> She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who helped shape neoliberal thinking. I don't know too much about whether Rand and v

> She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who helped shape neoliberal thinking. I don't know too much about whether Rand and von Mises interacted personally, but I know that Murray Rothbard (who moved in the same Austrian economics circles and founded the Mises Institute) wrote a satirical play mocking her.[1] > She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious, physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were. As other commenters have mentioned, that's not what I recall reading in the books. The whole message was that the 'heroes' were 'on strike' and 'done helping.' Not that they were actively trying to destroy anyone. My take on Rand is that she shared a lot of instincts with other people in the broader liberty movement and carried a lot of traumatic memories from early Bolshevik Russia. Atlas Shrugged represented those memories and also a potential wedge between the left and the right. The sociopolitical elites at the time treated the novel as a threat to the broad liberal consensus/compromise they believed was necessary to keep the country's left leaning and right leaning factions together in the Cold War against communism. Conservatives aren't going to work with Liberals and uphold the containment policy if they thinking in terms of 'looters' and 'producers' because they read a popular, apparently book. All this is my own speculation about the semi-private machinations of long dead people, of course. So they savaged both her and the book in the press of the day. Was it high literature? No. Even a great book? Highly debatable, even among libertarians. But it probably didn't merit critical comments such as Whittaker Chambers', "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'"[2] An interesting side note about folks like Chambers is that, if you trace the intellectual lineage of the neoconservative movement far enough back in time, you find a bunch of big-C communists (often Trotskyists, though not Chambers specifically) jumping from one end of the political horseshoe to the other. And in response to her novel's reception, Rand hardened and radicalized, becoming a threat to no one. Even others in the broad tent of then-nascent libertarian movement like Murray Rothbard, found her to be comically one-dimensional at best. In a way, the latter half of her life is more sad than anything else. [1]: https://mises.org/library/mozart-was-red https://mises.org/library/mozart-was-red [2]: http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bigsister/ http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bigsister/