Customer Reviews

Anthem

5 star:		(400)
4 star:		(136)
3 star:		(70)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(68)

 

 

Anthem is not a book. It is not a philosophical or governmental treatise. As Ayn Rand herself admitted, it has neither a real plot nor a real climax. Anthem is a poem.
Its final two chapters are (according to Rand) the "anthem"--the celebration of the human ego. This is not done in logical terms, but in pure emotional exultation. In my opinion, Rand's writing throughout the book is skilled, passionate and evocative, but in the last two chapters she really shines.
For presentations of Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, in logical form, read Atlas Shrugged. For a ruthless, beautiful evocation of the emotional aspect of Rand's philosophy of egoism, read Anthem. If you have socialist leanings, or simply have always assumed the many is more important that the one, the book may disturb you greatly (it did me, when I read it the first time). It will change the way you feel, and Rand's later work will change the way you think.
Highly recommended. This book is often misunderstood, but if you read it with the understanding that it is a poem, and not a book, your understanding of it will be enhanced.

I read this book for a graduate class in political philosophy.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982), in this book written in 1937, expertly refutes collectivists schemes; such as, Communism and Fascism and shows the utter peril that collectivism poses to individual freedom. One of my favorite historians, Lord Acton, warned us in the 19th century "that socialism is slavery."

This is a short novel about a man who escapes a society from which all individuality has been squeezed. Written a full decade before Orwell's "1984" Rand expertly shows how collectivism is destroying individuality and is being practiced throughout the world including the "New Deal" programs in the United States. During this time in world, history people are becoming serfs to the state as F. A. Hayek, the noted libertarian economist would put it. Rand's philosophy is really quite simple; planning is a synonym for "collectivism" and "collectivism" is a metaphor for Communism. Rand's literary style is easy to read and understand, I love how she uses the third person plural in the book until the hero finds his "ego" at which time she switches over to first person singular. This is a book that should be read by all who wonder what role the government should have in our lives.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in political philosophy.

This is a good travel book for anyone looking to get hooked right away. It is a simple read and easy to follow, so it's great for reading through in one sitting or in spurts. The book takes place sometime in the distant future. Somehow, mankind has become completely and utterly socialized. They no longer think or act for themselves. The word "I" has become the unspeakable word, the unpardonable sin. Only "we" exists now, and "we", the society as a whole, is all that matters.

This story is told through the eyes of a man called Equality 7-2521 because people no longer have names. Ayn Rand gives us a glimpse of the dangers and evils of social totalitarianism and loss of self, and also shows the beauty of freedom. It really makes you think...

So why wasn't this book made into an episode of the Twilight Zone? It is right up Sterling's alley-the individual against the state, and his right to revolt.

Of course this book has elements of other dystopian literature: big government and small humans, retrograde technology, and state control of life, liberty, and sex. This seems like a rehash of the usual works ("The Iron Heel," "THX-1138," "Logan's Run, " "Harrison Bergeron"), but keep in mind it was written in 1937, five years AFTER "Brave New World," and eleven years BEFORE "1984."

In fact, this book in many ways surpasses Orwell's classic. Being a novella, it is crisper, punchier, and more to the point. It has less deadwood (the sex scene are allusions), and focuses on the moral aspects of an omnipresent state that has eliminated the word "We."

That is the key. Eleven years before Appleforth refused to eliminate the word "God," the World Council had eliminated the word "I." For day to day activity, that is like removing the letter "e." Throughout the narrative, which is written in first person, Equality 7-2521 keeps referring to himself as "we."

This makes for awkward reading, since we do not know if he is along or with Liberty 5-3000, or anyone else. But that is point: the objective of the World Council is to eliminate the concept of individuality in order to cement control over society.

You do not need a whole Newspeak dictionary if you can eliminate this one word for the vocabulary. This one small change makes all the difference.

*

The only drawback is that Peikoff included the galley prints of Rand's revision of the First Edition. This uselessly doubles the size of the book, but it is an important insight for fans of Rand and those who are aspiring writers. If you liked "Romantic Manifesto" and "The Art of Fiction," buy this book. You see Rand's mind in action.

Equality 7-2521 is a street sweeper in a dystopic future where:

We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist
through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.

But Equality 7-2521 has a problem; he doesn't believe in the things that his brothers do. He has questions, which can not even be asked, that he wants answered. He has a friend (International 4-8818), which is forbidden, and then he falls in love with a woman he calls "The Golden One" (Liberty 5-3000). And as if all these crimes weren't bad enough, he's started to do experiments in an abandoned culvert and he's figured out electricity. But he's willing to accept the consequences for his crimes because he's certain that his discovery is so important to Mankind as to absolve him of all blame. He is, of course, wrong. Because in this society, it is not a good thing for an individual to discover new knowledge: "This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them." So Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 escape into the wilderness surrounding the city and, after renaming each other Prometheus and Gaea, begin to work out a philosophy where the self, the individual, is important. Prometheus realizes:

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke the chains. Then he was enslaved by the
kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he
broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king
nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man,
and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which
the blood of centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them
to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We."

...

Perhaps in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who
refused to surrender [the word I.] What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw
coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. And they, these few,
fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banner smeared by their own blood. And they
chose to perish, for they knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.

Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their
hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never
be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all
the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep,
but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will go on. Man, not men.

Ayn Rand espoused a hard line capitalist philosophy which she called Objectivism--''the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.'' During a period of years when one type of Collectivism or another (Socialism, Fascism, Communism) was regnant in virtually every nation in the West, she courageously swam against the tide of her time and demanded recognition of the primacy of the individual and of self interest as a force for good. As a result, she has been ignored by the arts establishment, by philosophers and by political scientists, but she has a strong cult following and nearly every young person has, at least, a flirtation with her ideas. There are legions of us who first read her in college and developed a ferocious intellectual crush on her for her iconoclasm and for the pure ferocity of her rhetoric. Here, at last, was someone telling us that the liberal pabulum we had been spoon fed for the first 18 years of life was moral poison. What a glorious moment when you discover that there are other people who, like you, think that individuals matter, that personal excellence should be celebrated, that anything that limits the rights and the abilities of individuals is evil.

One of the most telling indicators of the dichotomy between critics and the common folk is to compare her absence from the Modern Library Top 100 novels of the 20th Century list to the lofty placement of her novels on the lists where readers voted (i.e., Radcliffe's 100 Best Novels, Modern Library Readers' List & Koen Books Top 100) The critics may not respect her much, but we of the hoi polloi sure seem to like her. And, of course, Ms Rand has gotten the final laugh as it is her philosophy that has triumphed and, along with the careful tending of her acolyte and former boy toy Alan Greenspan, given the world a period of unprecedented economic growth and political freedom. The continued refusal of the intelligentsia to acknowledge her, merely serves to make her accomplishment all the more remarkable. When the dust has settled, a few decades or centuries from now, one assumes (okay, one hopes) that Keynes and Galbraith, Marx and Rawls, Dreiser and Lewis and Sinclair--all of the thinkers and writers of the failed Left--will have been consigned to oblivion and the names that are honored will be Hayek, Popper, Friedman, Orwell and Rand. .

The sheer length of her two masterworks, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, makes rereading them a pretty daunting prospect. They tend to be a little too hysterical, a little too repetitive and, with the end of the Cold War, they've lost a little of their edge. But only a little, her essential message is still as important and timely today as it was fifty years ago--the only guarantee of freedom and human progress continues to be the individual acting in his own interest. Every attempt to make one person work for another's benefit erodes all of our liberty and retards our progress as a society and a species. So I highly recommend that you return to these shorter works and The Fountainhead stands up pretty well. It also looks, from the reviews below, like her collected letters and journals make for rewarding reading. This fine short novel is an excellent introduction to her passionate political philosophy and her emotional polemical style.

GRADE: A

The novel is a tale of a time when the human race has lost all individuality, when people are reduced to numbers and have lost their freedom to make decisions for themselves. Through this novel, written and completed while Ayn Rand was working on Fountainhead, Ayn Rand introduces her philosophy concerning the individual.

The novel really got me thinking and I couldn't put it down. At just over a hundred pages, i read it all in one setting, and thought about it the rest of the week. Though the world in Anthem is a very dark and depressed one indeed, it comments nonetheless on more subtle forms of control and losses of our individual freedom in today's world.

An excellent read and a great intro to her philosophy. This book led me to purchase Atlas Shrugged, and I recommend these both to all my friends.

Amazing and Powerful.

This is in my opinion, Ayn Rand's best book. There are a number of reasons for this, but I think most important is that unlike "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged", she wrote a succinct piece, and didn't allow herself to ramble. Anyone wanting an introduction to Rand should start here, it won't take you long to get through, the writing is pretty good, and it lacks the convoluted plots and characters of her longer pieces. In a strange way it is at times quite moving, and also lacks some of the more objectionable statements that can be found in Rand's other pieces, bordering on racism & fascism at times... this is a classic struggle for Individualism against a smothering regime, but not a struggle putting down other people's individualism.

I suggest that any person coming to "Anthem" should read "WE" by Yevgeny Zamyatin first. It was written in 1920, only a few years after the Russian Revolution. Russian was Ayn Rand's native language and she would have been able to read this book in the original, in fact she left Russia six years after "We" was published. "Anthem" was written seventeen years after "We". Various features of "Anthem" seem to have been taken from "We" (Brave New World and 1984 were also influenced by it, but not to the same extent). The most obvious similarity is that the characters have numbers, not names, and don't think of themselves as "I" but "We" and there's also the diary format in common. A major difference is that in "Anthem", the society has regressed technologically. Although this particular Hive/Ultra-Communist set up has been much copied since in fiction, it was not so common when Zamyatin was writing.

I believe that Rand was heavily influenced by "We", and of course had a shared Russian background with Zamyatin... even if you don't agree with me, "We" is well worth a read in its own right for fans of "Anthem".

Trivia - "2112" by Rush is said to have been inspired by "Anthem", although the two stories only have basic similarities!

Anthem is short novel (only 88 pages) foreshadowing what is to come in Rand's better known novels--Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Because this fictionalized work is brief and lacks the voluminous speeches found in the aforementioned novels (e.g. John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged), it's a more accessible work.

I've long wondered why mediocrity is so celebrated, with "tall poppies" often being cut down by the puveyors of the status quo. It is because of the "forbidden word"--the last word in Anthem--that the collectivists, New Agers, and "global village" demonize those who worship individualism.

As one who has been a part of New Age thought, it gives me pause to consider what can be lost with the "all is one" mentality.

My favorite Rand quote aptly sums up this gem of a novel:

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

If you'd like a simple introduction to Rand's philosophy of individualism, Anthem is a great place to start. Those who have read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead will likely enjoy this straightforward book about a man who dares to think and discover for himself--and what this decision costs him in a world ruled by the "we".

I heard a lot about Ayn Rand from my elders 20 years ago. At the time, I tried to read Fountainhead, but never could get into it. This past year, I happened to run into Anthem and bought it on my Kindle. This is the book I should have started with all those years ago. Rand's rant against the evils of unmitigated collectivism still plays well for those who live and work in broken communities where the status quo has taken on the character of revelation. Rand inspires rebellion against group think. Add some real critical thinking skills to Rand's simplistic vision and one has the potential for solid citizenship.

Although this book can be read in a matter of hours the impressions left will last a lifetime. Unfortunately the message is less important today than it may have been when socialism and communism were still thought as viable models of government. Ayn Rand loves the individual spirit and her writings show the passion and fears associated with a movement that would take this away. She had left Russia at an early age to come to America. Only a person that has lived in an oppressive society could write such moving books about the strength of individualism, competitive industry, the terror of collectivism. This short book is written as no other. The words and ideas are expressed so beautifully. If one needs a boost to their individual spirit, this work will definitely help