Novel: Atlas Shrugged

Overview
Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is a dystopian epic set in a near-future United States where productive industries crumble under mounting regulation, political patronage, and moral campaigns against self-interest. Blending mystery, romance, and philosophical argument, it follows industrialists and innovators who begin to vanish as society’s dependence on them deepens. The book dramatizes Rand’s Objectivist vision: reason as man’s means of survival, the virtue of rational self-interest, and the ethics of voluntary exchange over coercive redistribution.

Plot
Dagny Taggart, the brilliant operating executive of Taggart Transcontinental, fights to keep her railroad functioning as the economy disintegrates. She allies with Hank Rearden, a steel magnate who invents a superior alloy, Rearden Metal, and faces vilification and dictates designed to seize his output for public ends. The country’s tone is set by the question “Who is John Galt?”, a fatalistic catchphrase that masks a mystery: top producers are quitting without explanation.

Dagny discovers a revolutionary motor that could harness static electricity, abandoned in a defunct factory. Convinced it could reverse the collapse, she hunts its inventor while battling crony laws orchestrated by Washington power-brokers like Wesley Mouch and protected by Dagny’s ineffectual brother, James Taggart. Francisco d’Anconia, a brilliant heir who appears to sabotage his own copper empire, reveals himself as an undercover destroyer of looters’ schemes, pushing producers to withdraw their sanction.

A plane crash in the Rockies brings Dagny to a secret valley, Galt’s Gulch, where the vanished creators live by the principle of trade and refuse to sustain a system that condemns them. John Galt, the motor’s inventor, leads a strike of “the men of the mind,” arguing that creators must stop enabling a society that expropriates their work while denouncing their values. Dagny returns to fight for her railroad, but the regime intensifies control, culminating in Project X, a weapon of terror.

Galt secretly addresses the nation by radio, presenting a comprehensive defense of reason, rights, and laissez-faire capitalism, challenging listeners to reject compulsion. The state captures him and attempts to force his cooperation through torture; Dagny, Rearden, and allies mount a rescue as the economy reaches final breakdown. With the system collapsing of its own contradictions, the strikers prepare to return and rebuild on the premise of individual rights.

Characters
Dagny Taggart embodies practical intelligence and integrity, refusing to accept decay as inevitable. Hank Rearden’s journey traces a moral awakening from guilt-ridden duty to assertive pride in his work. John Galt is both a man and a principle, the motive power of the story’s strike. Francisco d’Anconia acts as provocateur and teacher, dismantling a corrupt order from within. Their foils include James Taggart, a schemer who thrives on social pull, and Lillian Rearden, who wields moral blackmail against achievement.

Themes and ideas
The novel champions the moral right of producers to their minds, time, and rewards, arguing that civilization depends on the free exercise of reason. It portrays altruism, when weaponized as a social duty, as a justification for coercion, and depicts government as most dangerous when it replaces law with arbitrary decrees. Love, work, and trade are presented as forms of value-for-value exchange, not sacrifices. The strike dramatizes Rand’s claim that the mind is the root of wealth, and that when the thinker withdraws, the world stops.