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Atlas Shrugged
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Set in an imaginary America in a communist world, Atlas Shrugged is a sharp critique of a corrupt communist system and its damaging effects on areas as various as love, science, and industrial productivity. The novel's main protagonists, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are capitalist-minded industrialists, "Atlases" who carry the collapsing national economy on their backs. Things change... when the mysterious John Galt begins a revolution against the existing order, believing that the parasitic society would destroy itself if its competent and hardworking members would simply stop working. But first, the protagonists must learn how to let go of the ties of obligation, responsibility, and guilt connecting them to the abusive community in all aspects of their lives.
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The theme of Atlas Shrugged is the role of the mind in life and society. Rand argues that independent thinking, and the creativity and inventiveness that comes from this, is the motor that runs the world. In Atlas Shrugged she shows what she thinks would happen to the world if the "men of the mind" went on strike: the motor of the world would shut down, and civilization would fall apart. This is a direct assault on the Labor Theory Of Value, which was popular at the time of writing.
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The Atlas Society, devoted to Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and other fiction by Ayn Rand, saw Web site visits suddenly double to 23,000 a month this summer after holding steady for years at 10,000 to 12,000. Traffic started creeping up in January and February as the Enron scandal blossomed. The Objectivist Center, which focuses on the philosophy spawned by the books, saw user visits rise 159% to 78,397 in August 2002 from 30,247 in August 2001.
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CliffsNotes on Atlas Shrugged covers Ayn Rand's controversial bestseller about heroine Dagny Taggart's fight to save her transcontinental railroad from collapse. Dagny's efforts prompt her to seek out the man who stopped the motor of the world and to hunt down the destroyer who's leading a strike of the great minds. She finds both in the person of John Galt, who asserts that the first right of human beings is the freedom to think and act independently.
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Exactly when Atlas Shrugged is meant to take place is kept deliberately vague. In Section152 the population of New York is given as 7 million. The historical New York City reached 7 million people in the 1930s, placing the novel sometime after that. There are numerous early 20th century technologies available, but the political situtation is clearly different from actual history. It is as if history had changed around 1900, and the world went unimpeded down a gradual path towards socialism for perhaps 40 years, with no World War, and no rise of fascism in Europe. There are many examples of early 20th century Technology in Atlas Shrugged, but no post-war technologies such as jet planes, atomic weapons, helicopters, or computers; television is a novelty that has yet to assume any cultural significance.
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Exactly when Atlas Shrugged is meant to take place is kept deliberately vague. In section 152, the population of New York City is given as 7 million. The historical New York City reached 7 million people in the 1930s, which might place the novel sometime after that. There are many early 20th century technologies available, but the political situation is clearly different from actual history. One interpretation is that the novel takes place many years in the future, implying that since the world lapsed into its socialistic morass, a global stagnation has occurred in technological growth, population growth, and indeed growth of any kind; the wars, economic depressions, and other events of the 20th century would be a distant memory to all but scholars and academicians. This would be in line with Rand's ideas and commentary on other novels depicting utopian and dystopian societies.
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Atlas Shrugged