Atlas Shrugged — VOICES for REASON

Earlier this week Penguin, the publisher of Atlas Shrugged, released an application for Apple’s iPad that offers readers an amplified edition of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. Instead of buying the text-only e-book of the novel, you can purchase this application, which offers many additional features that allow you to learn more about the novel, Ayn Rand, and her ideas.

The app contains four main sections: “The Book,” “The Author,” “The Philosophy” and “Hall of Atlas.”

• “The Book” section offers the full text of Atlas Shrugged. In addition, app users can share their favorite passages from the text on social media sites and see manuscript pages of various sections of the novel.
• “The Author” section features a biography of Ayn Rand, a graphic timeline of her life, a gallery of photos of Rand and key documents related to her work, and recollections of Rand by Leonard Peikoff, her longtime associate and intellectual heir.
• In “The Philosophy” section, users can read about the essentials of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and listen to an audio lecture by Rand describing her philosophy. Users can also listen to Rand’s 1964 talk “Is Atlas Shrugging?”
• The “Hall of Atlas” section offers users many video and audio interviews of Rand discussing the main themes in Atlas Shrugged and other intellectual topics. Users can also take an interactive quiz that tests whether they can correctly attribute quotes from the novel to their respective characters, access discussion questions, and view further reading resources.

To find out more about the Atlas Shrugged iPad app, and to see a gallery of screen shots, please visit the iTunes App Store. The app sells for $14.99.

Over on the blog of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, Debi Ghate, co-author of the expanded collection, reports on the sales of the book.

She writes:

[Co-author] Richard Ralston and I are excited to report that sales for the first three months of the revised and expanded edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy are already equal to ten years of sales of the first edition of the book! It seems to be further evidence of the growth in readership of Ayn Rand and related products over the last decade, and in particular in the past few years.

Read the rest of the post at whybusinessmenneedphilosophy.com, where you can also view the contents of the book, read excerpts, and purchase the collection.

In his blistering review of the new Atlas Shrugged movie, political humorist P.J. O’Rourke vows not to criticize Rand’s novel itself. “I don’t have the guts,” he assures us. “If you associate with Randians—and I do—saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand.”

I will try not to scare Mr. O’Rourke. But his treatment of Rand includes a number of errors (and, notwithstanding his declaration of cowardice, a number of insults). Most of them aren’t worth addressing, but one goes to the essence of Rand’s thought: her view of selfishness.  Here is how O’Rourke describes Rand’s view:

In “Atlas Shrugged” Rand set out to prove that self-interest is vital to mankind. This, of course, is the whole point of free-market classical liberalism and has been since Adam Smith invented free-market classical liberalism by proving the same point.

The idea is that Rand had nothing new to say about self-interest or free markets, but was merely fictionalizing Smith’s “invisible hand” argument. Rand, however, didn’t see it that way. During a radio appearance, she described the difference between her defense of capitalism and Smith’s:

I am not an advocate of Adam Smith’s philosophy. I do not believe in invisible hands leading men to altruism through the pursuit of their private interests. I reject altruism, public service, and the public good as the moral justification of free enterprise. Altruism is what’s destroying capitalism. Adam Smith was a brilliant economist; I agree with many of his economic theories. But I disagree with his attempt to justify capitalism on altruistic grounds. My defense of capitalism is based on individual rights, as was the American Founding Fathers’, who were not altruists. They did not say man should exist for others; they said he should pursue his own happiness.

Rand was not picking nits. In Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction works, she shows that there is an inescapable contradiction between the morality of altruism, which says that the good consists of self-sacrifice, and capitalism, which enshrines the selfish pursuit of profit. This contradiction, she argues, is what explains the disintegration of economic freedom in America: although the Founding Fathers created a system based on the individual’s political right to pursue his own happiness, that system could not stand without a defense of the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness.

That is what Atlas Shrugged provides—a new code of morality that defines the good in terms of what is required for each individual to make the most of his own life, and so lays the foundation for a social system in which the individual can make the most of his own life.  (This is the theme of my colleague Onkar Ghate’s riveting talk, Atlas Shrugged and the Morality of Freedom.)

Rand’s point and Smith’s are anything but the same. Smith proposed that free markets lead self-interested actors “as if by an invisible hand” to act for the “public good.” But morally speaking, he said, self-interest was not noble. That is precisely what Rand—author of The Virtue of Selfishness—challenged.

Rand did not champion self-interest for its social consequences, because it was “vital to mankind.” Rather, she championed self-interest  (what she called rational self-interest) because it is vital to each individual. The essence of virtue, she argued, is the individual’s pursuit and achievement of his own interests. And markets? They are moral because they free the individual to pursue and achieve his own self-interest.

Whatever one’s evaluation of Rand’s argument, there is no question that she is saying something profoundly new and challenging.

In 2006, O’Rourke wrote a commentary on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations because he noticed that, while everyone talks about Smith’s ideas, few have a clue what he actually said. It’s a lesson that O’Rourke might have seen fit to apply to another of capitalism’s great champions.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has a new op-ed published today in the Christian Science Monitor.  In the article, Dr. Ghate asks, given the parallels between the events in Atlas Shrugged and the financial/economic crises in recent years, “Should you, like Rand’s heroes, ‘go Galt,’ stop working, retreat to a secluded valley, and try to rebuild only when the country has collapsed?”

Dr. Ghate writes:

Rand was asked these very questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you. In the 1970s, America was in a deep financial crisis (a new word, stagflation, had to be coined), urban violence was rampant, and power-seeking politicians like President Nixon instituted wage and price controls that led to, among other things, gas stations with no gas. How, people wondered, could Rand have foreseen all this? Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis.

Was the solution to “go Galt” and quit society? No, Rand again answered. The solution was simultaneously much easier and much harder. “So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged…. But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture…. [D]iscard all the ideas – the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And to learn more about the ideas in Atlas Shrugged, go here.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an article published today on FoxNews.com’s opinion page.  Titled “The Radicalness of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” Dr. Ghate writes:

To give a taste of its radicalness, consider that  today it’s taken for granted that the man of virtue is Mother Teresa-like; he  selflessly lives to serve others and demands that you do the same. The man of  vice is selfish; he pursues his own interests and demands that his actions bring  him a profit. Whenever a television show or movie needs a stock villain, one  whose evil motivation will require no setup, you can be sure a businessman  erecting an office building on treed land or a corporation testing an  experimental drug will be written in. Simply to point out that they are pursuing  profit is sufficient to damn them. Judging from my experience, more murders on  television are committed by businessmen than by mobsters.

It is this entire viewpoint, entrenched for  centuries by religious and secular thinkers alike, that Atlas Shrugged challenges. What emerges from its pages is that the moral man is in fact truly  selfish: he chooses to embrace his own life by choosing to purposefully,  systematically, and unwaveringly do the thinking and take the actions necessary  for his own happiness.

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And if you’ve heard of the movie and are interested in exploring Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, you can start here.

The April issue of the Ayn Rand Institute’s monthly newsletter Impact features an interview with Debi Ghate, co-editor of the new collection Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

Impact: Hello, Ms. Ghate. Thank you for meeting with Impact to talk about the new edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy. To begin, why did you decide to revise and expand this book?

Debi Ghate: Thanks for speaking with me! The idea to update Why Businessmen Need Philosophy arose when my co-editor, Richard Ralston, learned that the first edition had sold out. He was interested in printing it again with a few updates. When I learned of this, it seemed like a tremendous opportunity for us to create a new volume that might be of more interest to the academic and business community. It brought to mind all the positive conversations we’ve had about Atlas Shrugged with businessmen, college students and educators interested in free market ideas. We personally meet or otherwise hear of many fans of the novel who say the book was influential on them–and many of them are (or will someday be) in business-related fields.

Yet very few consider themselves to be seriously interested in philosophical ideas, which of course, the novel is full of. The new edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy serves as a bridge between the novel and its underlying ideas with an emphasis on how they apply to the realm of business. Hence the subtitle for our new book–The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

When Richard compiled the first edition in 1999, Objectivist scholarship in this area (and in many other areas) was more limited. Since then, there has been an explosion of excellent articles on themes of interest to the audiences I’ve described. In addition, the new volume provided us with an opportunity to highlight Ayn Rand’s writings on business in a way that had not been done before.

The result is that we now have a much expanded, improved and timely book than was originally planned.

Read the rest of the interview here.  The issue also includes an excerpt from ARC senior fellow Onkar Ghate’s essay ”Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”

For another excerpt from the book and the full table of contents, check out the website for Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.

The revised and updated edition of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy hits stores this Tuesday, April 5!  This edition contains new essays by ARC writers Onkar Ghate, Alex Epstein, Yaron Brook, and Keith Lockitch.  Check out the website for the book, where you can peruse the table of contents, watch an interview with co-editor Debi Ghate, read an excerpt from the book, and keep up with other updates.

Don’t forget to place your order for Why Businessmen Need Philosophy today!

And if you want to be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of the book, take our survey.

The revised and updated edition of Why Businessmen Needs Philosophy will be released April 5, 2011. This collection explores why businessmen are vilified in the culture today and how they should defend themselves against the plethora of attacks made against them. The book contains several new essays written by ARC intellectuals, including Yaron Brook, Alex Epstein, and Keith Lockitch.

Check out this excerpt of an interview with co-editor Debi Ghate.

You can peruse the table of contents here, and pre-order a copy of Why Businessmen Need Philosophy today!

The official description of this creative video contest is as enticing as it is brief:

Create a short web video, 3 minutes max, on how Ayn Rand’s epic story relates to current issues in society or in your own life. And have fun doing it.

Sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute, videos will be judged on their intellectual strength, creativity and persuasiveness.

I can’t wait to see all the imaginative angles that creative people will be coming up with. But note: the deadline is December 8, 2010, less than a month away.

Entries are already being posted on the Atlas Shrugged website. First prize is $5,000! Viewers can also vote on their favorites, and the creator of the most popular entry will win an Apple iPad stocked with Ayn Rand’s writings.

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.