Atlas Shrugged Themes

Objectivism is the name of Ayn Rand's personal philosophy, and Atlas Shrugged is basically one gigantic Objectivist manifesto. The book is all about demonstrating how Objectivist ideas can be used...

Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry was a pretty dramatic dude, best known for his famous either-or statement, "Give me liberty, or give me death." This is an example of what is known as a false d...

Goldfrapp's song "Happiness" fits rather well with this book. It's all about making choices and finding a nice crowd. It's also a rather tongue-in-cheek dig at cults, which is rather fitting for Ga...

At the start of The Muppet Movie, Kermit the Frog plays the banjo and sings a cool song called "The Rainbow Connection," a call to all the "lovers and dreamers" of the world. In the movie, Kermit a...

The celebration of sex in Atlas Shrugged was fairly controversial in straight-laced 1950s America. Sex is an expression of the strikers' value system, which prizes individual happiness and the unit...

There seems to be a frightening power vacuum in Atlas Shrugged. The world is collapsing and no one is doing much about it. We see a lot of examples of apathetic people who either have no power at a...

It's rather fitting that this theme is the unspoken heart of Atlas Shrugged. The novel doesn't often refer to issues of language outright, but it's a theme that is constantly present in the way peo...

It's fitting that the first lines of Atlas Shrugged are ones of fear, given that the novel depicts a dystopian world and an impending apocalyptic collapse of society. Things like that do tend to in...

The past doesn't exactly haunt people in Atlas Shrugged; it's probably more accurate to say that it comes back to bite them in the butt. Characters are always regretting past actions or eating thei...

There are a lot of different Americas in Atlas Shrugged. There's a familiar one, with cities, states, and industries that we recognize. And there is alternate-universe one existing in a world of co...

Characters in Atlas Shrugged tend to toss around the term science without much careful regard to its meaning. Science means very different things here, depending on who is talking about it. The deb...