Atlas Shrugged’s Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein opens the first chapter of her best-selling book The Shock Doctrine with an analogy. She compares the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate” (29) with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could similarly “depattern societies, . . . returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests” (50). The premise in both cases, she argues, is that shock intervenes in a subject or market that has grown sick and returns it to a salubrious state of nature. Klein’s book raises the question, though without explicitly asking it, why did shock constitute such a powerful and persuasive image under neoliberalism? How did shock change from a traumatic force associated with unconscious, libidinal desires and left-wing revolutionary potential to the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological rationalism during the second half of the twentieth century? This article suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer. In Atlas Shrugged, the recuperation of shock as a force of what Matthew Huber, following Michel Foucault, terms “entrepreneurial” (xv), or neoliberal subject-making, emerges from the white flight anxieties toward racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged following World War II. Within Atlas Shrugged this neoliberal vision of shock is a recuperative fantasy in which the destabilizing shocks experienced by white flighters faced with the racialization or so-called blight of downtown cores in concert [End Page 73] with a rising Civil Rights movement are transformed into a bitter yet necessary medicine that will ultimately create more resilient, self-sufficient, free, and implicitly white subjects and cities. I argue that Atlas Shrugged simultaneously acts as an origin story for what Klein conceives as the neoliberal doctrine of shock therapy and reveals the racialized, revanchist urban processes that helped create and shape these economic narratives