Abstract

George Orwell wrote to Roger Senhouse upon completion of 1984 that the work was designed in part “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.” The implications for social and political philosophy have furnished a generation of readers with frightening realizations. I will attempt in what follows to show that the implications for epistemology and metaphysics are equally central to the book’s message, and equally discomfitting to philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. The book connects totalitarianism with the entire British empiricist tradition from George Berkeley to A. J. Ayer, primarily by disclosing the totalitarian implications of Berkeley’s philosophy. The result is a vision of empiricism as the intellectual foundation for totalitarianism.