[cyborg]

Really? Should I bother reading Atlas Shrugged?

[ffusco]

Absolutely! It is a great book, but also just another utopian vision of an ideal world. It is a world populated by Greek gods, not mortal men. It is romantic, often inciteful and very inspirational at times. Also you are probably not as impressionable now as I was when I was 18 when I read it.

[CatoRenasci]

Yes, you should read Rand's two major novels: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Unlike ffusco, I have never been a Randite, but think her ideas are worth thinking about and reading. I think there is a profound cri d' cour in her work against any sort of enforced collectivism and for liberty. To me, that explains the appeal of Rand's work to so many over the past half-century or so. Whether she has been successful in translating that impulse and insight into a coherent philosophy (or philosophical system, which is another thing altogether) is a different question; one which most serious thinkers answer in the negative.

[Forgiven_Sinner]

Really? Should I bother reading Atlas Shrugged?

Sure. It's a great disection of the inevitable fall of socialism and communism. Based on "Atlas Shrugged", you could have predicted the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Ironically, I read it around 1992-94, after President Clinton was elected. I enjoyed matching his statements to the arguments used in the book.

Objectivism has some good logic in it, but it starts off with a false premise--God does not exist. There is its chief failing.