Summum Bum Analysis

Money: The Summum Bonum When Francisco d’Anconia says that the “words to make money hold the essence of human morality.” He is directly attacking the often-repeated idea that money is the root of all evil. This idea is espoused not just by James Taggart and his socialist colleagues in Atlas Shrugged, but also by modern socialists and economic moralists of the present. Rather than realize the importance of money in the history of civilization, they instead imagine an almost idealistic state of nature before the advent of currency that would not be out of place in the pages of Rousseau or Locke. To men like Taggart, money is the proverbial apple that destroys the ultimate good that resides within humanity and replaces it with a mindless worship of Mammon. What d’Anconia is arguing for however, is something that has roots in the earliest works of Aristotle, whom Rand admired greatly in comparison to other philosophers and …show more content…
This is a theory that states that there exists an ultimate good in the world that is worth pursuing for the sake of itself. This “ultimate good” needs no justification for itself as it is the basis of all noble things and it is also the source from which other lesser goods spring forth. When d’Anconia links the origin of civilization, industry, and progress with money, he is therefore saying in an Aristotelian fashion, that money is a Summum Bonum. Money, rather than being the root of ultimate evil, is the root of ultimate good as it allows the possibility of trade and exchange which are the building blocks on which all great human societies are built upon. Ultimately Rand and Aristotle, despite being separated by thousands of years, show us through the pages of Atlas Shrugged, that the modern attitude towards money as an evil is not only wrong, but completely