December 13, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  George Orwell is one of the most widely read English-language authors, and has certainly been one of the most quoted ones for more than a half-century. There is no need to mention the many concepts associated with him: “Newspeak,” “thought police,” “Orwellian” and so on. At the same time, the man who strove, as he himself said, to turn political writing into an art and who declared that everything he wrote after 1936 (subsequent to his participation in the Spanish Civil War, against fascist forces) was written against totalitarianism and in favor of democratic socialism, continues to be perceived, ultimately, as a storyteller.

In contrast to the approach of the vast body of writing that exists about Orwell, and about his novel “1984” in particular, I will argue here, in brief, that his output needs to be seen as belonging to the realm of of political theory. In other words, Orwell is (also) a political theoretician (in the conventional sense of the term: a person who espouses a theory about the social reality). Moreover, and especially in his 1949 dystopic novel, he contributed significantly to the understanding of the dynamics of modern politics and in particular of the phenomenon the Roman historian Tacitus called the “secrets of governing” (arcana imperii). “Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation,” Orwell wrote.

Any consideration of Orwell’s writing cannot ignore the fact that he chose the literary genre as the most congenial for giving expression to his views. Writing was for him a tool for changing social reality, and the literature he wrote was political. In fact, it often seems as though the narrative interferes with his attempt to set forth his views about modern capitalism (and about democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other). Indeed, when he encountered difficulties in plot construction, he was known to deal with them by devious literary means, so as to retain his political point.

A vivid example of this is his insertion of a completely theoretical text running to dozens of pages in “1984,” by means of a literary stratagem of introducing a fictitious book-within-a-book. The text, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” is manifestly a sociopolitical analysis of trends in modern industrial society and a historic description of the phenomenon called “government.” Some people advised him to remove the “book” from the book. Happily for us, he ignored them.

‘It depends on you’

Orwell did not in any systematic way read the classic works of political thought and theory (as opposed to contemporaneous political writing, about which he was extremely knowledgeable), and that may help us understand why he chose the literary genre rather than focusing on philosophy or political science. In his works he gave expression to, and provided an explanation (theoretical) for, developments in modern society. Shortly before his death, in 1950, he made it unequivocally clear that the appalling picture of the future starkly depicted in “1984” was not some imaginative exercise for him. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you,” he asserted toward the end of his life. In his view, the dystopia had already begun to materialize.

What is the “it” he warned against? He is referring to the fact that in the struggle to impose limits on political power, society is at a disadvantage. Orwell went a few steps further, developing the analysis of José Ortega y Gasset, who in his book “The Revolt of the Masses” (1932), wrote, “This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the state… The result of this tendency will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine.” In “1984,” Orwell showed how that scenario could be realized in everyday life.

His writing from the 1930s onward displays a persistent effort to identify the socioeconomic forces that were pushing toward the emergence of a society whose features resemble those he would portray in “1984” and to warn against them. For this reason, Orwell’s final book was a very frightening one. He was out to scare his readers, because he wanted to make them think about the direction in which modern society was being led. “Power is not a means, it is an end,” he wrote at the end of “1984.”

Then, as now, the public had trouble conceiving of the fact that there are sociopolitical elements whose goal is to preserve a class society. In other words, precisely in an era in which technology is creating great abundance, unparalleled in human history, it is scarcity that rules. (“In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life,” Orwell wrote.)

In his view, this state of affairs was not the result of a mistake, a “hidden hand” or a government of fools; it was a deliberate policy advanced by an exploitative elite. And it isn’t by accident that the masses don’t grasp what is happening: “In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” In other words, there are forces whose vested interest is to preserve “high” and “low.” The rationale for this was explained as early as the 17th century by the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu in his “Political Testament”: “All students of politics agree that when the common people are too well off, it is impossible to keep them peaceable… It would not be sound to relieve them of all taxation and similar charges, since in such a case they would lose the mark of their subjection and consequently the awareness of their station.”

Orwell died young, aged 46 – younger than the age at which many thinkers in the realms of humanities and social sciences have written their magnum opus. From this point of view, it’s hard to imagine how our world would look if Niccolo Machiavelli (who died at 58), Karl Marx (at 64), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (66), Immanuel Kant (79) or Thomas Hobbes (91) had died when they were still in their forties. By the same token, it’s tempting to imagine how our world of ideas would look if Orwell had lived another 40 years.

A survey of his development as a thinker, beginning from his period of service in the Imperial Police in Burma (when he was in his 20s), shows one thing clearly: The issues that troubled Orwell beginning in the 1930s won a richer and more complete theoretical expression in “1984.” Indeed, when we consider the stage his intellectual progress had reached in the autumn of his years, we find new directions, not yet fully matured, in his analysis of modern politics.

Mechanism of power

What I’ve written so far is meant to justify my reading of “1984” as political theory, and not just as a novel. The general plotline is well known and needs no elaboration. I will only mention that the book covers a short period in the life of Winston Smith, a citizen of Oceania (a region congruent with much of today’s Western world), which is under tight totalitarian rule as part of a one-party system and where life plays out under the watchful eye of “Big Brother.”

Over the years, what has drawn the most attention in the book – and is also considered Orwell’s legacy – is the description of the totalistic means of supervision and control that exist in Oceania, and in particular the “telescreen” that monitors people nonstop and identifies “deviations” from the government’s sadistic path. And, of course, the notion of the media as serving political interests. (“Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie,” Orwell wrote). In the wake of the technological and political developments of recent decades, references to him are only increasing, but often those references miss the crux of the book: not the mechanism of power, but the motif that generates it.