The interaction between the individual and the state in Ayn Rand's novels

Certain global emergencies of the current time, like economic and political instability, a pandemic, migration, and cyber threats, require a government treatment, which unconditionally raises the authority of a state. As a result, the question how far this authority with regard to the freedom of the individual should extend is under general discussion. One of the possible answers to the question can be found in the literary and philosophical works by Ayn Rand.

The Russian-born American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is the author of three novels: We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In all of them, she deals with the confrontation of an individual and some kind of collective body. As Ann Heller in her biography of Rand notes, it is Rand’s monumental theme [Heller 2009].

The fact that Rand’s treatment of the problem proceeding from the reality of the 20th century is still applicable to the current 21st century situation bespeaks the importance of the Rand studies. As such, the present study specifying Rand’s attitudes and techniques in pursuing the theme may contribute to the sociological analysis of contemporary society.

Two books, Ann Heller’s biography [Heller 2009] and Chris Sciabarra’s research [Sciabarra 2013], which provide both the biographical data that conditioned the formation of Rand’s philosophical views and the scientific analysis of the views themselves, serve as the theoretical foundation for the present paper.

In his work, Sciabarra covers Rand’s treatment of the individual-society relationship with regard to Nietzschean influence, of which Rand’s reverence for the individual and loathing for the mob is suggestive. As Rand herself specifies it, the difference lies in the epistemological bases of their philosophies: Nietzsche’s individualism is of the Dionysian type, which implies the dominance of emotion over reason, while for Rand true individuation is inseparable of reason, which correlates with the Apollonian principle [Sciabarra 2013, 114].

This epistemological premise also explains, according to Sciabarra, Rand’s contempt for Russian culture, which to her “... meant hatred for the individual and rational mind... it was antimaterialist and, above all, anticapitalist” [Sciabarra 2013,92].

Heller attributes Rand’s obsession with individualism partly to her literary tastes formed by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and partly to her recent memory of revolutionary Russia with its “lynch mobs”, as well as her genetic memory of pogroms led for generations by anti-Semitic peasants and priests against Russian Jews [Heller 2009, 186].

The aim of the present study is to trace the peculiarities of Rand’s treatment of the theme of the individual-state interrelation in her novels. This aim is achieved by means of tackling the following objectives: outlining the specific aspect of the theme that each of the novels reveal; tracing the development of the theme from novel to novel through the social environments it is placed in; and through the techniques used to tackle it.

The present study arrives at the conclusion that Rand’s treatment of individual-state interrelation is multifarious: first, in each of her novels she brings to the fore different aspects of that interrelation, like psychological, ethical, and economic ones; second, set in different historical conditions and different social systems the theme evolves acquiring a higher level of philosophical generalisation from novel to novel; third, the artistic techniques employed to render the evolution of the theme develop from realistic to non-realistic ones, which might be advantageous to the philosophical content of the novels but hardly so to their artistic merits.

We the Living

Rand starts tackling the theme of individualism in her first novel, We the Living. Although the novel is set in the 1920s Russian context, Rand herself formulates the theme of the novel in more general terms, as the “Man against the State” [Rand 2009, ix], thus, abstracting it from the Russian framework.

The novel embraces the period of 1917-1924 in the Russian capital. It opens with the return of the Argunov family to Petrograd after a refuge from the Revolution in the Crimea. The novel depicts the miserable life of once wealthy Russian families deprived of all their property for the benefit of the masses.

The plot of the novel centres around an intricate love story which involves three protagonists. The 18-year old heroine, Kira Argunova, falls in love with Leo Kovalensky, the son of an executed white admiral. To save Leo from tuberculosis she becomes the mistress of a high-ranking GPU officer, Bolshevik Andrey Taganov, thus getting access to nourishing food and sanatorium treatment for her beloved man. The triangle splits most tragically. Upon learning the truth, Andrey commits suicide; Leo, though physically recovered, goes bankrupt morally. The novel ends with Kira’s death - she is shot by the border patrol while trying to escape from the country.

Of all of Rand’s novels Heller describes We the Living as “the most lyrical,

the most straightforward and, in some respects, the most persuasive” despite its being the least popular [Heller 2009, 117]. The Russian researcher Elvira Osipova expresses a similar opinion, valuing Rand’s first novel much higher than her other two novels [Осипова / Osipova 2019, 165]. The appeal of the novel must be attributed to the fact that it renders Rand’s own life experience in post-revolutionary Russia before her emigration, on which account the novel is considered to be autobiographical. As such, it exposes the emotional involvement of a person who personally endured all the hardships described in the novel. However, Rand herself did not see it as a merit. She said that We the Living, as compared to her later novels, was not “fully” her “kind of writing” because it was “too historical” [Mayhew 2009, ix].

The fact that Rand appreciates more her later novels, in which she is mature enough to create her own world embodying her pure philosophical abstractions, is self-explanatory. But for the same reasons for which she values them more, they are inferior to We the Living in the artistic respect.

The strength of the novel comes from its penetration into the psychology of the individuals who appear, due to a dramatic turn of history, to have to interact with the Soviet state during the period of its formation. The novel provides various types of this interaction, exposing the characters’ motives, their willingness or reluctance to be submissive, and the power of their moral resilience.

The most dramatic type is enacted by the active opponents of the regime, like Kira. At the core of her struggle is the rejection of the communist principle that man must live for the state. She declares that man is an end in itself. Masses, whose interests the Soviet state serves, are for her “’stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, ... who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains ” [Rand 2009, 74]. She loathes the communist ideals because she knows “no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved” [Rand 2009, 74]. Thus through her protagonist’s statements, Rand starts formulating the basics of objectivism in her first novel. On an everyday basis, Kira’s struggle is confined to her desperate attempt to survive under the conditions where a human life has the least value. Hence, the title of the novel - We the Living.

Another type of the interaction is performed by Kira’s parents, who try to arrange the life of the family in their new conditions. Her mother starts to cooperate with the regime out of necessity and begins to like it. Kira’s father refuses to be a Soviet clerk but makes several attempts to open a private enterprise.

The most repugnant in Rand’s view type is presented by Victor Dunaev, Kira’s cousin. He single-mindedly focuses on making a career in the Soviet country. The worst part of it is that he pursues his purpose by not only showing excessive loyalty to the new regime but also denouncing his sister Irina.

The ideological adversaries Leo Kovalenski and Andrey Taganov also contribute to the diversity of the individual-state interaction. Though unable to accept the new regime, Leo is not strong enough to fight it. His protest expresses itself in contempt for corrupt communists, which does not stop him though from developing alcohol-addiction and indulging in an adulterous liaison with the wife of a Soviet executive. Andrey Taganov, on the contrary, is an ardent ad- vocate of the communist ideology, who claims that there “cannot be a better purpose for man than live for the state” [Rand 2009, 74]. But partly under Kira’s influence and partly in the process of his own enlightenment, his views undergo a considerable transformation, which becomes one of the causes of his suicide. Morally, Andrei is much closer to Kira because he is also a man of ideals, though wrong ones in Rand’s view. With respect to that, Heller notes that Rand never again in her future works portrayed a champion of the enemy ideology sympathetically [Heller 2009, 222] - a fact which can be regarded as one more manifestation of the novel’s psychological complexity.

Another factor that contributes to the artistic value of the novel is the recreation of the atmosphere in post-revolutionary Petrograd, which one of the protagonists, Irina, describes as “airtight. ” Originally the novel was entitled Air Tight: A Novel about Red Russia [Sciabarra 2013, 277]. Alongside physical hardships - hunger, cold, overcrowded communal apartments - the people’s lives are penetrated by overwhelming fear: fear of being suspected of disloyalty to the regime; of being informed on; of being fired and, as a result, losing food cards; but above all, of being summoned to the GPU. The most powerful among the Soviet political bodies is equated in Rand’s description with the Spanish Inquisition; a concrete building with the exact address metaphorically grows into the centre emanating fear to every part of the city: “ ...the flow of a silent terror swelled over the city, hushing voices to whispers; the flow had a heart, from which it came, to which it returned, that heart was Gorokhovaia 2 ” [Rand 2009, 111].

Summarising, in We the Living Rand discloses the psychological hardships of enduring totalitarianism. For that reason, it reads more like a Russia novel, rather than like a novel about an abstract dictatorship.

The Fountainhead

In her second novel, The Fountainhead, Rand reaches a higher level of abstraction in dealing with the theme of individualism.

The Fountainhead is set in the USA in 1922-1940, the years of the Great Depression. However, neither historical, nor social background is of any significance in the novel. It is a one-man story of an ambitious, self-confident architect, Howard Roark, whose approach to architecture differs from the traditional one. On his way to achievement and realisation, he encounters a lot of opposition from society, but neither physical hardships nor moral pressure can break his purposefulness. Handsome in appearance and integral in spirit, he is an embodiment of pure individualism. The novel ends with his complete moral victory over his opponents.

The characters and the events of the novel are most implausible. The main characters do not display a complexity of human nature but represent certain philosophical ideas, and as such the novel reads not like a story of life but like a story of original ideas. The correlations of the characters with the individualist Roark constitute the philosophical collisions of the novel. Thus, the charac- ter named Peter Keating represents a second-hand life, as Rand puts it. This character best illustrates the author’s specification of the theme of the novel as “individualism and collectivism within a man’s soul” [Peikoff 1999, 10]. Peter Keating is Roark’s classmate during their years at the Princeton Institute. Keating, unlike Roark, lacks the nerve to act on his own because for his self-esteem he depends on other people’s opinions. His only motivation is getting society’s appreciation. Driven by this concern, he becomes an architect even though he dreamt of being an artist. Considerations of prestige are superior to his own individual interests, which eventually results in his complete moral degradation.

Rand’s genuine idea is that the worst type of second-handedness is striving after power, as power means dependence on others, like tyrants depend on their subjects for power. This idea is represented by Gail Wynand, a self-made newspaper magnate. Since his poverty-stricken childhood, Wynand has been struggling to obtain power over the mob with the purposefulness identical to that of Roark’s. On eventually achieving his aim and becoming the owner of the network of newspapers with its flagship the Banner, the country’s most popular tabloid, he contemptuously feeds his readers the rubbish they want, fancying that they are under his power. In the course of events he meets and befriends Roark, recognising a kindred spirit in him. But when at a dramatic point he has to make a fateful choice between his friendship with Roark and his newspaper, whose staff and readers demand waging a campaign against Roark, he denounces Roark, thus proving to act at the mob’s will.

The extreme opposite to Roark is Ellsworth Toohey - a mouthpiece of the state ideology, the embodiment of the idea of collectivism in the flesh. The fact that the flesh is crippled - Toohey limps - suggests the deformity of the idea itself. The quintessence of second-handedness is in his incapability of creating anything, which is why he fights creators like Roark by publicly denouncing individualism and extolling collectivism. The character’s still greater contribution to the novel is that through him, Rand shows the technologies of spreading the collectivist moral in society. Running a column in Wynand’s newspaper gives him vast opportunities to belittle the great like Roark and glorify the mediocre like Keating.

The only female character of the novel, Dominique Francon, participates in the novel’s main philosophical opposition on the side of individualism, though in a very involved way. Throughout the novel she becomes, in turn, the wife of Peter Keating and then Gail Wynand, before eventually marrying Howard Roark. Like Toohey, she is on the Banner staff and like him, does everything in her power to ruin Roark professionally but on a different account. As she explains, she does it out of admiration for his work which, in her opinion, the mob does not deserve.

As the novel is built around the axis of the individualism-collectivism opposition, both Roark and Toohey, standing behind these ideas, are given the floor to deliver a fundamental speech summarising the main principles of their ideologies. The speeches are comparable both in length and logical argumentation; the only difference is that Roark speaks publicly in his own defence in court while Toohey’s speech is confined to a private talk with Keating. So, while Roark speaks openly and enthusiastically in favour of egoism as the driving force of humankind’s progress, Toohey cynically discloses the benefits of collectivism for the government as an unfailing measure of instilling obedience into its citizens.

All the aforementioned shows Rand’s deeper submergence into the theme of individualism versus collectivism in The Fountainhead by foregrounding the ethical aspect of the man-society interrelation, which reveals itself in a number of traits. Firstly, the novel focuses on the ethical problems of egoism and altruism as the derivatives of individualism and collectivism; secondly, it sets a moral man against a corrupt society and shows his superiority; and finally, it exposes the treacherousness of the authorities by disclosing the real purpose and mechanisms of popularising the collectivist ideology on a state level. Yet Rand’s own argument concerning the novel’s ethical orientation is outside the realm of the individual-society relationship. She claims it touches upon ethics as it shows “man’s dedication to a moral idea” [Rand 2005, xi].

As for the artistic aspect of the novel, its peculiarity lies in the fact that Rand masterfully animates her abstract ideas by attaching them to certain characters, suffuses them with the romantic passion, exalts the noble and degrades the unworthy. In a word, she conveys her philosophy by means of a compelling popular literature technique.

Atlas Shrugged

All that said, the highest degree of abstraction Rand achieves is in her third novel, Atlas Shrugged.

The plot of Atlas Shrugged is fantastic and centres around a strike of the most effective producers in all spheres against the government’s intrusion into their business and its claim on the results of their work. The action is set in the USA in the 1930s and ’40s. With regard to the concrete historical reality of the novel, Rand herself says: Atlas Shrugged “was completely my kind of universe,” for 1) “it is built on an unusual plot device which is not naturalistic in any sense; it is not even realistic”; and 2) it is “completely detached from any journalistic reality” [Mayhew 2009, ix]. And yet, both historical and social backgrounds are more important here as compared to The Fountainhead.

The 1930s in the USA was the period of President Roosevelt’s economic policy known as the “New Deal”, which caused a shift in the economy “from a minimally regulated free-for-all into a federally regulated system”, together with “redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor”, and “transference of power from the old free capitalist class to a new all-powerful government elite” [Heller 2009, 325]. This turn to the left, which was so familiar to Rand, was equivalent to a betrayal of the basics of capitalism established by the Founding Fathers. Inventing the fantastic strike, she aimed to show, in this “hypothetical case”, “what happens to the world without [the prime movers]” [Peikoff 1999, x].

The novel depicts the process of maturation of the “movers of the world”, as Rand calls her heroes, to the awareness of the necessity to get free from the enslavement by the government. The most illustrious protagonists are Dagny Taggart, the heiress to the country’s largest network of railroads, and the owner of a steel business Hank Rearden. The novel shows the protagonists’ desperate efforts to keep their enterprises afloat under the conditions of the state’s systematic predatory policy against business. It takes these characters the longest to quit their businesses and join the secret strike led by the prime mover, John Galt, and settle in a remote site in the Colorado mountains called by its inhabitants the Galt Gulch, a capitalist Utopia.

According to Heller, after the introduction of President Roosevelt’s economic policies, Rand “began to think more deeply about economics” [Heller 2009, 331]. That is reflected in Atlas Shrugged, where the individual-state interaction, viewed as that of producers and “looters”, is set in an economic framework.

As for the philosophical content of the novel, which is known to express the tenets of objectivism most fully of all her literary works, its comprehensive analysis is given by Sciabarra. Commenting on the fact that, on appearing, the novel was rejected by both the left and the right wings of the country’s political spectrum, the researcher says that such a reception “partially reflected Rand’s own belief that she had finally achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis that was neither Marxist nor religious” [Sciabarra 2013, 316]. The synthesis is, according to Sciabarra, in her transcending dualism between the spiritual and the material, mind and body, reason and emotion, which is fully reflected in her ideal man, John Galt, in whom, according to Rand herself, she shows “how the physical proceeds from the spiritual” [Peikoff 1999, x].

The artistic specificity of the novel reveals itself in shaping its philosophical content into the intricate interplay of numerous characters and subplots, which aims to entertain the reader. This device is suggestive of the metaphysical synthesis Sciabarra speaks of, achieved by overcoming duality between philosophy and entertainment.

The entertainment layer most evidently employs popular literature techniques. In the first place, this reveals itself in the choice of genres, among which are a political thriller, science fiction, detective, love story, and both dystopia and utopia.

The novel reads like a political thriller because its central conflict is based on a conspiracy of a group of people against the state, accompanied by a complete set of related attributes. There’s the pursuit, when Dagny tries to find out where her business partners disappear and virtually pursues one of them on a plane. There is suspense, where the mystery gets more and more intriguing with the partners disappearing at the most crucial moments. Dagny acts like a detective trying to figure out her enemy’s motives. And when she eventually solves the riddle, the enemy turns into a person sharing her values, and she ends up falling in love with him.

The plot of the love story is as implausible as that of The Fountainhead,

and as thrilling. Dagny has love affairs with the novel’s brightest individualists -Francisco d’Ankonia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt. The most improbable thing is that Dagny’s previous lovers sincerely accept her preference of John Galt as the best among them.

Of the same gripping nature is science fiction presented in the novel by a number of scientific inventions far ahead of their time. Among them are Galt’s motor, which converts static electricity from the atmosphere into the power for itself; Ellis Wyat’s invention of the technological process for extracting oil from shale; Rearden’s steel, which surpasses all existing alloys. Some of the inventions are used for the safety and convenience of the Gulch-dwellers, such as refractor rays used to produce the Gulch mirage to protect the Gulch from intruders, palm and voice-activated doors, and the powerhouse with a capacity exceeding all the country’s power stations. Though few, there are some inventions in the service of the government, like the Thompson Harmonizer, a deadly weapon named after the country’s president, based on the destructive force of the sound ray. In accordance with the canons of popular literature, the protagonists’ inventions serve the good, while the inventions the government resorts to serve the evil.

The advanced scientific technologies are just one aspect of the capitalist utopia portrayed in the novel. On the whole, the utopian Galt Gulch is designed as a community based on the principles of objectivism. Here, the ethics of egoism is acknowledged as highly moral and the economy is based on the laws of unfettered capitalism. Dystopia depicts the opposite - the grievous economic and moral state of the country after the prime movers have deserted it.

Summarising, in her third novel Rand achieves a peculiar combination of philosophical abstraction and its most compelling dramatization in the form of popular literature.

In conclusion, Rand presents the theme of the individual-state interrelation in all of her three novels. She treats the confrontation between the individual and a state multifariously. Firstly, by revealing different aspects of this confrontation: psychological, ethical and economic. Secondly, on different levels of generalisation, which directly correlates with the development of her philosophy, and with the help of different artistic techniques ranging from realistic to non-realistic ones. And thirdly, by placing it in the opposite social systems. The conclusion Rand comes to is that confrontation is inevitable in any system as long as there exists encroachment on the principles of individualism,i.e. the ethics of egoism and capitalism. The identical conclusions Rand draws from both her Russian and American life experience might be suggestive of the synthesis of her Russian and American identities, which opens vast opportunities for further investigation of the Rand phenomenon.