The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984
Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12419937 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew Benjamin Cole (0000-0001-7568-9146, Harvard University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 267-278 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-04 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Research Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1065-9129 • E-ISSN: 1938-274X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/10659129221083286 |
| OpenAlex | W4225661619 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
Though 1984 is often praised for its prescience, critics in Orwell’s time and ours have also condemned its pessimism. Orwell’s despair, the argument goes, undermines the power of his warning, representing a retreat from politics, a betrayal of socialism, and a repudiation of utopianism. This article draws on the text of 1984 and Orwell’s contemporaneous writings to reassess his thinking on power, socialism, and utopia and to reconsider 1984’s appeal to the political imagination. Characterizing Orwell’s late political sensibility as one of desperate radicalism, the article demonstrates that Orwell remained both a socialist and a steward of the utopian imagination and that he feared totalitarianism because it threatened to expunge utopian ideals from historical consciousness. 1984 depicts a world in which this effort has nearly succeeded, rendering Orwell’s present as a moment of choice between an egalitarian future and a future of permanent hierarchy
Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Communism · Democracy · Dystopia · Intelligentsia · Literature · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Socialism · Sociology · State socialism · Utopia · Utopian socialism · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Dystopia and the End of Politics
ONE. The Liberalism of Fear
The Practice of Socialist Internationalism
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
The Last Utopians
Heretics and Renegades
The Future as Nightmare
Archaeologies of the future
The Lion and the Unicorn, Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics
The Adequacy of the Canon
Bleak dreams, not nightmares
Picture Imperfect
George Orwell
Of Islands and Trenches
In Other Worlds-SF and the Human Imagination
The Road to 1984
Mixed feelings
| Highly cited | No |
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