, 01 at 17:50
A few small clarifications:She was born Allisia Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg circa 1900. Her family lived through the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, enduring starvation. Her parents later died in the siege of Leningrad in 1944. She got a permit circa 1923 to go visit relatives in Chicago, and defected. She changed her name, taking "Ayn" from the name of a Finnish author she admired, and "Rand" from the name of the Rand-Remington typewriter company. She moved to Hollywood and worked as an extra and as a screenwriter for silent films while learning English. In the 1930s she published "We the Living", which she called "as close to an autobiography as I will ever write", and the novella "Anthem". She became famous with the publication of "The Fountainhead" in the 1940s and "Atlas Shrugged" in 1957. Afterwards, she wrote several non-fiction books on her philosophy.
Libertarians almost universally admire Ayn Rand's writings, but she disagreed with some libertarian ideas about politics. Also, she conceived politics to be only one facet of a complete philosophy, including ethics, aesthetics, economics, and epistemology. Her philosophy can best be summed up as "rational self-interest".
If you want to know more about her philosophical ideas, please read her books for yourself and make your own judgments. An awful lot has been said about her books by people who have not read them, and she is falsely accused of condoning things she actually denounced. "Atlas Shrugged" is by far the best and most representative of her books. It is very widely read in America, mainly by people who are curious because they have heard about it. Some people agree with it and some people don't. Her most ardent admirers are often young people, who relish her message of self-reliance and non-conformity. Her books are actually disliked by those who are termed "conservative capitalists", for reasons which she addresses in her non-fiction.
As for the aesthetic qualities of her fiction, I must say that she has great strengths and great flaws. She is a master of plot development. "Atlas Shrugged" is a page-turner, if nothing else. And she is brilliant at describing people, scenes, and scenery. She is poor at character development, though. And then there are the "speeches" -- every once in a while one of her characters will start talking, and twenty pages later he's still talking, carefully expounding a philosophical point from premise to conclusion. In the 19th century, readers would not have objected so much to this, and these digressions of hers are really not much different from the political digressions in "War and Peace" or "Les Miserables". Also, her protoganists are the kind of people who really do have the patience and the focus to be able to talk seriously all evening about a complicated philosophical point, and there really are people like that in real life. The final "speech" of the book, though, is a doozy -- something like ninety pages, I think, and it does strain credulity -- but just take it with some artistic license -- or skim, if you have to.
She does have a tendency to go overboard with black-and-white statements and bombast. If you can make allowances for this (especially in light of her having personally suffered so much at the hands of the Communists), you can find a lot of ideas that are well worth reading. I don't agree with every thing she says, particularly not some of her ideas about aesthetics and about sex, but I find that she does have substantial things to say, that are worth hearing and worth chewing on, and she says them in clear English.