This volume's few exceptions to ignorance don't compensate for myriad content that should have not gone beyond editors' review
Editor Younkins acknowledges in his introduction that he solicited the 36 essays in this book from contributors already known to him, and that he thought the limited knowledge that some had of them subject would add to the perspective. For a potential reader who can get gut-level reactions to the book from Amazon reviews, the response could legitimately be: Why bother with this book? That question applies doubly when potential readers consider that a competing volume consists entirely of essays by contributors who have extensively studied the novel and its author. However, fairness to Younkins's collection demands that its best parts be highlighted and evaluated.
Among the better-informed, more analytical essays, there is a common attitude that if put into words would be expressed "Ayn Rand was smart, but I know better." These authors would have done well to gone back to her work to add to the knowledge they already had about her. Consider:
• Contributor Sechrest takes Ayn Rand to task for not embracing anarchism, contending that "Atlas Shrugged" provides a case for it. Secrest thinks that the novel validates his view over Rand's because Galt's Gulch functions with civility although it has no laws, just custom. (pg. 193-94) Contributor MacCallum likewise writes, "While Rand was ahead of many of her contemporaries in advocating a limited government, she stopped there, perhaps fearful that to go further would be to add the proverbial straw, branding her thought as anarchistic and thereby consigning it to intellectual oblivion." (pg. 197) Yes, Ayn Rand was an advocate of limited government, and, no, she was not inconsistent. Both commentators fail to consider that Galt's Gulch is inhabited only by those invited, persons known to be honorable, unwilling to victimize. (The complaint that Rand was inconsistent comes from contributor MacCallum, where he gripes that he would have preferred that Rand "discover a way out of her inconsistency that would not have branded her with the scarlet letter 'A,' for 'anarchist.'" (pgs. 204-205) As many potential contributors as there were who might have written on political-economic subjects, the book presents three with this one variant, but none sharing the novelist's viewpoint.) If Sechrest and MacCallum didn't realize that the inhabitants of Galt's Gulch differed fundamentally from society's average, these essayists might have recalled that in the chapters of "Atlas Shrugged" immediately before and after those taking place in Atlantis, the outer world is shown to be full of roving gangs, the consequence of lawfulness breaking down in a society without respect for rights. This is Ayn Rand demonstrating that ethics trumps politics in the lives of men and in a society, a perspective Rand advocates that Sechrest and Long didn't understand well enough to even acknowledge in their attempt to claim to know better than Rand the strengths and assumed-by-Sechrest/MacCallum limitations of her theories.
• Contributor Long contrasts "Atlas Shrugged" with Ayn Rand's "Anthem," noting that the protagonist street sweeper of "Anthem" is not called upon by society to share his intelligence, in contrast to Galt of "Atlas Shrugged," who is ordered to. Long says that the difference owes to "an insight Rand had not yet reached in 'Anthem'." (pg. 94) Why doesn't Long realize that if in "Atlas Shrugged" James Taggart had been ruler, he would not have even thought to make Galt dictator, never wanting to acknowledge Galt's superiority even to himself, just as Mouch would rather arrogate more power to himself than delegate the top spot? The difference between "Anthem" and "Atlas Shrugged" in this respect (which Long doesn't recognize) is that in "Atlas Shrugged," leadership in "Atlas" is by the likes of Thompson and Ferris more than Taggart and Mouch. "Atlas Shrugged" even makes the point that where Cuff Meigs controls, control is more diabolical still.
• Contributor Brown, inventorying previous Ayn Rand novels relevant to her point, says of the heroine of Rand's "We the Living," "... the fact is that Kira's attraction is based solely [!] on Leo's looks. While she will get to know him before she actually sleeps with him, one cannot help but think that the model that Rand presented here is one of impulsiveness designed to have a dramatic effect but hardly based on mutual values, since such values cannot be known." (pg. 281-282) Can't they? Brown goes on: "The reader is to conclude that Kira possesses some mystical power to discern a good man just by looking at him, or she is very lucky. Neither case supports Rand's later philosophical views, and neither supports a sexuality based on knowledge and, therefore, value." (pg. 282) Brown is ill-informed about Rand's views on recognizing a person's premises, values, mores, etc., from one's bearing, ingrained habits, spoken thoughts, etc. These inform her characterizations. She wrote in this way about what television cameras revealed about Watergate figures in "The Ayn Rand Letter" of June 18, and July 2, 1973. It was not mysticism, just evaluation from concretes.
Other authors muse their supposed insights, in ignorance of what the published record shows otherwise.
• Contributor Seddon, explaining the chapter title "Account Overdrawn," says the "word 'account' only appears once in the whole chapter". (pg. 51) He doesn't mention that the term "Account Overdrawn" appears elsewhere in the novel and thus its significance can be appreciated by the reader. He remarks also that Ayn Rand may have chosen chapter title "The Climax of the d'Anconias" because of "the explosive end of all of the d'Anconia copper on earth in Part III, Chapter V," (pg. 48) yet that explosion is not in her outlines, though that particular chapter title appears in her outline of August 24, 1946, as published in "Journals of Ayn Rand." The title came long before the decision to dramatize a dynamite explosion.
• This same contributor, musing on why Dagny and Hank stay at their jobs, remarks, "Nathaniel Branden once said it was psychologically naive but dramatically necessary." (pg. 52) No mention is made of Ayn Rand's published "Fiction Writing" course (made available on audio cassette and also published in edited/rearranged book form), where Ayn Rand says specifically what a real-life equivalent of Rearden would have done under the circumstances.
• Contributor Gladstein writes, "We are all familiar with the story of how the inexperienced young woman, armed only with a Remington Rand typewriter, and speaking the language inexpertly, landed a job with a titan of the film world, Cecil B. De Mille." (pg 109) By 2007, when this collection was published, a good number of Ayn Rand scholars, whether affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute (which debunked the typewriter story in 1997) or outside it, knew that no such typewriters had been manufactured when the hiring by DeMille occurred, yet this collection regurgitates the old discredited story.
• Contributor Michalson is one whose essay might have been appropriate for a small-town newspaper but not in a volume intended for persons wanting to know more than what can be gleaned from one reading of the novel. She misspells "Reardon" twice(!) (pg. 248), and puts to paper at least one incoherent thought with no relation to the novel: "Sunday isn't sharp and definable enough to be evil. Sunday is blanked-out and blotchy and has no power except as a parasite, as a second-hander to the rest of the week." (pg 247) With this kind of level of response, even though I'm an Objectivist, I can't get worked up in seeing Michalson offer this characterization that would be offensive had the writer conveyed even a modicum of expertise: "Objectivists ... pay lip service ... They develop this sense of life which demands that their opinions, no matter how ill-informed, must eclipse everyone else's at all times." (pg 246)
Apart from the low points of ill-informed contributors and ones who try to prop up themselves as having better ideas than the novelist as to what ideology the events validate, there are some positive aspects to this collection:
• Stephen Cox studied correspondence from Rand's friend Isabel Paterson and thus has information not published elsewhere. Paterson arranged for the trip on a passenger train where Rand drove the train. (pg. 338) Cox surmises that content in a Nov 30, 1943 letter from Paterson to Rand, concerning Paterson's conversation with Herbert Hoover about forced controls in an economy (Hoover said "something is bound to break"), may have found its way into "Atlas Shrugged." Although this is speculative, readers are given enough information to evaluate what has been suggested.
• Kristi Minsaas makes use of "Journals of Ayn Rand" and a good understanding of "Atlas Shrugged" to show how myths seem to be worked into "Atlas" and to suggest a possible intention of Ayn Rand to "recast" them in the novel. She has some interesting points on Prometheus and Atlas being brothers in the original myth (pg. 133), and some well-founded points about "Atlas" being not just criticism in politico-economic terms but about a commitment of the strikers in ethics terms, which helps the reader understand the motivation for the strike. (pg. 132). The book's editor also writes about Rand's variations on ancient Greek myths: "By changing them, she challenges their traditional meaning and endorses them with new meaning reflecting a revolutionary worldview complete with a new moral philosophy". (pg. 18)
• Lester E. Hunt writes about contrasts of like things in the novel (what he calls "twinning" of content), where there are detailed depictions of two marriages, two utopian communities, two philosophers, two composers, two institutions of knowledge, two steel manufacturers, two rides on the John Galt Line by Dagny, and two characters of mixed premises (Hank Rearden and Robert Stadler). Hunt points out that a decade after publication of "Atlas," Ayn Rand worked out a new theory of epistemology which places emphasis on consciousness of similarities. He writes, with a foundation for doing so, "Despite what you might think, a concerto and a new metal alloy are really instances of one kind of thing--the achievements of the human spirit." (pgs. 60-61) If only Sechrest and Long had looked for such comparisons and contrasts, they might not have reached the bad conclusions I mentioned.
• The aforementioned Mimi Gladstein spoke with Rand's one-time friend Erika Holzer (whose own novels followed her learning about writing from conversations with Rand), and relates what Holzer recalled being told about writing by Rand. (pgs. 112-13)
• Bryan Caplan creates an interesting phrase -- one that resonates on a familiar one by Ayn Rand -- when, in summarizing the anti-business legislation of the novel and the manner in which the justifications are sold to the gullible public, he writes, "If intellectuals brainwash the public, they brainwash it by engraved invitation." His point: "Atlas Shrugged makes an important contribution to social science. Yes, lobbyists enrich themselves at the expense of the majority, but only after the majority paves the way for the lobbyists by electing statist politicians." (pg. 223)
This is a book that can have a positive such as the above -- and then present the reader with a peculiarity such as this: "If I have a thesis at all, it would be that Rand's thoroughly integrated vision of the moral and political, through her conception of individualism, is both her salvation and her undoing." (pg. 347) A significant accomplishment of "Atlas Shrugged" is named -- and then followed by an insistence that the accomplishment wasn't one -- all the while with a preamble suggesting the contributor can't figure out what he wants to say. That's an appropriate sample from this book.
This review is one of several by me originally posted on Amazon.
I reviewed several books related to Ayn Rand.
To read the others, go to this page.