Should worthless idlers exist at the expense of energetic, will-driven entrepreneurs? Can an entire country hold steady when crowds of parasites want to live off other people’s labor and justify for it an entire system of views? These questions face the main characters of the novel—«the steel king» Hank Rearden and the vice president of a railroad company, Dagny Taggart.
Meanwhile, the government is trying to choke business, society sinks into apathy and chaos, and industry declines. Is there a way out of this situation, and who is the mysterious John Galt?
Large-scale portraits of a nation plunging into chaos, the clash between rationality, practicality, and meaningless destruction, a love story, and a whole layer of philosophy of «the morality of rational selfishness»—with touches of utopia and a harsh critique of socialist philosophy—finally, an attempt to explain the social meaning of entrepreneurship. These are the main themes of this ambiguous novel, where the genres of social science fiction and philosophical treatise intertwine. If the world wants to live only at the expense of creators, sooner or later they stop bearing the world on their shoulders.