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The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell
Stephen Ingle
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The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell
Stephen Ingle
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Stephen Ingle is Professor at the Politics Department, University of Stirling. His main academic interests are in the relationship between politics and literature and in adversarial (two party) politics, especially in the UK.
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1 In search of Orwell
That Trotskyite with the big feet.
(H. G. Wells)
âItâs the pigs I remember most. Napoleon, Squealer â especially Squealer â and when I look round the Chamber, there they are.â So said a backbencher in response to a survey on Labour MPsâ reading habits.1 He claimed that his politics had been decisively shaped by reading Orwell. For his own part, Orwell acknowledged the influence of other writers. The world would have been perceptively different, he said, if H. G. Wells, the hero of his youth, had not existed.2 This is a substantial claim to make in respect of any individual, especially a writer, and yet it is a claim that might be advanced equally seriously on behalf of Orwell himself. There is no comparison between the amount that the two writers published, or indeed between the length of time over which both were writing. Wells established an international reputation comparatively early in his career, went on to write some seventy novels and short stories as well as two extremely widely read world histories and a celebrated textbook on biology, met and claimed to have influenced a number of world statesmen and worked productively into his eighties. Orwell, on the other hand, achieved fame only near the end of his life, died at the age of forty-six after several years of debilitating ill-health, had the ear of no politicians or statesmen and wrote only nine major works (two of which he subsequently sought to suppress) and a number of seminal long essays (one of which he sought to suppress). On the face of it, then, any claim that Orwell might have changed the world would appear to be fanciful. But only a little digging would allow a fuller, and different, picture to emerge.
Orwellâs books have earned twice as much as all the writers on Secker and Warburgâs entire list (including Gide, Kafka, Mann and Colette), says Jeffrey Meyers.3 Three of his works â Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four â have been made into popular films. Much of Orwellâs enduring reputation was the consequence of his anti-totalitarian, and specifically anti-Stalinist, polemics. When he originally took this stance it was by no means popular or expedient. From the Spanish Civil War onwards, Orwell had difficulty getting some of his more partisan writing published. Animal Farm was a case in point: because the book was so clearly aimed at Stalin and his regime, and because until 1945 the USSR was such an important ally in the war against Hitler, it was difficult to rouse publishersâ interest on either side of the Atlantic. When the Western allies broke with their former brothers-in-arms, this graphic fable of Soviet brutality suddenly became very apposite and T. S. Eliotâs earlier judgement regarding its political inappropriateness was turned on its head.4 The publication a few years later of Nineteen Eighty Four could scarcely have been better timed. Nineteen Eighty Four was recently described as âthe canonical textâ of anti-communism, âthe key imaginative manifesto of the Cold Warâ.5 The book, together with Animal Farm, was translated into more than sixty languages, the two selling more than forty million copies between them. Nineteen Eighty Four received the supreme populist accolade, abridgement for the Readersâ Digest. In a survey of university-bound students in Britain and the United States, Nineteen Eighty Four was amongst the most âpersonally significant booksâ.6 In 1983 a Harris Poll discovered that no fewer than 27 per cent of Americans claimed to have read Nineteen Eighty Four â wishful thinking perhaps, but at least indicative of the bookâs reputation with the American public. In the first six months of 1984 itself, 301,000 copies of Nineteen Eighty Four were sold in Britain alone, together with 132,000 copies of Animal Farm. In the USA in the same year the novel was selling 50,000 copies a day. But some twenty years after the passing of that totemic year and twelve years after the end of the Cold War, the centenary of Orwellâs birth brought a number of biographies, a small and generally distinguished cluster of hagiographies,7 new editions of all his major works, television profiles and international conferences. The following year the US National Council of Teachers sponsored a nationwide reading and discussion project on Nineteen Eighty Four.
No doubting, then, the extent of Orwellâs influence on the English-speaking world and the significance of his contribution to Western morale in the Cold War. No doubting either the extent to which his critical stance vis-Ă -vis the Soviet Union was taken out of context: Orwell was trying to save the world for socialism as he understood it, and not for Western capitalism or for right-wing individualism. The enthusiastic adoption of Nineteen Eighty Four by the right-wing John Birch society8 would have infuriated Orwell beyond measure, though his many opponents on the Left might have felt vindicated. Even worse for Orwellâs amour propre perhaps would have been Rupert Murdochâs claim, in a lecture to the Centre for Independent Studies, that, in the struggle between free markets and totalitarianism, it was News International that had kept alive Orwellâs âcrystal spiritâ.9
Orwellâs popularity did not disappear with time, even after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. More than half a century after they were written, Orwellâs books are still much in demand. In fact in 2005 Londonâs Royal Opera House put on a production of Lorin Mazelâs opera Nineteen Eighty Four, whose themes, according to the composer, were âseemingly ever more relevantâ. Why is his social and political thought still so influential? What is the nature of Orwellâs influence? This book constitutes an attempt to address these questions by means of a detailed analysis of Orwellâs social and political thought. Where to begin? The obvious starting point must surely be a consideration of some of the main products of the âOrwell industryâ, the key commentaries on and biographies of Orwell that have emerged since his death. Our focus is on Orwellâs social and political thought, and so we will not be much concerned with the details of his life, except where they bear directly upon his thought. In reviewing some of the key commentaries and biographies, not only will we extract important insights into our subject, but we will introduce the main themes to be explored in the body of this study. The continuing popularity of a writer dismissed by some as simply one of the most martial of the Cold Warriors implies that there must be something more to Orwell than the good fortune of being the right person in the right place at the right time with the right message for the Right.
1
Sir Bernard Crick, Orwellâs first and, according to Julian Symons, definitive biographer, agreed to undertake that task because he wished to acknowledge, to celebrate, Orwellâs success in achieving his goal of making political writing into an art. Sir Bernard would have warmed to the kind of political writing that Orwell wished to make into an art: what Orwell called democratic socialism. Indeed, Crick called Orwell a supreme political writer âboth for what he said and how he said itâ.10 However, the biography shows clearly that Crick was primarily interested in what Orwell had to say rather than in how he said it. Had he chosen, Crick could have concentrated more on Orwellâs works as literature, but his interest was principally biographical and his exploration of Orwellâs life was undertaken to enrich our understanding of his politics. Crick set himself the task of coming as close as he could to understanding Orwell through observing his life closely. Acknowledging the shortcomings, as he saw them, of psychological analysis â ânone of us can enter into another personâs mindâ11 â he set out systematically to gather and corroborate the available evidence. Unlike a number of biographers who followed him, for example Michael Shelden, who left no stone wittingly unturned,12 Crick was not much concerned with what Samuel Johnson called âdomestic privaciesâ, primarily because he had concluded that Orwell had no great secrets to hide and that, anyway, they would not have impacted greatly on what Orwell had to say.13 This strategy seems to amount to fighting with oneâs arm tied behind oneâs back. We cannot know that Orwell had no secrets that might have affected his work without first carefully looking. Abstemiousness can be a virtue when we choose not to include some secrets merely because they are titillating, but it can also turn out to be a vice if we decide not to include some secrets that might have provided a clue to some action or event because they might impugn the integrity of the subject. An a priori decision not even to consider such things, however, can surely only be regarded as a vice in a biographer. Crick was quite clear in his own mind that the most important thing about Orwell was his supreme ability to render the spirit of democratic socialism as art, but he gave more attention to the socialism than the art. Crick has argued that Orwell scholars who see their subject as, for example, a Christian socialist, or as a Trotskyite, are actually finding in Orwell chiefly a reflection of their own political preferences, whereas Crick assures us that as a matter of fact, when all is said and done, Orwell was a plain Tribunite socialist. Quod erat demonstrandum? Even so, we should not give up the attempt to categorise Orwellâs social and political thought as objectively as we can, and in any case I do not believe that Orwell was a Tribunite socialist, and I shall try later to show why. Crickâs main contribution to Orwell scholarship was to provide a carefully crafted portrait of the man, skilfully set within the background of the main events and ideas of his times.
Sir Bernard was by no means the first of Orwellâs biographers. Orwell himself sought to prevent the writing of a biography (an odd thing for a man with no âsecretsâ, a man whose own writing was so patently autobiographical), but he was not successful, for a number appeared. Lionel Trilling included a perceptive chapter on Orwell in his 1955 book The Opposing Self, and he entitled it significantly âGeorge Orwell and the Politics of Truthâ.14 Orwell, like Cobbett, to whom he is often compared, did not dream of new kinds of men but contented himself with âthe old kindâ of man, and passionately wanted for these men âfreedom, bacon and proper workâ. Trilling declared that Orwell was what he wrote: he acted out his beliefs in the world and so could be considered, in short, a virtuous man. This theme of virtue became a leitmotiv for many who wrote about Orwell, including Crick himself; we shall return to it. For Trilling, Orwellâs virtue as a writer lay in his not being a genius, in his âfronting the world with nothing else than [his] simple, direct, undeceived intelligenceâ. Although this analysis is consistent with Trillingâs picture of the man and the writer being one and the same, it is not of itself convincing. In 1989 a personal, annotated copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, which Orwell had sent to an old flame, Brenda Salkeld, came to light. Michael Shelden read the annotations with care and his conclusions throw a different light on the relationship between the man and his work. âIt is the moment in Orwellâs career when we can see the split. As Eric Blair he is saying âGeorge Orwell said this, but I as Eric Blair felt this.â He had seized upon a way of creating himself as Orwell, of hiding Blair almost perfectly for the rest of his life.â15 Eventually âOrwellâ came to represent what Rodden called a âpersona of such style and simplicity . . . the Common Man arguing plain Common Senseâ.16 From 1930 onwards, then, Blair (Orwell-the-man) had begun to create a fictional character, Orwell-the-writer, a device which, as Raymond Williams put it, enabled him to get inside the experiences he was writing about. âOrwellâ was to remain Orwellâs finest literary achievement, one that as it blossomed would transform his prose style and allow his politics to develop. (I had the pleasure of spending a weekend in the house of Orwellâs nephew Henry Dakin some years ago. It was as clear as could be that the George Orwell I knew from his writings and the Eric Blair he knew as an uncle were quite different men. My man was Trillingâs âOrwell of the undeceived intelligenceâ, a literary contrivance that enabled its creator to champion the values of ordinary people.) In response to Trilling, then, to say that Orwell was what he wrote, whilst not entirely wrong, is to miss a trick. Nevertheless, Trillingâs picture of Orwell as common-sensible, forthright, virtuous and truthful has been influential.
In 1961 Richard Rees, formerly editor of The Adelphi for whom Orwell frequently wrote, and a long-time friend, wrote a biography poignantly entitled George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory.17 Rees also wrote a biography of Simone Weil, for whom much the same title would have been appropriate, and he argued about Orwell, as he would about Weil, that a concern for justice and an understanding of the balance of society made him ready to add his weight to the lighter scale, to change sides. Rees offered as an example Orwellâs championing of the industrial working-class, especially the unemployed, but he could have chosen Orwellâs joining the Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista (POUM) militia when fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Although he scarcely knew enough about the situation for this to have been an entirely conscious decision, there seems to have been something quite natural about his siding with the party that would be treacherously attacked by its former allies and then generally demonised. As we shall see, when Orwell returned to Britain he declared that his championing of POUMâs cause, which earned him the distrust and enmity of a number of former friends, was prompted not so much by the belief that POUM was right as that it was unfairly treated. This fire for justice was fanned by a general disregard for his personal safety. Orwellâs attitude towards his own health seems to represent a disdain for the sensible and comfortable in favour of the dangerous and uncomfortable in pursuit of his mission. His decision to live on Jura towards the end of his life is a specific example. Here was a man who was tubercular and who had been told that he needed easy access to a good hospital and the benefit of a dry climate, so he made for one of the most inaccessible parts of the Inner Hebrides, to live in what Rees described as âthe most uninhabitable house in the British Islesâ.18 Orwell wrote to his friends in London that the journey was quite easy really, though they would have to walk the last eight soggy miles. But he completed Nineteen Eighty Four there.
Rees found it difficult to account for Orwellâs fame. As we have seen, he was hardly prolific. His lack of an informed knowledge of philosophical and psychological issues limited the scope of his writing; and his style, Rees suggested, was nothing like as brilliant as Joyceâs. For Rees, then, Orwellâs cult status could be explained only by his personal appeal, âthe man he wasâ. Plausible though...