John Galt

John Galt is the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, an inventor and philosopher who organises a strike of the world's most productive people. He is Ayn Rand's fullest presentation of her ideal man, and the novel is constructed so that the reader meets him only after two-thirds of it has been spent learning what he means.

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
~ John Galt's oath, Atlas Shrugged

For his place in the novel's cast, see Characters in Atlas Shrugged.

"Who is John Galt?"

The novel opens with the question and does not answer it for a thousand pages. Within the story it has become a piece of street slang, said with a shrug, meaning roughly "who knows" or "don't ask" , an expression of a resignation nobody can account for. Part of the book's structure is the gradual discovery that the idiom is literal: there is a man named John Galt, the phrase entered the language because of what he did, and the despair it expresses is his doing.

That double reading is why the line works as the first sentence. The reader takes it as atmosphere and Dagny Taggart takes it as noise, and both are wrong in the same way at the same time. Dagny's search is the reader's search, which is why the novel withholds Galt until she finds him.

The Twentieth Century Motor Company

Galt was an engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company when its new owners adopted a plan to pay employees according to need and require work according to ability. He stood up at the meeting where it was adopted, said he would put an end to it, and left. He had been building a motor that drew power from atmospheric static electricity; he abandoned it in the ruins of the plant rather than complete it under the new arrangement.

The forum argues about whether abandoning the motor wronged his employer. The text supports the reading that it was unfinished work of his own that he declined to finish, not a completed deliverable withheld. What the episode establishes is the principle he then generalises: the people who make production possible have always been able to be used because they kept producing under any terms. His answer was to stop, and to persuade others to stop.

The strike

Galt's strike is not a labour action and not a withdrawal from life. It is the withdrawal of what Rand called the sanction of the victim: the productive person's own agreement to keep supplying the value that the system taking it from him depends on. The strikers do not attack anything. They disappear, and the world runs down on its own, which is the argument.

“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains — and he withdrew his fire — until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”
~ Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

The moral content of the strike is the claim that ability is not a debt. Rand's targets are the premise that a person's capacity to produce creates an obligation to produce for others, and the altruist morality that makes the producer accept it. See Sacrifice and Egoism.

Galt's speech

Late in the novel Galt seizes a national radio broadcast and delivers the philosophy directly. The speech is the most complete statement of Objectivism that Rand published in fiction, and it covers metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics in sequence: existence and identity, reason as man's means of survival, life as the standard of value, the virtues, and the political consequences.

It is quoted throughout this wiki as a source; see Identity, Existence, and The Virtue of Selfishness, where Rand reprinted the ethical portion of the argument as "The Objectivist Ethics" in her own voice.

Galt's Gulch

The strikers' valley in Colorado is where those who have quit live and trade with one another. The forum's standing question about it is whether it depicts an anarchy, since it has no visible state apparatus.

It does not, and the text is explicit about the reason: it is a settlement of a few dozen people who know one another personally, hold the same principles, and have a judge among them, Judge Narragansett, to arbitrate. Rand rejected anarchism and treated objective law and a government monopoly on retaliatory force as necessary for a society of strangers. See Government and Rights. The valley is a refuge for the duration of the strike, not a model constitution. For the setting itself, see Locations in Atlas Shrugged.

As a character

Galt is presented as already complete. He has no arc, learns nothing, and does not change, and the drama around him is entirely other people's. This is deliberate: Rand's stated aim in Atlas Shrugged was the projection of an ideal man, and the characters who do change, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, carry the novel's development. Readers who find him inert are noticing something real about the construction rather than misreading it, and whether that construction succeeds as fiction is a long-running argument here and elsewhere.

The related question of whether he could understand people unlike himself is answered in the text by his fifteen years of working as a labourer under an assumed name in the company Dagny runs, and by the fact that his method is persuasion, one person at a time, over more than a decade.

Common misunderstandings

That Galt is Ayn Rand, or her self-portrait. He is her presentation of an ideal, and she described the projection of such a man as the purpose of the novel rather than as an autobiography.
That the strike is career advice. "Going Galt" as a slogan for quitting a job in protest has little to do with the book, in which the strike is a coordinated withdrawal by people who have been persuaded of a philosophical position, not a gesture of individual frustration.
That the motor is offered as engineering. It is a plot device that makes the loss visible; the novel's argument does not depend on it working, and the forum's objection that it is physically impossible does not touch anything.
That being unlike Galt is a moral indictment. The novel's own answer is Eddie Willers, who has ordinary ability and is treated as morally serious throughout. Objectivism holds moral stature to be a function of how a person uses what he has, not of how much he has; see Pride and Self-esteem. A reader who concludes from Atlas Shrugged that he should feel guilty for not being a genius has drawn the opposite of the intended conclusion.
That Galt hates the people he leaves. The strike's premise is that the productive have been loved for the wrong reasons and used; its aim is to end that arrangement, not to punish anyone.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics". The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964. The ethical argument of Galt's speech restated in her own voice.

External links

Sanction of the Victim at the Ayn Rand Lexicon