How does it do that? Are you equating libertarianism with objectivism?
I always loved that review. Chambers nails the book and the bare fact that the objectivists are as shrill and dictatorial as the collectivists.
The libertarian movement (big L or small l) will never truly gain serious traction until they give up their romance with Rand.
The biggest problem I had with Atlas Shrugged was it seemed to assume that capitalism, without moral underpinnings, still works. It does not. Capitalism lacking in morality always leads to communism. Just as an engine without some sort of governor with eventually blow up. In other words, capitalists who do not throttle their desire to make money with a moral governor actually empower those who wish to destroy capitalism.
Whittaker Chambers offers an excellent review of Atlas Shrugged. I loved reading both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as a teenager and enjoyed them both. However, now when I look back on it I see the validity of Chamber’s critique. Atlas Shrugged, in particular, was filled with unrealistic characters making these long winded speeches and lectures. The good guys are virtually superhuman and without flaws and the bad guys are cartoonishly evil buffoons.
I recently read Chamber’s own book, Witness. Now there is a book for ALL conservatives. A true story based on Chamber’s tumultuous life as a young communist who transformed into one of the greatest conservatives of all time who famously locked horns with Alger Hiss in a titanic struggle which has divided conservatives from the liberal/left ever since. With Chambers you see the human condition in its totality warts and all beginning with himself. Therefore, his work, writings, and life experiences are much more grounded in reality.
Read Atlas Shrugged for fun and entertainment—and yes Miss Rand was light years ahead of her time predicting socialism coming to America no matter how silly and unrealistic her characters were. But read Witness for getting to the truth and a real life experience of one man’s ascent from darkness and evil to the truth and seeing the light. One work is quite juvenile, the other is manifestly profound and deeply spiritual.
NYC snob author?
Author cant even get D’Anconia’s name right while when making a point with the name. Oy.
My husband and I recently listen to it on CD as we drove to Texas. It was so true that I could barely stand to listen to it at times. Ellesworth Toohey is such a worm.
But there are a couple of things fairly clearly wrong with Chambers's thesis here - first, that the entire point of the book was the morality behind capitalism, not its amorality, and second, that - I'll be delicate here, because I respect Chambers deeply and it's a fairly inflammatory suspicion to express toward a literary critic - but I don't think he actually read the book.
You don't have to, really, to argue its salient points, but you do to get them right. In Chambers's case I suspect his religious epiphany made him more skeptical of the atheist Rand than her actual narrative justifies. Despite her nominal rejection of God she is drawn time and again back to seminal religious issues in developing her own ethical system: virtue, soul, sin. Her realization that Original Sin is a central topic in Christian theology is quite correct; her actual apprehension of the issues inherent is superficial and embarrassingly in error. I'd like to have read Chambers's views in that regard instead of this. All IMHO, of course.
I read that years ago. Some of Chambers’ claims about the book are true. But it doesn’t matter. Atlas Shrugged, with all its aesthetic difficulties, conveys more simple truth, more powerfully, and to a larger audience than nearly anything ever written by people like Chambers.
I read the book 30 years ago and have since gotten friends and family to do likewise. Overall, we don’t care about the book’s dictatorial tone and we skimmed over the 80-some-odd page “Galt’s speech,” the part that so many Objectivists view as the key feature of the book. For us, the key point was about the mob, yes “the looters,” using words, laws, and finally guns to steal value that they could never earn from those who had created it.
I’ve always thought that National Review should apologize for that inane review.
Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley seems more dated to me than Ayn Rand with all her problems.
Part of the problem is that Alinsky tactics does work much more effectively against the Buckley model of Conservatism than the Randian Objectivism in my opinion.
bttt