I have heard of Ayn Rand, her books and her controversial philosophy. This was the first of her titles that I read, and sounds like a precursor to her later novels.

A dystopian story: a totalitarian government, with the protagonist having the will to identify and isolate one's self, a release of force that presumably was locked inside for far too long.

Looks like all of these ideas (in Anthem as well as probably in at least some of her later books) were a result of herself, in her childhood, facing the Tsarist regime as well as the later oppressive Communist state in early Soviet Russia; perhaps even an effect of the growing Fascism in Europe in the mid-1930s, and with the fear of something like that also happening in the United States with the election of President Roosevelt in 1933 during the time of the Great Depression (1929-39), wherein eventually Rand moved and had lived since 1926.

Anthem was good in the sense because it stops at the moment when the protagonists release themselves from being under total control of the State, and identify that there exist something as their own selves. As far as it went to that limit (and not to the extreme, as perhaps in her later novels, I presume), I personally felt satisfied.

A good book, nothing great. Not really recommended. But I believe if one has to read Ayn Rand's books, one should also read her corresponding life-story and the history of those times to truly understand why she became and wrote what she did, her works which I personally feel are too dangerous for its presence in the current era of worldly events (and not in accordance with Dharma), perhaps even evil as some readers have suggested.

Congrats, Aynnie! You've received my first single star rating! I read this in high school when I was reading a lot of dystopian future literature and thought it was by far the worst of the lot. Granted, if I'd read it when I was younger I might have liked it more, but saying that the even younger, less mature, more pretentious version of my teenage self would have liked something is hardly a glowing endorsement.

As such I've steered /way/ clear of her door-stoppers. I don't think you really need to come up with some faux cerebral excuse to justify selfishness; if you're going to be self-centered your actions are ultimately justified by your own selfish inner drives, not your intellect. At best Rand was a shrewd self-marketed Cold War personality. At worst she's cynical, petty, pedantic, and most unforgivable of all, _boring_.

Part I of a multi-part review series.

Standard libertarian dishonesty that seeks to conflate egalitarian doctrine generically with various unpleasant practices. For instance, the state holds back technological development--primitivism--wishing to punish narrator for the comically unlikely invention of an electrical light. State also keeps knowledge of the past secret, of "the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unemntionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame." Narrator's invention is also rejected because it will "bring ruin to the Department of Candles," which is less a primitivist position than a cartel's protectionism, hardly a progressive idea. There can be egalitarian primitivism, sure--though hardly anyone advocates that. More than likely this is intended to be a slur on egalitarian progressivism, i.e., socialism.

Likewise, in the assertion "we are nothing," we see the self-abnegation common to fascist doctrine, which libertarians are pleased to associate with egalitarianism, even though fascism seeks to undo even those limited forms of egalitarianism that libertarians will recognize, usually. (Not Rand, however, for in this text the state has a "free and general vote of all men"--so perhaps the indictment of egalitarianism is total, and Rand joins with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and other anti-democratic rightwing writers--though of course Dostoevsky and Conrad are good writers, and worth reading, despite the bad politics.) In the same vein, the prohibition on speaking to persons in other trades is old syndicalist/corporativist doctrine of generating controls on civil society within employment groups, and managing the struggle of capital and labor through industry mediation, preventing thereby class-based unions of workers and limiting them to their own shops and factories, at the mercy of the employer.

Similarly, egalitarianism is equated herein with religious mysticism, such as in "the will of our brothers, which is holy." This is one of the most douchey (douchiest?) criticisms of socialism, and I'm surprised that there are people who still make it. Rand takes it so far as to have public burnings of heretics, as though this were 15th century England and heresy were punished by writ de heretico comburendo.

We also see sexual pairings decided by a council of eugenics, which is an odd thing to associate with progressive egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism is toward the end of novella conflated with "serfdom," which is Hayekian enough, I suppose--though this is manifestly idiotic, the merger in imagination of feudalism and socialism. (It may not be socialism, though: we see that narrator admits to possession of "stolen" items--so there is definitely some sort of property ideology here. If this were intended to be a critique of socialism, though, then the dystopia is not very effective in eradicating property ideology--I'll just go ahead and regard that as a writerly default of misconception or inartful execution or both.)

The text also demonstrates a severe lack of understanding regarding the content of egalitarian doctrine, attributing to egalitarianism undesirable policies that have no intrinsic relation to egalitarianism, such as statutes or customs or aesthetic standards that forbid or censure writing, height, having distinct tastes, having an independent will, having friends, having sex, creating works of art, doing any job other than what is assigned, speaking of historical events, leaving the city, and so on. It's one long strawperson, and it is so pervasive that not even someone as ludicrously uninformed as this author could have got it so wrong without trying--so perhaps it's best to assume a lack of good faith, considering the magnitude of the errors.

In other words, there is no form of barbarism or silliness that Rand does not associate with egalitarian politics, including the moronic assertion that with egalitarianism, humanity "fell lower than his savage beginning."

As though that weren't bad enough, text is just plain bad as a writing. Narrator states that "it is a sin to give men other names which distinguish them from other men," but yet everyone encountered has a name that distinguishes. Sure, there's a generic term and a number, but that produces a distinction. It appears, accordingly, that author didn't really think this through very far. Same, the hasty assertion that "never have men said this to women," when narrator refers to his amorous interest as "our dearest one." Another dumb moment: "A street Sweeper walking in upon the World Council of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the rules and all the laws!" Certainly not all the laws, on that one very specific point, which is presumably sufficiently rare that it is not to be believed when it does in fact occur?

Biggest writerly & conceptual default however is in what author must have considered the climax, when narrator sheds "we" as his first person singular pronoun and begins using "I." This feeds into the puerile doctrine that "we" is tyranny. It's all juvenile hyperindividualist Stirner stuff, and I can see why teenagers like this sort of thing.

The problem with the shift from "we" to "I" is that narrator always had the conceptual scheme for "I," an individualism from the first page, literally--but lacks only the word, substituting in another signifier for the first person singular grammatical function, which he always already possessed. The entire story is about narrator's individualist deviations. And he's not alone. The other characters involved each have their own deviations from the alleged rules (which are not very well enforced--he walks out of prison, and leaves a trail that amorous interest follows to find him, but there is no pursuit by law enforcement.) So, it's all one big red herring, really, and the facts represented by the narrative do not bear out narrator's dogmatic posturings.

Overall, terrible, poorly conceived & executed writing, filled with dishonest criticisms of left politics, substituting in childish ideas that should embarrass rather than embolden the rightwing. One of the worst books ever written.

Recommended nevertheless for those who owe nothing to their brothers, persons who want to live where there is no odor of men, and teabaggers who want to be flattered.

• هیچ چیزی نمیتواند آزادی انسان را از او بگیرد جز انسانهای دیگر؛ آزادی بشر در گرو آزادی او از بند برادرانش است. این است آزادی، همین و بس..

Свят, в който думата „Аз“ е непозната – съществува само „ние“ и колективът е всичко. Смисълът на живота е да работиш за другите и всякакви лични желания са забранени…

Това е светът в новелата „Химн“, в който хората даже нямат имена, а просто номера. Един от тях обаче си позволява да извърши нечуван грях – грехът на Предпочитането. Той Предпочита една жена пред всички останали т.е. влюбва се – а да предпочиташ един индивид пред друг по какъвто и да е начин е дискриминация и абсолютно забранено!

Отгоре на всичко, той случайно открива останките от една забравена цивилизация – цивилизация на бетон и електричество, твърде различна от тази на свещи и петилетни планове, в която живее човечеството в момента…

Химн е практически пост-апокалиптичен разказ, в който апокалипсисът е бил това, че хората са започнали да поставят другите пред себе си, започнали са да мислят за това, което искат другите, а не за това, което искат те самите.

И като резултат обществото се е превърнало в един мравуняк, в който всички работят до изнемога, а нямат никакъв личен живот, желания и стремежи, а цивилизацията запада и се връща едва ли не в каменната епоха - защото всяко развитие е плод на индивидуалния стремеж към знание, а наука не може да се гради на консенсус, мнение и съгласие, а само на спор, факти и лични постижения.

I generally don't read much dystopian, but just thought, 'what the hell, let's give it a go'. Although the concept for Anthem sounded promising, on the whole I felt it was poorly executed. Being relatively short I had nothing to lose, unfortunately by the time I reached the last page, put the book down on the table, went to make a coffee, before gazing out the window, Anthem had already started it's super quick journey of escaping my thoughts, scampering off to the nearest forest.

So then, this is some sort of stupid future, where all sense of the individual is annihilated in deference to the collective state and each man’s role in that society is assigned to him. Even some words have been completely obliterated from the language, and all citizens carry a designation such as 'Equality 7-2521', in this case, the name of our protagonist, who we learn right away was probably unfairly assigned to the duty of street sweeper for the great collective. In this setting, mankind’s reverence for a collective yet compartmentalized society has plunged him back to the dark ages, as all knowledge of the age before was destroyed and society’s new structure continues to keep men floundering in ignorance. 7-2521 is a bit of a rebel, a dystopian luke skywalker, who goes against the values of his society when he finds a secret lair belonging to people from the time before, and resolves to learn its forbidden secrets. Also in this time his newfound wisdom and courage causes him to flirt like Casanova with an attractive girl he calls 'The Golden One'. He starts developing some much forbidden feelings for her. In other words, he wants to jump in her pants.
Our hero flees to the dangerous wilderness, quickly followed by his beloved, and they start their new lives together.

Though Anthem contains some interesting moments, it falls flat on it's face for several reasons, not least because Rand's writing style seems incredibly tedious and pretentiously boring. Also the story just isn't convincing at all, we're expected to believe that the main character is familiar with such complicated terms and expressions which should be unknowable to someone with that kind of background. It's absurd that he's able to pick up books, read them, and understand with little to no problem. Maybe he was a book junky in a previous life, who knows.

As for Rand, she preaches with a sense of disregard, her efforts have been rewarded calling her a visionary, when she is clearly doing nothing more than following a trend to bash communism, socialism, and any political theory that does not promote capitalism and competition. Obviously Rand's own position in Soviet Russia comes into play, fair enough, why wouldn't it.
A Utopian society as fundamentally evil as this because it suppresses technology?. What Rand forgets is that a society's worth should not be judged solely on technological advances and science.
The world is a little more complicated than that to just go lumping things into different categories.

Weak philosophically and written with mediocre literary finesse, I really don't know what all the fuss is about. I regret having wasted my money on it.....Hang on?.....I didn't. It was borrowed. That's the only positive.

Luddite Borg control the future, but one man is prepared to take down this socialist dystopia by wielding his strongest weapons: his fearless individuality and the ability to recognise what a good idea a light bulb is. Tedium ensues.

You can usually depend on Rand for some funny strawman daftness, but this poorly written tosh is just dull, beyond dull, an unforgiving vacuum of flat characters in a flat world.
It could be a thought provoking read for solipstic narcissists who believe CEOs are the most oppressed minority, but it's an ideal bird cage lining for everyone else.

I should say right up front that I'm not at all familiar with Ayn Rand. I own a couple of her books, but I never read any of them until now. I never studied her in school and I'm not familiar with her philosophies, though I know that they are somewhat controversial and polarizing. And I am not a philosophical type person... so take this review with a grain of salt.

This is my first experience reading any of her work, and... I'm not really all that impressed. I got the lack of individuality theme right around paragraph two or so, when I realized that Equality 7-2521 wasn't literally referring to multiple people when he said "we" but just to himself. And so it wasn't that hard to predict where this was going. Maybe it's because I've read and seen quite a lot of dystopian themed work in my life, but this came across as very predictable to me. In fact, bits of it reminded me of Logan's Run and THX 1138, though I do realize that this was written well before both of those.

So, this society is based on The Borg the collective, and all existence is supposed to be to toil for the good of the whole. There's no explanation of how they got to this point and the population is very small, in the thousands, so I'm thinking that since there's mention of a great fire, there must have been a war or nuclear blast or something, and the survivors rebuilt society in the best way that they knew how... We need some people to clean up, we need some people to figure stuff out and help rebuild, we need some people to grow food, and some people to cook it, and some people to teach the next generation, and so on. But somewhere along the line, the people in power decided they liked it, and that limiting individual thought and convincing people that the whole is the only thing that matters, and any not following the rules would be whipped or killed, allowed them to keep it. Just your standard communist cult.

I don't necessarily think that socialism or collectivism is inherently bad. There are many communities that make it work, but when free will, knowledge, self, and choice are banned, and the collective replaces one's identity and purpose, that can be bad. This book illustrates this extreme form, and at the end once the main character discovers his sense of self, he claims that he will never again use the term "we". I guess I can understand wanting to break away from that concept completely and live truly freely and aware, but it struck me as just as ignorant, because how else will you refer to a group to which you belong by choice? The main character is not ALONE, he's just discovered he is an individual. There's a difference, and that difference matters, because "we" can be a good type of inclusive, and does not necessarily equate to a loss of self.

Rand seemed to have strong opinions on this, and that's cool... I just don't entirely buy into them.

Anyway, I liked that it was journal style, even though it was technically 1st person. It worked though in this case, because for him, there is no concept of a singular person existing just in their own head, so it's like he assumed from the very beginning that his writings would be read by someone else. I liked that he was also learning about himself as he wrote, so it was kind of like he was explaining things to himself and discovering his own thoughts at the same time. But, once he starts reading at the house, and discovers his sense of self, Rand goes a bit wild via this character. He definitely doesn't read like a 21 year old, and definitely not a 21 year old who has only had limited education and has been discouraged from thinking and questioning his whole life. His epiphany reads like a lifelong philosophy scholar coached him. It was a little overwrought at the end.

Still, I didn't HATE it, so I guess that is a plus. It's just one of those books that will eventually just fade to nothingness or blur together with every other dystopia I've read or will read. There's nothing really compelling here. It was just OK.

Alright. If, for some reason, the values of individuality or independence are completely alien to you, you should read this book. Everyone else is better off skipping it. It has nothing else to offer and it's got a good chance of convincing that you're smarter or more enlightened than you actually are.

Granted, I was a bit biased against Ayn Rand while reading this. But before reading this I had that sort of play-aversion that you carry around because it's fun to make fun of famous dead people. After reading this my contempt for her has become deep and far-reaching.

The setting is simplistic and nonsensical. Unlike other dystopias such as 1984 or Brave New World, it's not portrait of a functioning oppressive society or a sad commentary on human nature as much as it is a vague, untenable strawman. Other dystopias are written with an awareness or sensitivity towards the human condition. 1984 dealt with our willingness to circumvent logic for a comfortable, patriotic lie. Brave New World dealt with our willingness to completely ignore issues and problems as long as we're entertained. Anthem on the other hand, deals with our willingness to sacrifice logic, comfort, entertainment, and freedom for the good of our neighbors.

Oh wait... that doesn't make sense. In fact it flies in the face of the oldest, and most confounding problem in the social sciences, The Tragedy of the Commons. Biology and psychology have also found that self-sacrifice without compensation is an exceedingly rare phenomenon, and that animals (including humans) are ,as a general rule, selfish. Even the Soviet Union, a major influence behind this book, was only maintained by the general acceptance of the communist ideal for a short time before it was replaced with the KGB and the threat of the gulags. Considering how easy it was for Equality to escape from confinement, I'm comfortable saying that critical element was absent. This might be more excusable if it was meant to be a highly stylized hyperbole like The Giver, but Rand says herself in the introduction that this is not only the inevitable sum of collectivism, but what all socialists and collectivists secretly WANT.

All this leads me to believe that a person who could seriously believe, much less write, this would have to be someone who saw their self-interest as unique, and imagined the majority of humanity a swathe of ambitionless drones. That, or a reader who's mouth salivates at the word "individuality" and who, when it comes to the affairs of the world, automatically equates cynicism to realism because it makes them look clever and critical.

The writing's painfully overwrought as well. You have to understand this book is listed as half-read because despite my several attempts I can't finish it. I either get tired of self-indulgent prose and put it down or I start reading it out loud and I can't take it seriously (a friend and I did this to pass the time while waiting for a bus once.) The character thinks in short, declarative sentences that seem to rely on the reader seeing his struggle as novel and impactful. If you don't do this automatically there's nothing really there to MAKE you. The struggle in question, is a one-dimensional tug of war between We and I without the complexity or variability seen in actual human thought.

Even the treatment of individuality once it's "achieved" is trite. After you figure out the "I" and the "ego" you're pretty much scott-free. You don't have any uncertainty about what you want to do or who you want to be, and you don't have to worry about things like self-deception, insecurity or over-confidence to mess with you. Congratulations, you are one of an elite few! Rand's portrayal of selfishness and independence as some miracle cure is sophomoric and overly simplistic, and it gets hammered into you from the beginning. It's not even as if calls to challenge, question, and break social oppression or embrace your individuality are hard to find, even in Rand's time, and a lot of these calls don't have to resort to strawmen or heady promises of perfection. Read Ender's Game, The Giver, My Side of the Mountain or any other young adult novel. Even song lyrics (Tilly and the Wall, Say Anything, Incubus) treat the topic of self-definition and social constraints with more intelligence. This book might have been revolutionary for its time, but we've moved on as a culture. We've gotten over the novelty of selfishness being a virtue and social control being a bad thing, and we've managed to produce far more intelligent treatments of the subject.

ayn rand is the most ridiculous author i have ever read. i hate her. and her philosophies. she takes hyperbole to a hyperbolic extreme in this book. i hate how she makes the main characters these perfect beings whose only flaw is that society won't accept their superiority. i wonder how ayn rand would have thought if she had been unattractive, unsuccessful and poor. absolute rubbish.

Rand is one of my favorite authors! Her SciFi is well done and provocative. In this book she writes a dystopian story about a world of people living with a collective, predestined world. The hero is punished for thinking for himself.
When you realize this was written in 1937 it's really amazing. Not only did she write during a time when there were few women writers but she wrote SciFi. A field that is still male dominated.
This is one of the few dystopian stories that still holds up and a precursor to so many other stories.

The real tragedy of this book is that the billions of copies that have been printed could have been more appropriately used to build homes for people in third world countries. This book could not be more self indulgent if it came with a bottle of Absynthe and a membership to MENSA. Not only is it impossibly boring to read, the characters are so one dimensional that they put V.C. Andrews to shame. Do yourself a favor: set this on fire and use the fourteen hours that it burns to read Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series instead. You won't regret it.