How Influential Is Atlas Shrugged?

It’s the novel critics and progressives still love to hate. Ayn Rand’s impact on the world is real, but not quite as massive as is sometimes claimed.

Media Name: arand2.jpg
David Boaz

David Boaz was a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato Institute and played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He was the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

Boaz was a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. Boaz was the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-​researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate, and he wrote the entry on libertarianism for Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a frequent guest on national television and radio shows and has appeared on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, CNN’s Crossfire, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, The McLaughlin Group, Stossel, The Independents, Fox News, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.

Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged might be the most influential libertarian book of our lifetimes, but contrary to what’s frequently claimed, it’s nowhere near the second most influential book ever. Certainly it was the best seller—10 million copies so far, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. Celebrities from Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan to Billie Jean King and Steve Jobs have acknowledged its influence on them.

Nick Gillespie and Jeff Riggenbach both note her influence on the ’60s generation, comparing it to Jack Kerouac and On the Road. A forthcoming book by Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, examines her crossover appeal to both the New Right and the New Left of the ’60s, with her message of individuality, freedom, and sexual liberation. Rand attracted overflow crowds on college campuses throughout the 1960s, sometimes with loudspeakers set up outside the auditorium for those who couldn’t get in.

Books on the history of the modern American right cite the influence of Rand and especially Atlas Shrugged along with Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek on a generation of intellectuals and activists who came of age in the Goldwater-​to-​Reagan years. George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged “the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.” Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: “Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.”

Indeed, Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.

Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, can’t‑put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-​offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.

Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-​improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.

And her impact on the libertarian movement? Well, as Roy A. Childs, Jr., wrote in an essay on her death in 1982, tracing the influence of Ayn Rand on the libertarian movement is “rather like trying to sort out the effects of Christianity on Western Civilization.” There wasn’t much libertarian movement when Atlas was published in 1957. Through the entrepreneurial efforts of her protégé Nathaniel Branden, people in some 80 cities gathered weekly to listen to audiotapes of Rand and Branden lectures. That was an important contributor to a libertarian movement than began to blossom around 1969, in the era of “do your own thing” up against LBJ, Nixon, Vietnam, giant university bureaucracies, and a stagnating economy.

Atlas Shrugged is a steady seller, year after year. Every now and then it gets a new boost, such as during the Microsoft antitrust trial when it was reported that lots of people were sending copies to Bill Gates, and during the financial crisis of 2009, when bailouts and nationalizations and collapsing stock prices led many people to say “It’s just like Atlas Shrugged.”

So Atlas Shrugged was an influential book.

But some people take it too far. It’s common to hear in libertarian and Objectivist and even mainstream circles that Atlas Shrugged is the second most influential book in the United States. Or even, in at least one source, that it “is considered the second most influential book in history, right behind the Bible.”

Let’s not get carried away. There actually is a source for this claim. In 1991 the Book-​of-​the-​Month Club and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress conducted a survey of BOMC subscribers, and sure enough Atlas Shrugged ranked just behind the Bible as the book that most influenced readers’ lives. (I have been unable to track down the actual questions or data from the original survey, so I rely on newspaper reports at the time.)

But notice what the question apparently asked: the book that has most influenced the reader’s individual life. That seems somewhat different from “most influential book,” which I would take to imply some impact on the world. And let’s look at the numbers. The survey company mailed surveys to “a random sample of 5,000 Book-​of-​the-​Month Club subscribers. Of those, 2,032 completed the questionnaire and 778 cited one or more books that had influenced their lives.” Of those 778 respondents, 166 named the Bible. Atlas Shrugged was named by 17. Coming in behind Atlas were The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

So this survey does not suggest that Atlas Shrugged is “the second most influential book in history,” even in U.S. history. After all, nobody thinks The Road Less Traveled ranks third on such a list. What might be the most influential books in history? A book by that title begins in chronological order with Euclid’s Elements, the I Ching, the Hebrew Bible, Homer, the Upanishads of India, and on through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Darwin, Marx, and so on—obviously with a pronounced Western bias after the early Asian titles.

Atlas Shrugged does have a lot of sales and a lot of fans. Ten million is a lot of books, though it’s nowhere near the top of all-​time bestsellers. This author puts Atlas on his list of “best philosophical novels” in the category of “Upenders … books [that] turned the world on its head and created a lasting impact.” Atlas fares less well with scholars and critics than with general readers. Atlas Shrugged didn’t make Modern Library’s 1998 list of 100 Best Novels. But it was first in an accompanying internet poll, followed by The Fountainhead. And then, in spots 3 through 16, books by L. Ron Hubbard, Tolkien, Harper Lee, Orwell, Rand, Rand, Hubbard, Hubbard, Joyce, Heller, Fitzgerald, Herbert, Heinlein, and Heinlein.

In 2009, 27 years after Ayn Rand’s death, literary scholar Stephen Cox wrote:

There can be no question about the fact that Rand remains America’s most influential libertarian, with the possible exception of Milton Friedman, and America’s most influential novelist of ideas. In that second category, there is no contest, because there is no runner-​up.