George Orwell | 20th Century Lives - Explaining History Podcast

1. Who He Was and Why He Matters

George Orwell (1903–1950) is the most widely read political writer in the English language, and also one of the most misused. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm have been deployed by the right as anti-communist parables, by the left as warnings about all authoritarian power, and by the centre as general-purpose critiques of propaganda — often simultaneously and in ways Orwell would have contested. The real Orwell — a democratic socialist who hated imperialism, distrusted the left intelligentsia, opposed Stalinist apologetics, and spent his life trying to write plainly about difficult things — is rather more complicated and rather more interesting than his posthumous reputation.

He matters because the quality of his attention was exceptional. His essays on the English class system, on imperial violence, on political language, and on the relationship between aesthetics and politics remain models of a kind of political writing that is honest about its own contradictions rather than resolving them rhetorically.

2. The Thought and Work

Imperialism and the Formation of a Dissenter

Orwell served as an imperial policeman in Burma from 1922 to 1927 — the formative experience of his political life. His essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) is one of the most honest accounts ever written of what imperial power does to the people who exercise it: ‘I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.’ His novel Burmese Days (1934) is a devastating account of the moral degradation of colonial society. This was not the romantic anti-imperialism of someone who had never been there.

The Spanish Civil War

Homage to Catalonia (1938) is both Orwell’s finest work and the pivot of his political development. He went to Spain to fight fascism and found himself caught in the Communist Party’s suppression of the independent left — the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), with whom he was fighting, were accused of Trotskyist conspiracy and crushed by Soviet-backed forces. The experience gave him a direct, personal knowledge of Stalinist violence and dishonesty at a moment when most Western leftists were still defending the Soviet Union as the only bulwark against fascism.

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Orwell’s most precise statement of his conviction that political dishonesty and linguistic deterioration were connected: ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.’ His rules for clear writing — use short words, use active verbs, avoid Latin derivatives, never use a long word where a short one will do — were also political prescriptions: clarity was democratic, obscurity served power.

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Animal Farm (1945) was a satire of the Russian Revolution and its Stalinist betrayal, written at a moment when it was almost impossible to get published (several publishers rejected it for political reasons). Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) extrapolated the logic of totalitarianism into a future England: doublethink, newspeak, the memory hole, the two minutes hate, Big Brother. Written while Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, it was not a prediction but a warning — and explicitly, as he said, about totalitarian tendencies that existed in English society as much as in the USSR.

3. The Context

Eric Arthur Blair — he adopted the pen name George Orwell — was born in Bengal into the lower-upper-middle class, educated at Eton on a scholarship, and trained from birth in the rituals of a class he could not afford to maintain. His entire career was an attempt to escape that formation while also understanding it from the inside. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is both a superb documentary account of working-class life in the north of England during the Depression and an act of self-interrogation about the class assumptions that documentary itself carries.

4. The Contradictions and Limits

Orwell’s journalism and essays contain significant quantities of casual misogyny and homophobia that sit uneasily with his politics of clarity and decency. His list — provided to the Information Research Department, a British government anti-communist propaganda unit, shortly before his death — naming individuals he considered crypto-communist or fellow-travellers has generated sustained controversy. The list included people named partly on the basis of their being ‘Jewish,’ ‘coloured,’ or homosexual — compromising his reputation as an opponent of prejudice.

His anti-communism was entirely principled but also at times indiscriminate. His hostility to the Soviet Union was justified; his extension of that hostility to the broader left intelligentsia sometimes became a kind of contrarianism that served conservative purposes he did not intend.

5. The Legacy and Debate

Orwell’s posthumous reputation is one of the great case studies in the politics of intellectual legacy. The right has consistently claimed him as a Cold War anti-communist; the left has claimed his democratic socialism; liberals have claimed his defence of individual liberty; conservatives have claimed his patriotism. The real Orwell — who wrote that ‘every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’ — is not easily assimilated to any of these claims.

The quality of his prose — direct, concrete, anti-rhetorical — is inseparable from his politics. His conviction that you could not think clearly in bad prose and could not govern honestly in bureaucratic language is one of the most important arguments about the relationship between style and politics that the 20th century produced.