David Dwan - Liberty, Equality, and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals

George Orwell is watching you and youre watching him. Britain pays its respects in the form of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Lecture, and, more recently, Orwell Daywhich in its inaugural year in 2013 generated an

The same thought-experiment is, of course, regularly repeated in the British Houses of Parliament. Countless proposalsfrom the Special Powers Act of 1972 (the embodiment of .

Orwell-worship in Britain and America has inevitably triggered a sizable counter-movement. Since the death of Orwell in 1950, a long line of criticsfrom Isaac Deutscher to Will Selfhas queried his . He continues to be taken to taskas a snitch, as a reactionary, and as an intellectual mediocritybut ultimately, the iconoclasts and the idolaters seem to be locked into a lovers quarrel, each blast and counter-blast merely entrenching the thin moustachioed face in the imagination of the next generation.

So Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times, yet, partly because of this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque. It is a cliche about a cliche to suggest that the term Orwellian means very littlethough its very vagueness heightens its general . How these different views can be squared is not entirely straightforward, yet given Orwells centrality to our civic culture, the interpretative task remains an important one. This book tries to account for Orwells apparent inconsistencies by exploring the broader moral conflict at the centre of his work. I focus in particular on the ways in which the conflict plays itself out in Orwells views on justice and its constituent ends. His various ideological leaps and pivots, I shall argue, are both interesting and instructive, because they highlight the extreme difficulty of getting justice right. Like many, I regard Orwell as a great political educator, but less for the solutions he proffered than for the problems he embodied and the questions he allows us to ask.

Of course, several fine treatments of Orwells politics exist, but this study aims to do two distinctive things: a) to test the coherence and abiding value of his political opinions by subjecting them to a more philosophically oriented analysis than they have so far received, and b) to make sense of his views by situating them within wider .

Orwell would probably have disapproved. The first aim flies in the face of his own strictures about philosophy (Ill say more on this in a moment). The second objective chafes against his sense of himself as a maverick. He was a man who was hostile to smelly orthodoxies and preferred to do all of his own thinking for himself. The lines he cited from a nineteenth-century evangelical hymn say much about his aspirations to independence:

Dare to be a Daniel,

Dare to stand alone;

Dare to have a purpose firm,

Dare to .

Orwell dared to be a Daniel and inspired others to dare the same. But the fact that he advertised his autonomy through borrowed lineswritten by the American Philip Bliss, who drew in turn on a broader tradition of religious dissentmay say something about its ambiguous nature. Orwells desire to stand alone has often been taken at face value and it has fostered a strangely decontextualized view of his . This makes his views more original than they are, but it also renders them less intelligible and often less controversial than they might otherwise be. So this book places Orwell alongside some of his contemporariesR. H. Tawney (one of the few socialists he professed to like), Professor Harold Laski (with whom he enjoyed a much testier relationship), the philosopher and public intellectual Bertrand Russell (an under-appreciated influence), as well as Wells, Shaw, and the Auden gangconsidering these voices, often in some detail, as a foil and frame for his work. The design of the book is to show how Orwells views emerged as part of a shared conversation about the nature of justice and of the good (it says a lot about Orwells moralized vision of politics that these ends often amounted to the same thing).