Most importantly, Galt is unwaveringly rational and deals directly with the objective facts he encounters. In him, rationality and emotion are fully integrated. Though ruled by reason, he is able to express and experience his emotions as well. Just as Rand uses Dagny to shatter the mind-body dichotomy that separates physical pleasure from higher thought, she employs Galt to reject the split between reason and emotion.
The mind is the motive power that drives civilization, just as the motor Galt develops can drive industry. I suppose someone with more patience for this book than I have could wade through Galt's muddled metaphysics and establish just how "the law of identity" leads to property rights, but remember that, in the plot of the novel, Galt's speech was a revolutionary act meant to inspire his listeners, undermine the regime of the looters, and usher in the reign of the Galtians; it was not a text to be brought to the seminar room and pored over by graduate students, but a call to arms.
Or rather, a call to drop out. Since I brought up human nature, there is also the matter of the thinness of Rand's anthropology. Rand's basic assertion is the rationality of human beings. To the extent that a person is irrational, he is regarded as evil, anti-mind and anti-life. And it is this conception of the human being as a rational, thinking being which leads to her ideal of the productive genius, his happiness, and the political order that would protect and preserve it. For Rand, the state only exists to shield the rational from the irrational, the good and the strong from ravenous desires of the wicked and the weak.
Of course, other rationalists have drawn strikingly different conclusions. In this regard, it useful to note that much serious political philosophy proceeds from a completely different premise -- the imperfect rationality of human beings -- and rightly so.
If one considers Hobbes, say, or Spinoza, or Locke, three of the thinkers who inaugurated modern liberalism, one will notice that the fundamental problem of social life is that human beings are driven by their passions and their imaginations, by their hopes and their fears.
It is these passions that create the problems and tensions that point to the need for stable political organization. While it is reason that leads them to enter into civil society -- to escape from the inconveniences of the state of nature -- the political order arranged is one that must take human beings as they are and not as the best they could be.
This could be an authoritarian state, as it was for Hobbes, or a liberal democracy, as it was for Spinoza. In both cases, however, there is the recognition that human beings are passionate creatures, that the state is needed because of the problems inherent in human nature, that these problems may be alleviated somewhat in civil society but they won't go away. Ironically, when one mulls it over, one may find that it's Galt and his band of strikers and dropouts who prove to be driven by their passions.
Galt especially, who, despite his ultra-handsome looks and heroic self-understanding, can't muster up the gumption to just go up to the woman he has a massive crush on and ask her out for a drink -- or at least just talk to her -- and instead sits around chatting up her poor, love-struck assistant, hoping to catch a glimpse into her life.
No, I think not. And aside from being somewhat creepy, it underscores the true impotence of Rand's hero. And it's not only with Dagny. When faced with the "communist" takeover of the motor factory, Galt doesn't seek out the banker Midas Mulligan and ask for a loan so that he can develop his motor on his own or attempt a run for political office; he just takes his toys and goes into hiding, hoping by such action to help hasten the apocalypse.
This seems to me to be more like the behavior of a petulant adolescent than of the "highest man. Despite all of their speeches and protestations, these people are not so much stern rationalists but romantics. Such characters make terrible role models for those of us who are forced to reside in the world, which just may not be the stage for the struggle between the looting mystics and heroic individuals, but a place infinitely more complex, and more interesting.
Also, we should keep in mind that it is people convinced of their superior rationality and gnostic insights into the direction of world-historical change that generally pose the greatest challenge to the stability of the political order.
It is worth remarking, too, that there is no sense of tragedy, no sense of the ultimate fragility of existence, in Rand's work. Her heroes regard suffering as something unnatural and unnecessary, and happiness as the only rightful condition of man.
It is a strangely sterile world, one without sickness or disease or disability, where failure in business is merely an incentive to greater striving, and death takes only the villains, the marginal, or the vast unnamed. Rand's heroes are unencumbered by finitude, however. They strive to overcome "the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men," to recover, as Galt himself says, the spirit of their childhood. There is a word for people who try to escape from the contradictory, the arbitrary, the irrational and tragic dimensions of life that we all must face--that word is delusional.
Bill Buckley once said he thought Whittaker Chambers had gone too far when he wrote in his review of this book, "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged , a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber -- go! Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The Atlas Shrugged Book Club. The thinking, sans the name, had been around since at least the s. And her contemporaries, economists such as Milton Friedman and the so-called Austrian School, gave the set of ideas academic standing and respectability.
For every studious reader of ecnomist Friedrich von Hayek , there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of eager devourers of Rand. Her heirs and successors in the so-called Objectivist camp have since waged a kind of sectarian cold war with libertarians.
One thinks of the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists or between Social Democrats and Communists. In the interim, starting with Ronald Reagan, the GOP has absorbed selected aspects of the rhetoric and larger aims of the libertarian purists much as the New Deal did once pick and choose rhetoric and programs from the socialist left.
At the same time, official party conservatism took to cultivating the evangelical Christian sectors, marshaling issues such as abortion and evolution in an aggressive bid to gain favor with fundamentalist voters. The result is a marriage of convenience, an uneasy alliance between a pro-market, secular Right and the older, faith-based forces who make common cause against a perceived common enemy.
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