Liberty, Equality, and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals
by David Dwan
(Oxford University Press, £25)

THE inclusion of “humbug” in the title of David Dwan’s examination of the ideals that drove one of the most controversial political writers of the mid-20th century does not necessarily imply that he is about demolishing George Orwell’s reputation.

He is more concerned with analysing the nature of and reasons for the apparent conflict of contradictory views that informed Orwell’s relatively limited output — a few undistinguished novels, a body of powerful essays and the two books — Animal Farm and 1984 — that fed the emergent cold war and for which he is best known today.

EP Thompson likened Orwell to “a man who is raw all down one side and numb on the other. He is sensitive — sometimes obsessionally so — to the least insincerity upon his left but the inhumanity of the right rarely provoked him to a paragraph of polemic.”

Oxford don Dwan uses the key revolutionary terms liberty, equality and fraternity along with truth, to guide his appraisal of Orwell’s often bewildering and contradictory political philosophy. In the process, he attempts to anatomise the schizophrenic nature of this maverick socialist.

Freedom — rejecting rules — came to be regarded as a negative concept for the erstwhile anarchic Orwell, whereas liberty must necessarily be based on rational laws. Sounding like some Tory backbencher, he argued in The Road to Wigan Pier that coercive laws, harshly administered, were “always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence.”

For a writer who prided himself on the lucidity of his language, Orwell seems prone to equivocal vocabulary and an example is his frequent use of the term “human,” where feudalism is more “human” than capitalism, while socialism “appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types.”

In Dwan’s analysis of the fable-cum-fairy tale Animal Farm, seized upon by the cold war warriors, Orwell seems to recognise an essential conflict between liberty and equality. And the author finds a strange conflict in Orwell’s mind between solidarity and justice, happiness and freedom and paradoxical views on most of the basic human ideals at the heart of his work.

Many of the prognostications of the “gloomy sage of socialism” have been borne out and his dystopian 1984 is increasingly relevant in a contemporary world of technical surveillance by its particular brand of truth-manipulating Big Brothers.

The figure who emerges from Dwan’s interesting book reveals a man who strangely never seemed to trust himself. Inwardly questioning his own beliefs, he nevertheless publicly presented his views with a “relentless rhetoric of certitude.”