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was “to be much more a ‘social’ novel than The Fountainhead.” First and foremost, the novel had to focus on the cluster of relationships that constitute the social totality:

      Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are out consciously to destroy him. But the theme was Roark—not Roark’s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation. (x)

      As a novel, Atlas Shrugged explores these relations in every dimension of human life. Rand traces the links between political economy and sex, education and art, metaphysics and psychology, money and moral values. She concentrates extensively on the union of spiritual and physical realms, on the specific, concrete means by which certain productive individuals move the world, and by which others live off of their creations. She attempts to show the social importance of the creative act by documenting what would happen if the prime movers, the “men of the mind,” were to go on strike.⁴⁷

      No summary of Atlas Shrugged could possibly unravel its intricacies. The book boasts a long list of protagonists and villains, but it centers around the exploits of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, two industrialists who attempt to keep their respective businesses afloat in a global economy plagued by extensive government intervention and growing social chaos. The economic devastation wrought by growing statism is made worse by a conspiracy of omission. As the state becomes more intrusive, creative thinkers and producers from every profession begin to disappear. They unite secretly behind John Galt, a brilliant inventor, who leads a “strike of the men of the mind.” These people of creative ability desert their businesses and leave the statists nothing to loot. They retire to a capitalist utopia in the mountains of Colorado known as Galt’s Gulch.

      It takes Dagny a long time to realize that she is fighting to keep her transcontinental railroad alive in a parasitical society that is slowly consuming her. As the world heads toward cataclysm, the leader of the United States government takes to the airwaves to issue a call for calm. Using specially developed technology, Galt interrupts the broadcast and proceeds to explain the cause of the decline of civilization. His speech touches on nearly every major branch of philosophy; it is the essence of Rand’s Objectivist worldview. Galt asks the remaining producers to stop permitting their own victimization and join the strike. When the strike succeeds in stopping the motor of the world, the people of creative ability return on their own terms, to rebuild a truly human society.

      Integrating science fiction and fantasy, symbolism and realism, philosophy and romance, Rand’s novel inspires passionate responses from admirers and critics alike. Admirers see the book as the credo of a new intellectual movement, but critics from both ends of the political spectrum are repulsed. Left-leaning reviewers abhorred Rand’s preoccupation with capitalism, whereas conservative columnists were sickened by Rand’s atheism. Granville Hicks (1957) asserted that “the book is written out of hate.” He condemned Rand for “cheerfully” celebrating “the destruction of civilization.” And Whittaker Chambers, writing for National Review, sensed that Rand was heavily indebted to Nietzsche. But he believed that in her atheism and “materialism,” Rand had greater affinity with Marx. Chambers wrote: “Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Chambers believed that in the “dictatorial tone” and “overriding arrogance” of the book, one can hear a voice “from almost any page … commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”⁴⁸

      These hostile reviews from the left and the right partially reflected Rand’s own belief that she had finally achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis that was neither Marxist nor religious. In her philosophic journals, Rand explained that her novel had to “vindicate the industrialist” as “the author of material production.” Rand wished to secularize the spiritual, and spiritualize the material:

      The material is only the expression of the spiritual; that it can neither be created nor used without the spiritual (thought); that it has no meaning without the spiritual, that it is only the means to a spiritual end—and therefore, any new achievement in the realm of material production is an act of high spirituality, a great triumph and expression of man’s spirit. And that those who despise “the material” are those who despise man and whose basic premises are aimed at man’s destruction.⁴⁹

      For Rand, the “spiritual” did not pertain to an otherworldly faculty, but rather to an activity of human consciousness. Reason, as “the highest kind of spiritual activity,” was required “to conquer, control, and create in the material realm” (ibid.). Rand did not limit material activities to purely industrial production. She wished to “show that any original rational idea, in any sphere of human activity, is an act of creation and creativeness” (ibid.). This applies equally to the activity of industrialists and artists, businessmen and intellectuals, scientists and philosophers. Each of these spheres is accorded epistemological significance.

      By connecting reason and production, thought and activity, theory and practice, Rand intended to uncover the “deeper, philosophical error” upon which these dichotomies were based. As such, Atlas Shrugged was designed to “blast the separation of man into ‘body’ and ‘soul,’ the opposition of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’” Rand rejected the metaphysical dualists who had bifurcated human existence. She proclaimed in her journals that “man is an indivisible entity.” Mind and body “can be considered separately only for purposes of discussion, not in actual fact.” In reality, the human individual is an integrated whole.

      This vision is central to Galt’s sixty-page speech, which took Rand two years to complete (B. Branden 1986, 266). It abounds with ideas and principles that served as the basis for Rand’s formal philosophical totality. But Rand’s transcendence of dualism is just as obvious in those sections of Galt’s speech which were edited out of the final manuscript. Rand writes:

      You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?⁵⁰

      Rand’s revolt against dualism was motivated by a profound desire to exalt a heroic and integrated view of human existence. Even in the sex act, Rand’s characters show a passionate spirituality that is not cut off from intense physical pleasure. In her journals, Rand explained that she wanted to dramatize the “essential, unbreakable tie between sex and spirit—which is the tie between body and soul.” The religionists damned human beings for the sins of the flesh, whereas the materialists divorced man’s mind from the functions of his body. Rand proclaimed that her morality of rational selfishness was designed for human life on earth. In her ethos, sex is as much a spiritual celebration as it is a physical one.⁵¹

      Rand projects this mind-body synthesis in a fictional representation of the “ideal man.” She explains that her chief protagonist, John Galt, “has no intellectual contradiction and, therefore, no inner conflict.” He experiences a joy in living that is not determined by pain or fear or guilt.⁵² Each of Rand’s heroes reflects this same “worship of joy” to a lesser degree, but all are united by Galt’s oath, one that is similar to the credo enunciated by Equality 7-2521 in Anthem. Galt states: “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” (1069).

      After years of literary and philosophic integration, Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957. She credited herself with having created a new, nonreligious morality through an aesthetic medium. She aimed to bridge the gap between art and entertainment. She wrote in her journal that traditional morality sees “art” and “entertainment” as polar opposites. Art is supposed to be “serious and dull.” Entertainment is enjoyable, but superficial. No serious work of art, in such a traditional view, could possibly be both entertaining and

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