Hank Rearden

Henry "Hank" Rearden is one of the central characters of Atlas Shrugged: the founder of Rearden Steel and the inventor of Rearden Metal, an alloy that took him ten years to develop. He is the novel's study of a productive man who lives by one code and judges himself by its opposite, and the character through whom Ayn Rand dramatised the sanction of the victim.

“If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!”
~ Hank Rearden at his trial, Atlas Shrugged

His error

Rearden begins the novel as the most capable industrialist in the country and the most thoroughly disarmed. In his mills he acts on his own judgment, keeps what he earns, and treats the men he deals with as traders. Outside them he accepts, without ever having examined it, that a man who serves himself is guilty and that the measure of virtue is what he gives up.

The result is a life split in two. He supports a wife, a brother and a mother who despise him, and he interprets their contempt as evidence that they hold a moral standard he has failed to meet. Each new demand strengthens their claim, because he has already granted the premise on which it rests. Rand's point is not that his family are unusually vicious but that they could not touch him without his agreement: their power over him is entirely borrowed from his own altruism. See Sacrifice and Egoism.

This is what Rand called the sanction of the victim — the productive man's own moral endorsement of the code used to expropriate him. His conversion is not a discovery about economics or politics. It is the recognition that he owes his enemies nothing, that his ability is not a debt, and that his guilt was the only thing holding the arrangement together.

The sex theme

Rearden's second conflict is Rand's chief vehicle for the mind-body dichotomy in Atlas Shrugged.

He desires Dagny Taggart, who is the one person whose values match his own, and he treats that desire as proof of a degrading animal streak in himself. He tells her so, in terms that insult them both, because he has inherited the view that sex is a physical appetite unrelated to a man's spirit — and on that view, wanting his highest value most intensely is the deepest evidence against him.

Francisco d'Anconia is the character who dismantles this, arguing that a man's sexual response is not separate from his convictions but is generated by them, so that what a man desires is a report on what he values. Rearden's release from the contradiction is his release from the dichotomy generally. See Sex and Reason-Emotion Dichotomy.

The trial

Rearden is prosecuted for selling Rearden Metal in violation of the Fair Share Law, and he refuses to defend himself in the terms offered. He will not plead, will not accept a court-appointed lawyer, and will not help the proceeding maintain its appearance as a trial. He tells the judges that he is guilty of the act charged, that he acted for his own profit and would do it again, and that he does not recognise their claim on his work.

The scene is the moral centre of his arc because it is the first time he refuses the sanction rather than the sentence. He is fined and the sentence is suspended, which Rand uses to make the point that the looters need his cooperation more than his punishment.

Rearden's function for the reader is that he is in the reader's position: he knows something is wrong and has not identified what, and he arrives at the answer by the same route the reader does, through Francisco d'Anconia and finally through Galt's speech. See John Galt and Who is John Galt.

Common misunderstandings

That Rearden is a self-made hero who needs no correction. The novel treats him as gravely mistaken for most of its length. His competence is what makes his moral error expensive rather than what excuses it.
That his family are villains and he is simply their victim. Rand's analysis is more specific: they hold no power he did not hand them, and the transaction ends the moment he stops agreeing.
That his affair with Dagny is presented as admirable throughout. What Rand endorses is the response; what she indicts is Rearden's interpretation of it, and the cruelty toward Dagny that follows from that interpretation.
That Rearden Metal is a technological prediction. It is a plot device for a superior product, and the novel's interest is in what the world does to the man who made it.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapters 8 and 9.