The group of young intellectuals who often gathered at Ayn Rand’s Manhattan home in the early 1950s had a couple of different names for themselves. One was the “Class of ’43,” after the year that Rand published her first successful novel, “The Fountainhead.” Another, with intentional irony, was “the Collective.”

To most Americans, still basking in the successes of the New Deal and victory in World War II, government — that is collective solutions — seemed to be working pretty well at the time. But to Rand and her followers, collectivism was the single greatest problem facing the country. As they saw it, government programs forced citizens to comply with goals they often did not share while stifling the creative energy of individuals and even laying the groundwork for totalitarianism. In Rand’s apartment on East 34th Street, her collective sat around imagining a better, freer world.

The movement remained on the political fringe, however, and not only because its adherents were out of step with the times. By any definition, they were also a little odd. As Brian Doherty writes in “Radicals for Capitalism,” his history of libertarianism, every member of the group had to subscribe to a series of cultish premises beginning with “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.” Rand and her protégé Nathaniel Branden began an affair in 1954, with scheduled liaisons that their spouses were told to tolerate. Rand later described the group, Doherty writes, as the only “fully moral, fully happy” people in human history.

In spite of all this, the group left a deep imprint on the culture in the years to come. Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged” — Branden and others read portions of the drafts — became a best seller when it was published in 1957. Its story of a strike leader who is transformed into a charismatic crusader for individual genius became “a cornerstone of the modern libertarian movement,” Doherty writes. One Rand acolyte was a young economist, Alan Greenspan, whose belief in the power of markets — or, in Randian terms, the power of individual decisions — later helped shape the American economy during his two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Another young economist, Martin Anderson, who joined the group in the early 1960s, went on to advise Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and was instrumental in abolishing one of the most notorious collectivist policies of all, the draft.