1. Anthem by Ayn Rand

2. Rand’s Background She was born in Russia in 1905
Age 6 – taught herself to read – educated under communist rule
Age 9 – decided to make writing fiction her life’s work.
During teens, she witnessed the Kerensky and Bolshevik Revolutions and Lenin bring Totalitarianism

3. Rand’s Background
Rand experienced firsthand horrors of totalitarianism:
Form of government in which political authority has absolute and central control over all aspects of life. Individual thought, political and cultural expression is suppressed for the “good” of the government.
She “visited” America in 1926 and never went back to Russia

4. Development of Her Writing
Due to life under Bolshevik rule, she is radically pro-capitalist and anti-Communist.
She worked in Hollywood for a few years, sold a screenplay, and published her first novel, We the Living, in It is the most autobiographical of her works.
Other works include Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged (considered by many to be her finest work) as well as many others.
The Randian hero is one whose ability and independence cause conflict within the masses but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand views this as the ideal.

5. Rand’s Beliefs
Man’s “self” is his mind or conceptual faculty…ability to reason
All man’s spiritually distinctive attributes derive from this faculty
It is reason (man’s value judgments) that leads to man’s emotions.
It is reason which possesses volition, the ability to make choices.
Reason is a property of the individual.
There is no such thing as a collective brain.
From these beliefs she developed a philosophy called Objectivism

6. Objectivism Vs Collectivism

7. Objectivism
Regards every man as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.
Man must exist for his own sake
Politics: Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Free market economy without the interference of the government in any way
Reason is man’s basic means of survival

8. Collectivism
Developed from ideas from Karl Marx who wrote the Communist Manifesto
Opposes individuality and diversity; focuses on interdependence, groups and collectives

9. “From everyone according to their ability, to everyone
“From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs.” - Marx

10. Collectivist Principles
The subjugation of the individual to a group
Man must be committed to a collective action and collective thought for the common good
Individual, not an end to himself
Group is primary and standard of moral value
Collective is an entity: culture
Has ideas, can think, has goals
Is the most important even at the sacrifice of the individual

11. Egoism Vs Altruism

12. Egoism
Each man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare or self-interest
One’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind
Man should be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

13. Altruism Man has no right to exist for his own sake
Service to others is the only justification of man’s existence
Self-sacrifice is man’s highest moral duty
The self is the standard of evil; the selfless is the standard of good.

14. Free Will vs. Determinism
Free will means people can make choices, make up their own minds, make decisions, and direct their own lives by the ideas and values they adopt
Determinism is that people are by nature in the grip of forces beyond their control

15. Dystopian/Anti-Utopian Literature
This type of literature presents the world as it should NOT be.