Shock Therapy: Atlas Shrugged, Urban Renewal, and the Making of the Entrepreneurial Subject

Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the question, why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This chapter suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the post-war period. Reading Atlas Shrugged in relation to the debates surrounding the future of America’s cities at a time when the often-opposing forces of urban sprawl, suburbanization, urban decay, and urban renewal were making that future increasingly uncertain, this chapter argues that Atlas Shrugged simultaneously acts as an origin story for the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject and reveals the racialized and revanchist urban processes that helped create and shape these seemingly objective economic narratives and subjectivities.