LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

their uniqueness, but in practice, the Russian ideal involved the dissolution of the individual into an organic totality. The communists merely secularized this vision of conciliarity; they retained the Russian impulse toward the material and spiritual subordination of the individual, but substituted the State for the body of Christ.

      Toohey’s newspaper column, “One Small Voice,” features endless attacks against individualism that reek of Russian sobornost’. In many ways, he extols the virtue of the cultic loss of self, a theme that was prominent in the writings of the Nietzschean Russian Symbolists. But Toohey goes further: he advocates the sacrificing and subordinating of the individual to the almighty One. Rand uncovers this pretentious use of altruistic language as an ideological tool to conquer the human spirit, to make men small and insignificant, to rule the masses by elevating mediocrity and ridiculing greatness.

      In her portrayal of Toohey, Rand also continues her literary policy of integrating the traits of mind and body. She depicts her chief villain as a repulsive swine. She writes in her outline, that Toohey’s “puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.”⁴²

      Despite her emphasis on the individual’s ego as the fountainhead of human progress, Rand had provided a far more complex psychological portrait of the mass men as fragmented and incomplete. In opposition to this splintered picture of a human being, Rand began to articulate a nondualistic, nonatomistic view of the genuine individual.

      While writing The Fountainhead, Rand continued her paean to individualism in her novelette, Anthem, originally titled Ego (Reedstrom 1993b). Written in 1937, first published in England in 1938, Rand’s futuristic story offers an alternative to Zamiatin’s visions of a technologically advanced collectivist dystopia. Rand projects the primitive conditions that must predominate in any social order that destroys the individual. In Anthem, total collectivism has led to the obliteration of industry and the distortion of human relationships. Peoples’ names have been replaced by euphemistic code words and numerical notations. Even the word “I” has been lost. The rediscovery of this word by the protagonist of the story is one of Rand’s most poetic tributes to individualism. Foreshadowing the egoistic ethical credo of Atlas Shrugged, uniting body and soul through secular means, Equality 7-2521 proclaims:

      “I am. I think. I will. What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.… This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.… My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.”⁴³

      At the end of the novelette, Rand’s protagonist has renamed himself Prometheus. He escapes the collectivist society with the woman he loves to build a new individualist culture. In her elevation of Promethean individuality, Rand inherits the Nietzschean-Symbolist leitmotif, without its penchant for Dionysian emotionalism, organic collectivism, or the cultic loss of self.⁴⁴ The genuine individual is neither slave nor master; he does not submit to, or seek self-assertion through, the rule of the collective.

      EARLY NONFICTION

      Mixed reviews of The Fountainhead did not block Rand from achieving commercial success. In the early 1940s, Rand was planning to write her first nonfiction work, “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” She wrote a condensed version called, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” which appeared in Reader’s Digest. Rand considered the essay a “bromide” to serve as the credo for a broad union of Old Right intellectuals committed to capitalism. The group never materialized primarily because of its ideological diversity (B. Branden 1986, 163). Nevertheless, during this period, Rand had the opportunity to interact with several conservative and libertarian thinkers and activists, including Channing Pollock, Albert Jay Nock, Ruth Alexander, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the father of the contemporary Austrian school of economics and the teacher of the renowned Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek (163, 188). Rand championed the Austrian school of economics in her later nonfiction essays. Though she shared much in common with her procapitalist political contemporaries, she was often disappointed by what she perceived as their cynicism, subjectivism, and mysticism.

      Despite its political clichés, “The Only Path to Tomorrow” provides a first peek at Rand as a public philosopher. In the essay, Rand argues that totalitarian ideology is the greatest threat to civilization. She posits a historical antagonism between “Active Man” and “Passive Man.” “Active Man” is another name for Howard Roark. “Active Man” is the individualist. He is a producer, creator, and originator. He requires independence and “neither needs nor seeks power over other men—nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion” (Rand 1944, 89).

      “Passive Man” was another name for Peter Keating. He dreads independence and “is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told” (90). Collectivism breeds upon such passivity. It is an ideology that unites the masses through “the ancient principle of savagery.”

      Interestingly, Rand does not argue that the needy are parasites on the wealthy. She states emphatically that “Passive Man” can be rich or poor. Coming from all social classes, the “Passive Man” is a parasite on the genuine productive achievements of the “Active Man.” This theme reappears in much more sophisticated form in Rand’s mature critique of contemporary statism.

      Rand’s well-known antipathy for Soviet collectivism enabled her to contribute an anticommunist tract to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Written in 1946, the “Screen Guide for Americans” followed the same form as her earlier Reader’s Digest article. Rand supported the communists’ right to express their ideas, but argued that moviegoers and producers should not be obligated to patronize and sanction projects that aimed to corrupt American institutions.

      In the pamphlet, Rand posited a stark battle between Freedom and Slavery, between republican government and dictatorship. Of greatest philosophical relevance is Rand’s contention that the dictator is not an individualist. He is “by definition … the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collection of men” (Rand 1947, 49). Rand had transferred her insights on the “soul of the collectivist” into a successful piece of political propaganda for the Hollywood film industry.

      Throughout the 1940s, Rand wrote several screenplays, including the film version of The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey; You Came Along, starring Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott; and an especially romantic Love Letters, with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.⁴⁵ These works adumbrate typically Randian themes, but they are of little or no independent philosophical interest. The 1940s were marked by something much more important to Rand’s intellectual maturation. The celebrated author began working on the magnum opus of her literary career.

      ATLAS SHRUGGED

      In The Fountainhead, Rand focused on the principles of individualism and collectivism as manifested within the individual’s soul. The personal conflicts faced by each of her characters are primarily internal. Each character is a mixture of two extremes symbolized by Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. The characters are defined not by their relations to one another, but by their specific natures. Their social ties were secondary and derivative of the central theme.

      In 1945, Rand began to outline a new novel, initially called The Strike. She wanted to change her focus radically by delving deeply into the dialectical interrelationships between characters, social structures, and institutional processes. She wished to proceed “from persons, in terms of history, society, and the world.” Her emphasis was not on

Скачать книгу