The American hardback edition of the book has the same turquoise dust-wrapper that will be familiar to viewers of the cult TV series Mad Men. The senior partner of the advertising agency in the series, Bert Cooper, gives copies of the book to favoured underlings whose minds he wishes to see travel in the right direction, a subtle advertisement that will not have done sales any harm
either. On the blurb of the hardback it reads: "This is a story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world: and did." Atlas Shrugged takes the pro-individualist ideology expounded in The Fountainhead one stage further. Roark's appears to be a personal, or local, struggle against forces that seek to control him which are prevalent within his milieu. In Atlas Shrugged, they have infected an entire nation and apparently much of the world.

Who is John Galt? He is a man who by his wit and ingenuity discovers the secret of perpetual motion. In doing so, he becomes successful, and - his just reward - rich: the Christ-like symbol by which he comes to be recognised is not the cross, it is the dollar sign. Inevitably, as successful enterprises do, he puts less successful ones out of business. This goes down exceptionally badly with the slow-witted rivals, who demand that Congress pass a "fair shares law", to award them a slice of the profits made by Galt's genius, that they might keep body and soul together without having to strive for any innovatory coup themselves. Think of the whining of the car giants of Detroit at the fact that Americans would rather buy reliable, well-made German cars than the tinny rustbuckets turned out by them, and their demands for huge taxpayer-funded bailouts, and you begin to see why this book and its arguments have once more turned on lights all over America.

Galt withdraws from society and takes his genius, and his wealth-creation, with him. He sets up a base in the Rockies: not a collective, not a commune - expressly not those things - but a society where every man or woman exists on his or her own terms, spurred on by the profit motive, outside the reach of a confiscatory or controlling state. Inevitably, without the services of the truly innovative and capable, America starts to fall apart. Rand demonstrates that it is not merely capitalism, but the self-interest upon which capitalism must be based, that leads to a dynamic, progressive and truly free society. Rand was the daughter of a St Petersburg pharmacist who witnessed the confiscation of her parents' property after the 1917 revolution and herself came to America in 1926. Her visceral hatred of collectivism stems from that, but was matured over a lifetime not merely of watching the development of the inevitable evils of communism around the world, but of witnessing the blindness of Americans whom she felt had an unduly casual attitude to the real nature of capitalism and of the threats towards it. In her novel, it is not merely America that is giving up on capitalism. Other nations are relying on America for handouts as they slump into the status of "People's States". Rand started to scheme the novel at the time of the Marshall Plan, which she thought put the whole of non-Sovietised Europe on the road to socialism, too.