George Orwell

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, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, 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.
Orwell did not receive academic training in philosophy, but his writing repeatedly
focuses on philosophical topics and questions in political philosophy, epistemology,
philosophy of language, ethics, and aesthetics. Some of Orwell’s most notable
philosophical contributions include his discussions of nationalism, totalitarianism,
socialism, propaganda, language, class status, work, poverty, imperialism, truth,
history, and literature.

Orwell’s writings map onto his intellectual journey. His earlier writings focus on
poverty, work, and money, among other themes. Orwell examines poverty and work
not only from an economic perspective, but also socially, politically, and
existentially, and he rejects moralistic and individualistic accounts of poverty in
favor of systemic explanations. In so doing, he provides the groundwork for his later
championing of socialism.

Orwell’s experiences in the 1930s, including reporting on the living conditions of the
poor and working class in Northern England as well as fighting as a volunteer soldier
in the Spanish Civil War, further crystalized Orwell’s political and philosophical
outlook. This led him to write in 1946 that, “Every line of serious work I have written
since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic
Socialism” (“Why I Write”).

For Orwell, totalitarianism is a political order focused on power and control. Much
of Orwell’s effectiveness in writing against totalitarianism stems from his recognition
of the epistemic and linguistic dimensions of totalitarianism. This is exemplified by
Winston Smith’s claim as the protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Here
Orwell uses, as he often does, a particular claim to convey a broader message.
Freedom (a political state) rests on the ability to retain the true belief that two plus
two makes four (an epistemic state) and the ability to communicate that truth to
others (via a linguistic act).
Orwell also argues that political power is dependent upon thought and language.
This is why the totalitarian, who seeks complete power, requires control over thought
and language. In this way, Orwell’s writing can be viewed as philosophically ahead
of its time for the way it brings together political philosophy, epistemology, and
philosophy of language.

Eric Arthur Blair was born on June 25, 1903 in India. His English father worked as
a member of the British specialized services in colonial India, where he oversaw local
opium production for export to China. When Blair was less than a year old, his
mother, of English and French descent, returned to England with him and his older
sister. He saw relatively little of his father until he was eight years old.

Blair described his family as part of England’s “lower-upper-middle class.” Blair had
a high degree of class consciousness, which became a common theme in his work
and a central concern in his autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys”
(facetiously titled) about his time at the English preparatory school St. Cyprian’s,
which he attended from ages eight to thirteen on a merit-based scholarship. After
graduating from St. Cyprian’s, from ages thirteen to eighteen Orwell attended the
prestigious English public school, Eton, also on a merit-based scholarship.

After graduating from Eton, where he had not been a particularly successful student,
Blair decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the specialized services of
the British Empire rather than pursue higher education. Blair was stationed in
Burma (now Myanmar) where his mother had been raised. He spent five unhappy
years with the Imperial Police in Burma (1922-1927) before leaving the position to
return to England in hopes of becoming a writer.

Partly out of need and partly out of desire, Blair spent several years living in or near
poverty both in Paris and London. His experiences formed the basis for his first
book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which was published in 1933. Blair published
the book under the pen name George Orwell, which became the moniker he would
use for his published writings for the rest of his life.
Orwell’s writing was often inspired by personal experience. He used his experiences
working for imperial Britain in Burma as the foundation for his second
book, Burmese Days, first published in 1934, and his frequently anthologized essays,
“A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” first published in 1931 and 1936
respectively.
He drew on his experiences as a hop picker and schoolteacher in his third novel, A
Clergyman’s Daughter, first published in 1935. His next novel, Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, published in 1936, featured a leading character who had given up a middle-
class job for the subsistence pay of a book seller and the chance to try to make it as a
writer. At the end of the novel, the protagonist gets married and returns to his old
middle-class job. Orwell wrote this book while he himself was working as a book
seller who would soon be married.
The years 1936-1937 included several major events for Orwell, which would
influence his writing for the rest of his life. Orwell’s publisher, the socialist Victor
Gollancz, suggested that Orwell spend time in the industrial north of England in
order to gather experience about the conditions there for journalistic writing. Orwell
did so during the winter of 1936. Those experiences formed the foundation for his
1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier. The first half of Wigan Pier reported on the poor
working conditions and poverty that Orwell witnessed. The second half focused on
the need for socialism and the reasons why Orwell thought the British left
intelligentsia had failed in convincing the poor and working class of the need for
socialism. Gollancz published Wigan Pier as part of his Left Book Club, which
provided Wigan Pier with a larger platform and better sales than any of his previous
books.
In June 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, an Oxford graduate with a
degree in English who had worked various jobs including those of teacher and
secretary. Shortly thereafter, Orwell became a volunteer soldier fighting on behalf of
the left-leaning Spanish Republicans against Francisco Franco and the Nationalist
right in the Spanish Civil War. His wife joined him in Spain later. Orwell’s
experiences in Spain further entrenched his shift towards overtly political writing.
He experienced first-hand the infighting between various factions opposed to Franco
on the political left. He also witnessed the control that the Soviet Communists sought
to exercise over both the war, and perhaps more importantly, the narratives told
about the war.

Orwell fought with the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia that
was later maligned by Soviet propaganda. The Soviets leveled a range of accusations
against the militia, including that its members were Trotskyists and spies for the
other side. As a result, Spain became an unsafe place for him and Eileen. They
escaped Spain by train to France in the summer of 1937. Orwell later wrote about his
experiences in the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938.
While Wigan Pier had signaled the shift to an abiding focus on politics and political
ideas in Orwell’s writing, similarly, Homage to Catalonia signaled the shift to an
abiding focus on epistemology and language in his work. Orwell’s time in Spain
helped him understand how language shapes beliefs and how beliefs, in turn, shape
the contours of power. Thus, Homage to Catalonia does not mark a mere epistemic
and linguistic turn in Orwell’s thinking. It also marks a significant development in
Orwell’s views about the complex relationship between language, thought, and
power.
Orwell’s experiences in Spain also further cemented his anti-Communism and his
role as a critic of the left operating within the left. After a period of ill health upon
returning from Spain due to his weak lungs from having been shot in his throat
during battle, Orwell took on a grueling pace of literary production,
publishing Coming Up for Air in 1939, Inside the Whale and Other Essays in 1940, and
his lengthy essay on British Socialism, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the
English Genius” in 1941, as well as many other essays and reviews.
Orwell would have liked to have served in the military during the Second World War,
but his ill health prevented him from doing so. Instead, between 1941-1943 he
worked for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). His job was meant, in theory,
to aid Britain’s war efforts. Orwell was tasked with creating and delivering radio
content to listeners on the Indian subcontinent in hopes of creating support for
Britain and the Allied Powers. There were, however, relatively few listeners, and
Orwell came to consider the job a waste of his time. Nevertheless, his experiences of
bureaucracy and censorship at the BBC would later serve as one of the inspirations
for the “Ministry of Truth,” which played a prominent role in the plot of Nineteen
Eighty-Four (Sheldon 1991, 380-381).
Orwell’s final years were a series of highs and lows. After leaving the BBC, Orwell
was hired as the literary editor at the democratic socialist magazine, the Tribune. As
part of his duties, he wrote a regular column titled “As I Please.” He and Eileen, who
herself was working for the BBC, adopted a baby boy named Richard in 1944. Shortly
before they adopted Richard, Orwell had finished work on what was to be his
breakthrough work, Animal Farm. Orwell originally had trouble finding someone to
publish Animal Farm due to its anti-Communist message and publishers’ desires not
to undermine Britain’s war effort, given that the United Kingdom was allied with the
USSR against Nazi Germany at the time. The book was eventually published in
August 1945, a few months after Eileen had died unexpectedly during an operation
at age thirty-nine.
Animal Farm was a commercial success in both the United States and the United
Kingdom. This gave Orwell both wealth and literary fame. Orwell moved with his
sister Avril and Richard to the Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell hoped to be able
to write with less interruption and to provide a good environment in which to raise
Richard. During this time, living without electricity on the North Atlantic coast,
Orwell’s health continued to decline. He was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Orwell pressed ahead on completing what was to be his last book, Nineteen Eighty-
Four. In the words of one of Orwell’s biographers, Michael Sheldon, Nineteen Eighty-
Four is a book in which “Almost every aspect of Orwell’s life is in some way
represented.” Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was in many ways the
culmination of Orwell’s life work: it dealt with all the major themes from his
writing—poverty, social class, war, totalitarianism, nationalism, censorship, truth,
history, propaganda, language, and literature, among others.
Orwell died less than a year after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly
before his death, he had married Sonia Brownell, who had worked for the literary
magazine Horizons. Brownell, who later went by Sonia Brownell Orwell, became one
of Orwell’s literary executors. Her efforts to promote her late husband’s work
included establishing the George Orwell Archive at University College London and
co-editing with Ian Angus a four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism,
and letters, first published in 1968. The publication of this collection further
increased interest in Orwell and his work, which has yet to abate in the over seventy
years since his death.

Orwell’s claim that “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism,” divides
Orwell’s work into two parts: pre-1936 and 1936-and-after.

Orwell’s second period (1936-and-after) is characterized by his strong views on

politics and his focus on the interconnections between language, thought, and power.
Orwell’s first period (pre-1936) focuses on two sets of interrelated themes: (1)
poverty, money, work, and social status, and (2) imperialism and its ethical costs.

Poverty, money and work

Orwell frequently wrote about poverty. It is a central topic in his books Down and
Out and Wigan Pier and many of his essays, including “The Spike” and “How the Poor
Die.” In writing about poverty, Orwell does not adopt an objective “view from
nowhere”: rather, he writes as a member of the middle class to readers in the upper
and middle classes. In doing so, he seeks to correct common misconceptions about
poverty held by those in the upper and middle classes. These correctives deal with
both the phenomenology of poverty and its causes.
His overall picture of poverty is less dramatic but more benumbing than his audience
might initially imagine: one’s spirit is not crushed by poverty but rather withers away
underneath it.

Orwell’s phenomenology of poverty is exemplified in the following passage

from Down and Out:
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much
about poverty it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would
happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You
thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it
would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty
that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the
crust-wiping (Down and Out, 16-17).
This account tracks Orwell’s own experiences by assuming the perspective of one
who encounters poverty later in life, rather than the perspective of someone born
into poverty. At least for those who “come down” into poverty, Orwell identifies a
silver lining in poverty: that the fear of poverty in a hierarchical capitalist society is
perhaps worse than poverty itself. Once you realize that you can survive poverty
(which is something Orwell seemed to think most middle-class people in England
who later become impoverished could), there is “a feeling of relief, almost of
pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out” (Down and Out, 20-21).
This silver lining, however, seems to be limited to those who enter poverty after
having received an education. Orwell concludes that those who have always been
down and out are the ones who deserve pity because such a person “faces poverty
with a blank, resourceless mind” (Down and Out, 180). This latter statement invokes
controversial assumptions in the philosophy of mind and is indicative of the ways in
which Orwell was never able to overcome certain class biases from his own
education. Orwell’s views on the working class and the poor have been critiqued by
some scholars, including Raymond Williams (1971) and Beatrix Campbell (1984).
Much of Orwell’s discussion about poverty is aimed at humanizing poor people and
at rooting out misconceptions about poor people. Orwell saw no inherent difference
of character between rich and poor. It was their circumstances that differed, not their
moral goodness. He identifies the English as having a “a strong sense of the
sinfulness of poverty” (Down and Out, 202). Through personal narratives, Orwell
seeks to undermine this sense, concluding instead that “The mass of the rich and the
poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average
millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit” (Down and Out,
120). Orwell blames poverty instead on systemic factors, which the rich have the
ability to change. Thus, if Orwell were to pass blame for the existence of poverty, it
is not the poor on whom he would pass blame.
If poverty is erroneously associated with vice, Orwell notes that money is also
erroneously associated with virtue. This theme is taken up most directly in his 1936
novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which highlights the central role that money plays
in English life through the failures of the novel’s protagonist to live a fulfilling life
that does not revolve around money. Orwell is careful to note that the significance of
money is not merely economic, but also social. In Wigan Pier, Orwell notes that
English class stratification is a “money-stratification” but that it is also a “shadowy
caste-system” that “is not entirely explicable in terms of money” (122). Thus, both
money and culture seem to play a role in Orwell’s account of class stratification in
England.
Orwell’s view on the social significance of money helped shape his views about
socialism. For example, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell argued in favor of a
socialist society in which income disparities were limited on the grounds that a “man
with £3 a week and a man with £1500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures,
which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches
cannot.”

Orwell was attuned to various ways in which money impacts work and vice versa.
For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, leaves
his job in order to have time to write, only to discover that the discomforts of living
on very little money have drained him of the motivation and ability to write. This is
in keeping with Orwell’s view that creative work, such as making art or writing
stories, requires a certain level of financial comfort. Orwell expresses this view
in Wigan Pier, writing that, “You can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything
has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you”
(82).
Orwell sees this inability to do creative or other meaningful work as itself one of the
harmful consequences of poverty. This is because Orwell views engaging in satisfying
work as a meaningful part of human experience. He argues that human beings need
work and seek it out (Wigan Pier, 197) and even goes so far as to claim that being cut
off from the chance to work is being cut off from the chance of living (Wigan Pier,
198). But this is because Orwell sees work as a way in which we can meaningfully
engage both our bodies and our minds. For Orwell, work is valuable when it
contributes to human flourishing.
But this does not mean that Orwell thinks all work has such value. Orwell is often
critical of various social circumstances that require people to engage in work that
they find degrading, menial, or boring. He shows particular distaste for working
conditions that combine undesirability with inefficiency or exploitation, such as the
conditions of low-level staff in Paris restaurants and coal miners in Northern
England. Orwell recognizes that workers tolerate such conditions out of necessity
and desperation, even though such working conditions often rob the workers of
many aspects of a flourishing human life.