_Orwell's Faded Lion_ traces the history of Britain from the end of the Second World War, during the darkest days of which George Orwell wrote _The Lion and the Unicorn_, calling for a British revolution, to the present. The book confronts the actual direction taken by British society against the background of the high hopes of the generation that survived the war. The book also considers Britain alongside its European neighbours, drawing upon personal experiences of living and travelling widely (...) in Europe, as well as experience of left-wing party politics and of the Northern Ireland situation in the 1980s. (shrink)

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was a British essayist, journalist, and novelist. Orwell is most famous for his dystopian works of fiction, but many of his essays and other books have remained popular as well. His body of work provides one of the twentieth century’s most trenchant and widely recognized critiques of totalitarianism. This article focuses on philosophical topics and questions in political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, and aesthetics that Orwell (...) dealt with in his writing. Continue reading Orwell, George →. (shrink)

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its (...) agential system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

O texto apresenta a apropriação feita pela extrema-direita brasileira ao redor da obra de George Orweel, em especial, de '1984' e 'Animal Farm'. Argumentamos que a adjudicação 'conservadora' é inadequada para tal apropriação. Os intelectuais e editoriais implicados na circulação atual de Orwell nas redes bolsonaristas permite ver como clássicos do pensamento conservador ocidental são aqui canonizados em chave, mais que conservadora, reacionária. Além disso, o duelo de distopias empunhados pelos ideólogos da extrema-direita dá também acesso a uma indústria (...) cultural, na qual um sem-fim de produtos culturais são vendidos para forjar e cativar uma plateia potencial reacionária. (shrink)

Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's novel Brave New World have often been thought prophetic commentaries on economic, political, and social matters. I argue, with particular reference to the supposed applicability of these novels to issues of technology and privacy, that the novels are best understood as literary works of art, rather than as social science or commentary, and that when so viewed Orwell's novel in particular reflects a dissatisfaction with everyday life and a nostalgia for Romantic values.

This article discusses George Orwell’s attitude to Zionism and the Palestine question, a controversial and emotional subject in left-wing circles in his time and since. There have been a number of studies on Orwell’s attitude to Jews and anti-Semitism and some of these have touched upon Orwell’s approach to Zionism. However, his stance on the Palestine question specifically deserves further exposition. This is so, not least because on this subject too Orwell’s views—largely anti-Zionist—differed from the prevailing, (...) passionate beliefs of most left-wing intellectuals of his time, including some of his closest friends and political allies. Furthermore, Orwell’s views were expressed at a time when the Palestine conflict peaked during the last decade of the British Mandate with results which resound to this day. (shrink)

Most interpretations of Orwell's political thought have concentrated on his critique of the ideology of totalitari-anism, especially as this ideology manifested itself in the 1930's in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Nazi Germany under Hitler.2 These interpretations have provided valuable insights into Orwell's own perceptions of the dangers of cen-tralized state tyranny. However, they suffer from two weak-nesses connected with the concept of totalitarianism. First, the concept of totalitarianism as it has been developed in aca-demic political (...) science has been related specifically to the Soviet and Nazi experiences, and, thus, does not adequately account for other types of tyrannical regimes.3 Second, the application of the totalitarian model to the examination of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four tends to emphasize the pro-phetic aspects of the novel and to diminish its character as an investigation of contemporary political life.4 Instead of using the normal rubric of totalitarianism, I shall examine Orwell's political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four in terms of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy, a con-cept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. (shrink)

P McKenzie; George Orwell, ‘Seeing’ and ‘Saying’: a reply to Francis Dunlop, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 255–264.

George Orwell perceived the possibility of a postwar united Europe, based on regional integration along social-democratic lines, as a means of survival in a world struggle rather than as a preamble to peace. This was the logical conclusion of his understanding of political realism: his endorsement of its assumption that violence is endemic to social life and that the force-wielding sovereign cannot be done away with. Yet Orwell also had reservations about realism. He argued that a purely realist (...) analysis that was not normatively connected to any values outside itself would go astray because analysts would be unable to factor in their own positions and would thus lose the analytic distance from their objects of study. Orwell was thus as suspicious of a politics managed by experts as of the utopian anticipation of a violence-free world. His world-view, rooted in realist necessity while leaving room for the values of democracy and socialism, offered a vision of a postwar united Europe that fostered t... (shrink)

In this article Alan Gewirth's theory of social ethics is applied to the picture of life presented in Orwell's novel, 1984, in such a way as to justify one's sense of repulsive evil therein. It is the systematic denial of human rights to freedom and well-being that is fundamentally immoral and destructive of the capacity of people to function as prospective purposive agents. This denial of what Gewirth terms additive, nonsubtractive, and basic goods violates both privacy and personal autonomy, (...) reducing man to a sub-human level. (shrink)

Pourquoi associer les noms de Russell, Orwell et Chomsky? Quelles parentés y a-t-il entre leurs pensées mais aussi entre leurs engagements militants respectifs? Quel genre de lumières pouvons-nous espérer d’eux sur le thème « Rationalité, vérité et démocratie »? Il est largement admis que les tyrannies s’appuient sur le mensonge et les préjugés, et que la démocratie suppose l’existence d’un espace public des raisons où s’affrontent pacifiquement des citoyens éclairés. Mais il est largement admis aussi que le savoir confère (...) habituellement à celui qui le possède une supériorité et une autorité sur celui qui ne le possède pas. Le relativisme, nous dit-on, garantit le droit des dominés et des minorités à défendre leur propre vision du monde. Certes, il peut arriver qu’il leur offre temporairement une protection efficace. Mais, fondamentalement, il est contradictoire avec tout projet d’émancipation car il dépossède les dominés des armes de la critique. (shrink)

The language of dys-topia, both oral and written, is forced to be an upturned language, a kako-logos, even a no-language when is landing in Orwell’s Oceana : as well as the utopia, in the sense of eu-topia, capsizes in dys-topia the dystopia language capsizes in dys-language. Precisely, the Newspeak of Orwell, built by manipulating the language and by shorting drastically the dictionary, aims to prevent the subjects from communicating with each other and even from thinking in order to (...) make the Big Brother regime even more totalitarian. Similarly, to forbid any kind of literature allows the industrial producing system leaded by the Governor Mustafà Mond of Huxley and by the Government faceless of Bradbury to rule autocratically over a mass society harmonized, tidied, stabilized, and alienated through the use of latest technology for inducing it obsessively and deceitfully towards a growing consumerism. (shrink)

Embodied approach to cognition has taken roots in cognitive studies with developments in diverse fields such as robotics, artificial life and cognitive linguistics. Taking cue from the metaphor of a Watt governor, this approach stresses on the coupling between the organism and the environment and the continuous nature of the cognitive processes. This results in questioning the viability of computational–representational understanding of mind as a comprehensive theory of cognition. The paper, after giving an overview of embodied approach based on some (...) examples from conceptual metaphor theory, looks into a special case of Orwell’s problem in cognitive science. The problem is that there is so much evidence for embodiment to be true, yet there is little understanding of the same. I shall try to solve this problem by pointing out that it is our inveterate habits of perceiving ourselves that makes the embodied approach appear implausible. Studies on free will as well as the importance of the unconscious in overall cognitive processing raise challenging questions on our self-conception. A revision in the self-conception in the light of these findings will pave the way for a better appreciation of the embodied approach to cognition. (shrink)

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

Neither novel should be read as predictions, the accuracy of which can be used to judge them. Rather, both attempt to portray what humanity could conceivably become. The authenticity of this conceivability is a necessary condition of the power of both works to raise central philosophical questions about the human condition. What is ethically wrong with control? How far can Man go in recreating himself? In what sense are these worlds anti-utopian? Are they really possible worlds? How credible are they (...) as political systems? In what ways do the different systems depict the end of humanity? What logical and moral objections could be made against their fictional apologists? (shrink)

Este trabalho estabelece um diálogo entre o discurso filosófico e literário. Os autores que fundamentam esta tentativa são John Dewey e George Orwell. Pensamento Reflexivo e Comunicação são os conceitos aqui empregados. A assim chamada novilíngua tem, na obra de Orwell, a pretensão de restringir o próprio pensamento individual manipulando o processo social da comunicação. Discutir sobre a possibilidade de uma manipulação em massa da mentalidade conduz a um exame crítico das noções presentes no pensamento deweyano sobre educação.

The hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defends a seemingly modest claim: "There was truth and there was untruth."1 It may be incoherent to deny this, but, as the novel shows, those who set no store in truth will not be browbeaten by contradictions. Orwell's last novel reflects his conviction that a commitment to "objective truth" was fast disappearing from the world—a prospect that troubled him more than bombs.2 Truth meant little in this "age of lies" and was (...) neither the aim nor horizon of intellectual debate (CW, 17, p. 11). Standards of rationality were opportunistically enlisted and jettisoned in the service of particular ends. Politics, he concluded, was "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and .. (shrink)

“Orwell was only in the loosest sense a political thinker,” or so Glenn Burgess begins this new study of the man and his work. And he quickly adds that “still less was he a political theorist or po...

The core of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is the debate between Winston Smith and O’Brien in the cells of the Ministry of Love. It is natural to read this debate as a debate between a realist and an anti-realist. I offer a few representative passages from the book that demonstrate, I believe, that if this is not the only possible way to understand the debate, it is one very natural way.RésuméLe coeur de la nouvelle de George Orwell, 1984, (...) est le débat entre Winston Smith et O’Brien dans les cellules du Ministère de l’Amour. Il est naturel de lire ce débat comme un débat entre un réaliste et un anti-réaliste. Je présente quelques passages représentatifs du livre qui démontrent, je crois, que si ce n’est pas la seule manière possible de comprendre le débat, c’est une manière très naturelle de le faire. (shrink)

John Rodden is the author of an important study of Orwell that was published in 1989 and titled The Politics of Literary Reputation. That study integrated modes of analysis drawn from literary stud...

Le coeur de la nouvelle de George Orwell, 1984, est le débat entre Winston Smith et O’Brien dans les cellules du Ministère de l’Amour. Il est naturel de lire ce débat comme un débat entre un réaliste (concernant la nature de la vérité) et un anti-réaliste. Je présente quelques passages représentatifs du livre qui démontrent, je crois, que si ce n’est pas la seule manière possible de comprendre le débat, c’est une manière très naturelle de le faire.

This paper first considers and rebuts George Orwell's case against international sport. He argues both from general principles and specific examples that international sporting contests lead to org...