This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand,
especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which
Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an
unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize
themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's
conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and
capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation,
which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century
founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically
by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world.
Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned
as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg
in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian
intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian
community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional
valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans
into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of
competing civilizations - in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand
drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even
the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the
polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book
concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have
topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal
democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and
economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social
tensions.
