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Almost sixty years since its first printing, Atlas Shrugged remains a towering classic of American philosophical fiction. Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's magnum opus and most brilliant articulation of her Objectivist philosophy. Rand was an original, independent and controversial thinker and writer. Objec-tivism itself continues to attract and retain adherents in each gen-eration; it is an applied philosophy for methodological individual-ists of the intelligentsia, widely practiced but nowhere taught in academe. While Rand's romantic Smithian capitalism and rugged virtue ethics ought to be well-received in America (her adopted land), she often stands accused − unjustly, I contend − of elitism and hard-heartedness. My focus is on the prescient and sagacious warnings she voiced in Atlas Shrugged. Rand rang strident, pre-cocious but evidently unheeded alarms against the encroachment on the West of inconsistent metaphysics, collectivist politics, al-truistic ethics, economics of need, debasement of merit, hatred of reason, celebration of mediocrity and deconstruction of high cul-ture − the very hallmarks of postmodern decline. Since her prog-noses are unfortunately so well-confirmed, it behooves us to re-evaluate her practical philosophical prescription.
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