Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, when tensions between the communist USSR (Soviet Union) and capitalist US threatened to plunge the world into nuclear war. The topics and themes explored in the novel as well as the values of Rand’s objectivist philosophy are strongly influenced by this geopolitical context.

After the end of World War II in 1945, tensions mounted between former allies US and USSR as the two superpowers competed for global supremacy and pitted their respective incompatible ideological systems against each other. The US was dogmatically committed to capitalism and associated values such as Radical Individualism and Idolization of the Lone Genius Archetype. In contrast, the USSR was formed as a communist state founded on ideals of collectivism and social responsibility following the Russian Revolution of 1917, with personal liberties increasingly eroded by Stalin’s authoritarian regime. Both nations consolidated power in their respective spheres of influence—the US over its colonial holdings and NATO allies and the USSR over its conquered territories and satellite states. The nuclear arms race saw each side develop greater and more powerful atomic bombs, while the threat of cataclysmic retaliation deterred the two nations from outright war.