Anthem is an outstanding introduction to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of human nature. The novella’s theme and central conflict—the individual versus the collective—occurs in all her novels and is an important element of her moral and political philosophy.
The story of Anthem takes place in an unnamed Communist- or Fascist-like dictatorship of the future, where an individual has no rights, existing solely to serve the state. The hero, Equality 7-2521, is a brilliant young man who yearns to be a scientist, but who is commanded to be a Street Sweeper by a government that fears his independence of mind.
The citizens of this society are pawns without rights who exist as wards of the state. They are born in state-controlled hospitals, raised in state-controlled nurseries, educated in state-controlled schools, toil at state-assigned jobs, and sleep in massive barracks organized by the state. Citizens have no personal lives or loves; they cannot choose friends or lovers. Instead, they engage in state-controlled breeding, in which the government decides who sleeps with whom and when. Even their names are variations on collectivist slogans—Unity, Fraternity, International, and so on—followed by numbers, indicating the many “brothers” who share the slogan for a name. Above all, the word “I” has been outlawed; it is the “Unspeakable Word” that has been erased from the language and from the thoughts of citizens. All first-person references have been expunged from individual thought. When individuals speak of themselves, they use the collective “we,” there being no individualistic concepts or words available.
The struggle of Equality 7-2521 to think, live, and love on his own terms and in conflict with the oppressive dictatorship forms the heart of Anthem. By means of her character’s quest, Ayn Rand defends the right of individuals to a life of their own and sounds a warning against modern society’s relentless movement toward collectivism. The novella is informed with a sense of urgency derived from the popularity of various collectivist factions existing at the time of its writing (that continue to exist to this day.) In the 1930s, a number of U.S. intellectuals and politicians praised both the Nazi and Communist systems as “noble experiments”—and support for Communism, as Marxist ideology, continues among many American intellectuals.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and raised during the Russian Revolution. She saw firsthand the horrors of Communism in action. She witnessed the confiscation of private property, the persecution (and disappearance) of political dissidents, and through reports from her family that remained in Russia, the extermination of millions by Josef Stalin. Escaping to America—the freest country in history—she was horrified to find present and increasingly popular the very ideas she had fled. Leading up to World War II, American intellectuals and politicians often lauded the Fascist, Nazi, and Communist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Russia as “noble experiments.”
