Regardless of what one thinks of Ayn Rand or her Objectivist philosophy, the general consensus is that “Atlas Shrugged” simply isn’t a good novel by literary standards. So what would be a good alternative? A story that decries collectivism and extolls the freedom of individuals to excel, only far less ham-fistedly than Rand did?
A lot of sci-fi explores similar philosophies.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein comes to mind.
The self made man who does things his own way pretty much defines James Bond.
I’ve heard A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole called an allegory of objectivism, but I personally find that to be a stretch.
And if you wanna stick with Rand Anthem and We the Living are much better.
The problem with a piece of literature which “extolls” some particular philosophy is that such a purpose is in inherent conflict with the main purpose of literature, which is to tell an interesting story with engaging characters and imaginative or engaging situations. The problem with Atlas Shrugged for instance, isn’t that it doesn’t actually have the nugget of an interesting story–that is, innovations that the world doesn’t appreciate, so the ubermenches hide themselves on an island concealed from the world like some kind of comic book hereos–or even that she expects the reader to take this absurd concept with utter seriousness, but rather how much time the protagonists spend lecturing each other or musing about what lazy failures poor people are and the lengths to which she goes to portray antagonists as being inept, self-absorbed, shiftless, entitled, et cetera, notwithstanding the rape porn and cryptofascism of the novel.
Note, this isn’t just a problem with bad writers (and Ayn Rand, for all she is revered by her followers, is a terrible writer); no less than John Steinbeck fell into this same trap, notably in The Grapes of Wrath, where he spends whole chapters railing against the banks, the landowners, et cetera, sounding every bit like a budding Millennial Marxist. Regardless of whether you agree with the screeds or not, it breaks the flow of what is otherwise a very engaging book of epic scope. The lesson isn’t that as a writer you shouldn’t infuse your work with your worldview, but it should be done in a way that is consanguineous with the story and characters, instead of having the characters essentially lecture the reader (either by proxy by expositing to one another, or in an essay of internal thought).
Regarding the question of the o.p., “A story that decries collectivism and extolls the freedom of individuals to excel, only far less ham-fistedly than Rand did?” I would recommend Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t know that it exactly fits in with what the o.p. is looking for insofar as Eric Blair was certainly not an “Objectivist” in any sense (he was an avowed democratic socialist and definitely on the leftist edge of the English Socialism movement) but the novel is very much about what happens when the rights and needs of the individual are subsumed by an autocratic government for its own bureaucratic ends regardless of what political ideology it purportedly represents.
I’ve seen people claim this previously but I just don’t really think it is true. To be sure, Luna–as a penal colony providing needed grain for an overpopulated Earth–is presented as kind of a libertarian paradise with minimal regulation and in which someone can be ‘spaced’ for being rude or offensive with the only consequence being that the aggrieved party is then on the hook to provide for the offenders dependents if public opinion weighs against his action, and of course there is no central government other than the prison governor (who has no real authority over the free-born citizenry of Luna), wage controls, regulation of trade or quality of goods, et cetera. But the protagonist explicitly describes himself as being apolitical and largely uninterested in revolution until essentially forced into it by the authoritarian actions, and ironically, the revolution uses an organization and tactics created and employed by Russian revolutionaries. The collectivist nature of line marriages and other arrangements is frequently referenced or alluded to, as are various agricultural collectives and interests.
The novel is bookended with an anecdote about Manny griping because the municipal government was debating a bill to “examine, license, inspect–and tax–food venders”, but that really seems more old man cussedness than any ideological offense, and really the only character who has a clear libertarian ideology is “The Prof”, of whom the reader gets the distinct impression that he is engaged in the revolution largely for his own entertainment and to test the tenets of his ideology. Heinlein himself was certainly an individualist with a strong little-l libertarian philosophy (at least, after his marriage to Virginia Gerstenfeld; prior to that he seemed to have a pretty leftist-bent) but The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is not a prime example of that nearly as much as Starship Troopers or Farnham’s Freehold (and boy, is that last one a hard read in today’s world).
Stranger
For Heinlein’s little-L libertarian philosophy, try The Rolling Stones or Time Enough for Love.
Funny how Rand, a White Russian Marx hater, has heroes who put in the real effort of envisioning and creating things, disdaining the fat cats who think their power to write regulations or provide funding entitles them to meddle with that creation. Its almost as if she was saying all value derives from labor.
I can’t argue with your analysis of Harsh Mistress, but I will quibble with your take on objectivism. While libertarianism plays an important part, the principle tenet is that
“Objectivism” derives from the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one’s mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has.
This is evident in the fact that Luna has laws and customs distinct from Earth, because life there has a different reality than on Earth. The laws of Earth, whatever relevance they may have had on Earth, simply do not apply on Luna. And, while the collectivist nature of much of what’s going on on Luna seems in contrast to Rand’s ideals, it seems to me to be inline with objectivism. The reality demands it.
Same for the fact of the revolution. Manny doesn’t care much for politics until reality makes it so that he has to.
Heinlein certainly weaved alot of different philosophies into his stories, and I think it’s often not clear where he actually stands. But, I think objectivism is pretty front and center.
Insofar as Atlas Shrugged is half-thawed Nietzsche, you could try googling works that were influenced by Nietzsche.
Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/9484pi/literature_based_on_nietzsche_and_his_philosophy/
However real thinkers like Doestoyevsky attempt to grapple with ideas, and apologists for one perspective or another are less likely to be any good. So it might be difficult to locate fictional ideological cheer-leading with any subtlety.
Gee, that sort of sounds like material necessity. 
Yeah, but it’s a matter of perspective. With Randian objectivism you’re doing it to maximize your own happiness which will in turn maximize society’s. In Communism, your doing it to maximize society’s happiness and which will maximize individual happiness.
“You’re” — contraction of “you are.”
I knew that…just testing…
Fixed, thanks.
You’re velcome, 
According to the biography of Bond in the Wikipedia article, his parents sent him to Eton and he attended university in Switzerland in the 30s, before entering the Secret Service at age 21.
Any family that could send their kid to Eton back then had money and social standing. And a foreign university also indicates money.
That’s not a self-made man. That schooling and career path, pre-WWII, indicates someone benefiting from the English class system.
OTOH no one uses “yore” much unless they’re indicating a heavy southern/country accent, or talking about long ago.
That is about the kindest way to describe it. Unlike Nietzsch, who is sometimes miscontextualized to justify entitled, narcissistic, and sociopathic behavior, Rand’s philosophy seems purposed designed for self-aggrandizing assholes, hence why Marc Cuban has a 288 foot yacht named “Fountainhead”. (Yes, I know it isn’t actually his yacht but he’s seen entertaining on it far more than owner Eddie Lamper.)
I don’t know if it is possible to count up how many ways that philosophy is, uh, objectively wrong, but they are manifold. There are certain items of ‘human knowledge’ that are objective and measurable, like the speed of light or the Lamb shift, but the vast majority of human knowledge is not ‘objective’ in any meaningful sense, certainly not that it “exist[s] and [is] determined by the nature of reality” independent of society; nor are ‘human values’ some kind of fundamental laws of nature. As bad of a writer as Rand was, her capacity in logic and and the superficiality of her philosophy was somehow even worse, notwithstanding her personal hypocrisy, so count me less than interested about Rand’s sophomoric philosophical pretensions.
Stranger
To a sufficiently blinkered anti-thinker, all “truths” are self-evident; they simply appear unbidden in their head. And are therefore seen by that unthinking head as an objective feature of nature.
Couple that with a dose of psychopathy, which in essence assumes that everyone else cannot think or even matters at all, and of course the universe including the man-made part is both objective and very, very convenient to Meee!
Welcome to Randian “thought”.
Terry Goodkind’s series The Sword of Truth started of are fairly normal epic fantasy but quickly turned into an ode to individualism. The quality stays decent for several books but in the end there is nothing libertarianism.
I thought The Fountainhead was much better written than Atlas Shrugged. It has the same theory behind it, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it as much.
I disagree with this. I think that the philosophies expressed in Moon and Starship Troopers are fundamentally different. Moon is libertarian; Starship Troopers is not.
As a starting point, I don’t see that the fact that Manny in Moon doesn’t originally express any political viewpoints has anything to do with whether the book’s philosophy is libertarian. As is typical with Heinlein, the protagonist starts out in a sort of “getting along” position, and is forced to make choices that shake him out of the “getting along”. He sees his friend killed by having his leg blown off, at a political protest, and Mike gives him the projection of famine and food riots on the Moon in a few years if nothing changes. That forces Manny out of his “getting along” mode and he then has to identify his political position. There’s nothing about the libertarian position that says you’re a libertarian from the cradle; people’s political thoughts can evolve and they can realise that the libertarian position best fits their own position.
As to why Moon and Starship Troopers have opposing political philosophies, I would say that there are four fundamental differences:
- the relationship between the individual and the state;
- the attitude towards punishment by the state for offences;
- the concept of individual versus collective responsibility; and
- the type of government espoused in each book.
The first point, the individual and the state, is made by contrasting the discussions in the chapter in Moon where Manny, Professor de la Paz and Wyo are holed up in hotel room, waiting for matters to cool down after the suppression of the political meeting, compared to the tutelage Johnny gets from Lt Col Dubois MI (ret’d), his civics teacher. The meeting in the hotel room is the heart of Moon, in my opinion; everything else in the book flows from that discussion. (And note the fundamental difference between the mentors in the two books, teaching the previously unengaged protagonist: a rational-anarchist academic, compared to a retired military social philosopher.)
Here’s the money quote from Moon:
That is classic, strong libertarianism: the individual always comes ahead of the state, and the state has no call on the individual.
The view in Starship Troopers is diametrically opposed, as set out in Dubois’s letter to Johnny that gets him over his “hump”:
That is the complete opposite of the philosophy of Manny and the Prof; the highest calling for the individual is to protect the community, even at the risk of his own life; the individual is called to place the community’s welfare ahead of his own interests, even at risk of his life and limb. (And lives are lost in Starship Troopers, when Capt. Rubik sacrifices his life for one of his soldiers, and Carl is killed on Pluto; limbs are also lost as demonstrated by the recruiting sergeant and Dubois. Those are not considered tragedies, but the ultimate expression of the collective good; to be grieved, but also to be lauded.)
The second point, the attitude towards punishment by the state for offences, is contrasted between Manny’s experience on Earth, compared to Johnny’s field punishment. When Manny is on Earth, acting as ambassador along with the Prof, he gets thrown in jail temporarily for breach of miscengeneration laws in one particularly backward community. He’s quickly released, but his picture behind bars is flashed to the moon. Manny is ashamed of it, not because he thinks he did anything wrong, but because his cherished line marriage was wrongly condemned. But when he gets home to the Moon, he finds that the episode has increased his status: he gets called “jailbird” by others who were transported from Earth to the penal colony, as a mark of respect. He too has suffered unjustly from the state, and is now “one of us” in a way that wasn’t the case before. The state is presumed to be unfair.
The situation is different for Johnny: when he negligently fires off a weapon in training that could have killed one of his mates, he gets a field discipline. He’s willing to trust his CO and opts for field punishment and doesn’t request a full court-martial, and he gets a sentence of flogging. He too is ashamed of his treatment, but it’s because he accepts that he did wrong and the system was justified in inflicting corporal punishment on him. Later on, he reflects proudly that his father would naturally get through basic training without a mark on his record. Being a “jailbird”/offender is a mark of shame in Starship Troopers, not a badge of honour as in Moon.
The third point is the concept of individual versus collective responsibility. Again, the money quote in Moon is in the hotel room chapter:
So here in Moon we have a purely individualistic view of responsibility. There is no such thing as collective responsibility, blame or guilt. It’s all on the individual, for good or ill.
Again, Starship Troopers is completely opposite: it celebrates the collectivity. The motto and mission statement of the Mobile Infantry is collective: “In the MI, everyone drops, everyone fights.” And there is collective shame, exemplified by the recruit who deserts. At first he’s just written off as a failure and they move on. “And then he killed a little girl.” That sentence is a gut punch and is meant to be. But the key thing is that the deserter is still on the books of the training regiment, so it’s the regiment’s responsibility to deal with him, not the civil courts. He gets a full court-martial and is hanged. And the regiment goes into a one month period of shame: no music, no singing, the colours draped in black, because they are collectively shamed and responsible for the actions of one of their own, even though individually, none of them are personally responsible. They collectively take responsibility for the actions of each member of the group.
The fourth point is the type of government espoused in each book. Again, there is a fundamental difference. In Moon, the ideal form of government, both pre-revolution and post-revolution, is that everyone belongs, just by virtue of being on the Moon. This point is literal, because of the low-gravity of the Moon: anyone who stays on the Moon for any length of time becomes a Moonie and can never go back to Earth. The rebels make this point to the Warden’s guards at one point: the rebels just have to keep the guards on the Moon long enough, and the guards physically become Moonies. Just by being on the Moon, you are a full participant in society. It is a wide-open populist system, where everyone automatically belongs and are full equals. That strikes me as a libertarian ideal: the individual is a member of society, with equal rights, simply by being human. (It’s not a classic democracy, of course, since the Warden is in charge, but the Warden seems to take a pretty light touch, at least until the popular uprising starts. Generally, as long as the Moonies don’t raise trouble, the Warden leaves them to govern themselves. )
The government in Starship Troopers is fundamentally different. I would call it a classic republic, in the sense of the later Roman republic: you have to be a citizen to participate in government, but everyone is entitled to seek citizenship, by public service, placing the republic (the “res publica”, the “public thing”) ahead of their own self-interest. Heinlein’s been criticised for the militaristic attitude, but it does not strike me as a fascist system, as it sometimes is stated to be, because of the feature that everyone has a right to try for citizenship. Fascism traditionally worked by always identifying “the other” - people who were not, and never could be, part of the society, simply by virtue of personal characteristics. The government model in Starship doesn’t take that position; as in Rome, citizenship was broadly open to those willing to support the republic. And the recruting sergeant makes the point that it doesn’t have to be military service: if a blind, deaf, paraplegic applied to serve, the state would be required to find a way to allow that person to serve, and gain citizenship by public service. There’s no doubt it’s a militaristic state, but it’s a republican state, in the classic sense.
So no, I don’t see the two books as being on a continuum of libertarianism; Moon is libertarian; Starship Troopers is not.