Atlas Shrugged is an extended cry against the oppression of creators, most particularly businessmen: the Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the true successors of Socrates, Galileo, and the countless other truth-seekers who, over the centuries, have been silenced, punished, crushed, and killed—not for their vices but for their virtues.In the scene that gives the book its title, one of the novel’s greatest Atlases, the steelmaker Hank Rearden, is asked: “When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?” The questioner’s point is that Rearden knows he should be rewarded for his productive efforts, yet he allows himself to be punished—and by helpless parasites at that. Why? Why not free himself of his tormentors? Why not shrug them off?
Rand’s novel, thirteen years in the writing, was finally published in October 1957, but she did not stop asking “Why?” Why were businessmen persecuted? Why did moralists not condemn the injustice? Why did businessmen themselves do nothing? Within a few years, she had taken to the college lecture circuit to denounce this continuing oppression, and her talk could not have been more provocatively titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Businessmen.” Nor could it have been better timed. The Sixties were just beginning, and the students at elite Northeastern universities were preening themselves for their moral superiority, in part because they opposed Southern segregation and in part because they disparaged capitalists (like their fathers) as “hidden persuaders” and perpetrators of “planned obsolescence.” Into this environment came Ayn Rand, to declare that America’s truly oppressed minority comprised just those businessmen the students scorned.
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