in the form of a pamphlet issued by a small-scale conservative publishing house in Los Angeles. It had to wait until 1945 for its for public release in the U.S. Although Rand got it published in Britain the year after she wrote it (1938), in the United States she couldn't find a publisher willing to take it. And if you're interested in more of where that came from, both egoism and collectivism are central to Rand's two later (and vastly longer) novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, as well as her many non-fiction works on philosophy.īecause of her distinctive ideas, particularly her commitment to radical egoism, Rand's fictional and philosophical works have always been controversial. The last pages of Anthem constitute an egoist tract. Rand's family lost almost everything to the government, including their pharmacy, and Rand herself was later almost expelled from the university for not being "proletarian" enough (that is, not enough like your average member of the working class).Īs a result, Rand developed her own unique brand of philosophy called egoism, centered on the idea that an individual should act "selfishly" – that is, act mostly, or only, to promote her own happiness. At age twelve, she witnessed the Russian Revolution, in which the communists (most definitely "collectivists") took over the county and began to "expropriate" (forcefully take away) property from the well-off in the name of "the people" and "the proletariat" (the poor, working class). Rand was born in Russia in 1905, to a fairly well-off, intellectual Jewish family (her father was a chemist and pharmacist). It's no big surprise Rand hated collectivism so much – the real life version of it that she experienced scarred her for life. Rand intended Anthem to be a scathing critique of collectivism, which can be defined as any philosophy that subordinates the individual to the well being of the community, or collective. In the society Rand portrays in Anthem, individuality has been completely erased right down to the first-person singular (the characters say "we" instead of "I"). Like Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, it's a work of dystopian literature that depicts an oppressive society you'd never want to live in. Anthem is a novella written by the controversial novelist and popular philosopher Ayn Rand in 1937.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |