Shrugging off Atlas

I am currently re-reading Hayek's "The road to serfdom".  It is, in my opinion, the definitive critique of socialism, and makes the case for individual liberty better than anything else I have read.  It was eye-opening when I first read it, and sparked my interest in other great free market classics, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Milton Friedman's treatise on Capitalism.  And, as I read it, I wonder why I have not recommended it to others.

Instead, I have often recommended Atlas Shrugged to friends that had little or no exposure to libertarian philosophies.  And yet, after reading it again last year (for the first time since college), I realize Atlas is a novel that I have very polarized feelings about.  Ayn Rand's magnum opus is a prescient tale of the collapse of western civilization, courtesy of the erosion of the free market through socialism and political corruption.  If the book was a novella containing only the chapter "This is John Galt speaking", I might list it among my favorites.  It eloquently presents Rand's philosophy of objectivism - her belief in a moral code of individualism and reason, and her critique of collectivism and enforced sacrifice.  It is an overly utopian vision, but within it lie the core tenets of economic freedom.

That being said, while her political philosophy is well articulated, Rand is not (in my opinion) a great writer of fiction.  She tends to be pedantic, and it is difficult to empathize with her characters, as they are caricatures of real people.  Though she has a very clear vision for what an effective society might look like, Atlas Shrugged does not explore the true motivations of man - the flaws in human nature which lead men and societies towards socialism.  This lack of empathy results in overly simplistic heroes and villians in the novel, and it becomes a comic book study in good vs. evil.  It is also unnecessarily long - the book would have been only a few hundred pages were it not full of so many repetitive tales, of so many characters with identical story arcs.  

It is not even one of her better works of fiction - the Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem are all more compelling tales, with better insight into the motivations of the antagonists.  Notably, Atlas Shrugged was the last piece of fiction she ever wrote, and I wonder if turning to non-fiction was a result of her recognizing her own weaknesses. If so - mad props to Rand for her self-awareness.

Anyway, I recommend looking to Hayek for an elaboration of libertarian philosophy, without an unreasonably utopian view of the world.  Rand and Hayek were contemporaries with similar visions, and both were influenced by the facism of the Nazis and by Stalin's rapid descent from freedom to socialism and statism.  But Hayek's work is denser, deeper, and more actionable - and at only a few hundred pages it is about 1/4th the length of Atlas Shrugged...

So you may actually find the time to read it.