Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. Through his relationship with her, he becomes involved in the organized underground opposition to the all-encompassing government - an opposition he had never previously realized existed at all. He begins a forbidden sexual affair with this woman, meeting with her illicitly in a very old part of the city where the intrusive gaze of the all-encompassing government doesn't seem to penetrate. The writer I'm talking about today wrote a novel in which a citizen of a totalitarian state of the future meets a woman and becomes obsessed with her.
Paterson's libertarian classic, The God of the Machine, has never reached a wide readership, but, thanks to the effort of her protégé, Ayn Rand, Paterson herself has influenced millions of readers who have never even seen a copy of The God of the Machine. I gave an example of it just last week, when I discussed the life and career of Isabel Paterson. Regular listeners to this series know what I mean by indirect influence. This week, I'd like to talk about a writer whose level of influence has been much more modest, but whose indirect influence has nevertheless been considerable. In earlier podcasts in this series, I've already discussed two such figures: Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is, arguably, one of the half-dozen most important libertarian works of the 20th century, and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the professor of philology at Oxford whose giant fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings, published just a few years before Atlas Shrugged, is arguably the most culturally influential single novel published in English in the 20th century. But surely one part of the libertarian tradition belongs to novelists and other fiction writers. When we think of the libertarian tradition, we tend naturally to think of political philosophers and economists of the past.
0 kommentar(er)
