orwell foundation politics and the english language

We may criticize the end product of his socialism, but it would be difficult to criticize the integrity of the route he took to get there and impossible to criticize the vitality and power with which he expressed his convictions. Indeed, the hard-bitten clairvoyance with which he viewed the world in his later novels was not a departure from but, rather, a development out of the earlier arguments.

Nor can we simply lump Orwell in with the naivete of British socialism between the wars, since naive is an adjective that could never be applied to him. Such a fact can be creatively marginalized, but it always remains. But there is always the rather embarrassing issue that Orwell was an outspoken socialist throughout his entire adult life. The general conservative take on Orwell is that he is a valuable, if limited, prophet, having offered up a startlingly shrewd exposure of Stalin’s maniac state in Animal Farm (the publication of which was prevented until 1946 so as not to offend Britain’s wartime alliance with Russia) and having suggested the darkness of a future haunted by totalitarian governance in 1984 (published in 1949 on the eve of Orwell’s death). In his relentless defense of the economically and politically oppressed (and he sees not only people but language itself threatened), he has provided us with the last century’s salient model for intellectual honesty. His is a voice that, if we listen closely, has much to teach us about the urgency of speaking the truth and the necessity of devotion to justice in a world gone awry. But the popularity of these novels has tended to mask the rich variety and clarity of Orwell’s other writings, especially the journalism and essays wherein he builds his case for a politics of conscience, a strange brand of socialism that criticized communist deceit just as readily as capitalist malaise and that had, at its center, a defense of the integrity of language. There is enduring interest in his two antitotalitarian novels, Animal Farm and 1984, which together set forth a sort of intellectual prophetic ground for the Cold War that Orwell only just glimpsed, dying as he did in 1950 of tuberculosis. No writer of the twentieth century has touched popular political sensibilities with as broad an effect as George Orwell.

Orwell foundation politics and the english language