George Orwell and the Dystopian World of Nineteen Eighty-Four

This article is based on my essay, Der »letzte Mensch« in einem Totalitarismus ohne Alternative? Zu George Orwells »1984«, published in UTOPIE kreativ, July 2000, Nr. 117, p. 681-692.

I.

Like hardly any other utopian novel of world literature, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been interpreted in very different ways.[1] Many authors simply read it as the anticipation of a future that we cannot escape. Others classified it in the tradition of satire established by Swift, which warned contemporaries of present misdevelopments through their radical criticism, that the horrors of the future could be overwhelming if they persisted in their passivity. Other interpretations saw an anatomy of the national socialist and Bolshevik systems of rule as a model of a possible totalitarian future of humanity. Nineteen Eighty-Four was also historicized or personalized, whether interpreted as a satire on the England of the Second World War or read as an emanation of the frustrated childhood and youth of its author. The core of Nineteen Eighty-Four was also seen as a metaphysical despair at the nature of power.

Not only is the “understanding” of this novel controversial, but soon after its publication there were attempts to instrumentalize it for the political goal of creating and controlling enemy stereotypes during the Cold War era. “While critics from the right-wing camp confirmed the warning clothed in an anti-utopia of possible political developments in the whole world and emphasized the truth-content of this work, leftist critics put in question Orwell’s intellectual and literary achievement and tried to diminish the importance of his statements on politics by pointing out that Orwell was already terminally ill when he wrote this book. In such a view, Nineteen Eighty-Four is no more than the expression of a very limited private experience, the document of the psycho-physical condition of the author in the genesis of the work.”[2]

That Orwell from 1936 to his death professed democratic socialism speaks against the conservative monopolization of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.’ (Orwell)”.[3] In a letter to an American unionist, he expressly resisted all tendencies to misuse Nineteen Eighty-Four as a political weapon against socialism.[4] A one-sided anti-socialist interpretation of this novel ignores the fact that it also contains all the essential elements of Orwell’s criticism of capitalism. They extend from “the atomized existence” of individuals, the dichotomist social stratification of the totalitarian system, and “the passivity of the proletariat” to the “destruction of quality of life”, the “suppression of drives” and the “culture industry”.[5] However, the attempt of leftist authors to deactivate the criticism in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four of the Stalinist Soviet Union, by insisting that he derived the sickness of the whole world from his own sickness, represents an illicit psychologizing of his work. It suppresses not only the analytical qualities of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which moved at the height of the contemporary historical and socioeconomic explorations of the totalitarian structures of rule of his epoch. It also misunderstands the fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four represents the sum total of all Orwell’s works up to then, in which all his political experiences appeared directly or indirectly. [6]

In modern research, Orwell’s literary work and his biographically mediated political goals represent a unity. He emphasized explicitly that texts are written for four possible reasons: (1) out of sheer egoism, (2) out of aesthetic enthusiasm, (3) out of historical impulse, and (4) to attain a political purpose. The last motive was decisive for his writing. In a peaceful epoch, he probably would have written ornate or merely descriptive books without being conscious of his political standpoint. However in an epoch like the time between the wars, he had to develop into a sort of pamphleteer.[7] Perhaps the diverse common intersections with the different experiential horizons and cognitive interests of the interpreter or reader offered by this text is the reason why Nineteen Eighty-Four was at once a bestseller after its publication and contributed substantially to Orwell’s increasing significance and influence after his death, a development that continues undiminished. [8]

One interpretation tries to relate this novel to the tradition of classical utopian thinking as a self-criticism that does not abandon Orwell’s political experimental horizon of the 1930s and 1940s. This version appears to be convincing, since Orwell was never an anti-utopian in the sense that he abhorred the whole genre a priori as “totalitarian”. Rather, he constantly emphasized the constructive continuity between utopian thinking and social reform.[9] The structural characteristics and topoi of this novel urge such an interpretation. Thus Norbert Elias declared that “the good land utopia” of Thomas More “recalled a little George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”.[10]

This hypothesis raises two questions: (1) Does Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four actually follow a pattern that is modeled on the utopias from the 16^th century to the end of the 19^th century, even if now turned radically negative in its concrete vision? (2) Is the negative scenario of Nineteen Eighty-Four a rejection of the emancipatory reason of the Enlightenment and thus of utopian thinking?

II.

The social critique of utopian thinking since More had the task of naming the misdevelopments from which the utopian design should provide liberation. The social mechanisms that caused the social misery or dehumanization of millions of uprooted existences were presented as real tendencies of European societies. The fictions of a better alternative first gained their binding force and persuasiveness against the background of the feudal and capitalist relations of exploitation and the absolutist or civil state machinery covering them. What is new in Orwell’s diagnosis of the reality of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not that the topoi of anti-capitalist criticism are missing, but that they are put in question: the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, mistrusts this negative interpretation of the capitalist past. Without glorifying it, he suspects that the realities of the pre-revolutionary epoch, despite all their social deficiencies, were more human than the totalitarian state in which he lives. In Orwell’s utopian pattern, the subject of social criticism is changed. The magnified deficits of the so-called utopian community are prominent.

With his emphasis on the political and social conditions of the totalitarian state, Orwell triggers the reversal of the utopian ideal of the classical tradition into its opposite, and makes this the central theme of his temporal diagnosis. What was once conceived as a normative vanishing point of the liberation of humanity from misery and exploitation became their fate, the sign of the extinction of everything human. The negativity of the normative points of the state of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not at first visible through an ideological-critical interpretation. According to their claim, they are “the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. […] If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell allows O’Brien, the protagonist of the state of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to say, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”[11]

Seen this way, central elements of the ideal of the classical utopian tradition are changed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Anti-individualism has always been a sign of the social utopia since More. However it always had its corrective in emancipatory thinking, to help the individual gain his rights despite the priority of the “whole”. This corrective definitively belongs to the past in Orwell’s state of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The anti-individualism of the older utopian tradition serving the abolition of material misery and oppressive living conditions is now replaced by the simple negation of the individual and his own personal value: “The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.”[12] Expressed in a simplified way: all normative points of the classical utopian tradition are reversed into their opposites in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four since their original claim, the secular emancipation of humanity from social misery, having become historically superfluous, was abandoned.

The perverted goal of the state, propagating universal oppression as its ultimate goal, also changes the original goal of utopian property relations. The abolition of private control over means of production and labor in favor of communist communal property was a central demand of the classical utopian tradition. Production barriers were to be removed, as they were standing in the way of supposedly optimal industrial-technical development, making possible the most egalitarian distribution of social wealth. In contrast, the abolition of private property in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four achieved the exact opposite goal: it served only to fortify social inequality in the interest of the absolute claim to power of a tiny party oligarchy. For Orwell’s state of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the abolition of private property actually amounted to a “concentration of property in far fewer hands than before”, with the difference “that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything […] because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.”[13] This form of property relations resulted from the insight “that the only secure basis of an oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privileges are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.”[14]

What role is played by the three pillars of classical utopian economic systems, namely work, technology, and science, as well as the structure of material needs to be satisfied in Orwell’s “gloomy” or “black” Utopia of the year 1984?

(1) As in most classical social utopias, a complete mobilization of all available labor resources occurs in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, a decisive distinction cannot be ignored. Since More, the general labor obligation was always accompanied by a reduction of working hours, opening up possibilities for creative occupations. This connection between work and leisure is brutally disrupted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both the elite of the party and the “proles”, the great mass of the working population, are subject to labor dictatorship up to physical and psychic exhaustion without ever having the prospect of cultivating abilities not immediately connected with the material reproduction of the coercive system. A qualitative distinction of work along caste lines cannot be ignored. Elite officials are excused from bodily work, as in the classical utopian tradition. In contrast, all physical labor is assigned to the proles.[15] They have the position of the slaves in More’s Utopia. A fifth of the whole population of the earth is available to the three superstates, entering the possession of the respective conquerers as slave laborers.[16] In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “productive work again became slave labor, which it had widely been in late antiquity before the western civilization process.”[17]

(2) In classical social utopias, natural science and its application as technology had a clearly outlined function. This consisted in the expectation that hunger, overtime hours, filth, misery, lack of education, and sickness will be definitively overcome with the development of scientific-technical potential. A different function from the utopian tradition is ascribed to science and technology in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it is a direct instrument of rule of a small, self-styled elite. This re-orientation can be read as a kind of advancement of science. Since all three superpowers have nuclear weapon potential, war cannot appear winnable any more. The only relevant task for natural science and technology consists in discovering the ideas of another person. Unlike military research, this goal is of decisive significance: Nothing is more efficient than the thought police, we read. The scientist is a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor who, with exceptional conscientiousness, studies the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and changes of moods, and tests the effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and corporeal torture in forcing truthful statements. Or he is a chemist, physicist, or biologist who is only occupied with those questions of his specialism that relate to the destruction of life.[18]

3. The great utopian works of the 19^th century, confronted with the unparallelled social wealth achieved by industrialization, brought the traditional prohibition of luxury to an end. As Orwell wrote, their sign was the “vision of a future society unbelievable rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete”.[19] Unlike Herbert George Wells[20] and Aldous Huxley,[21] who emphasized this tradition to the end to the point of cynical excess, Orwell returned to the social asceticism of the early utopias. The characteristic difference was that the comparatively low standard of living was their framing condition, corresponding to the control of nature that was still in its early stages from the 16^th century to the end of the 18th century. But now material poverty is artificially brought about by the state of the year 1984, to reinforce the existing caste structure. The harsh freezing of the living standards of the majority at the subsistence level occurrs through the systematic destruction of overproduction. Machine creations have fallen prey to destruction in the course of permanent war preparations, to prevent the general standard of living from rising. Apart from the top of the Party leadership, these consumption limits are in force for the medium and lower cadres of officials. If people in the social utopias of the 19th century received their exquisite meals in luxurious palaces, the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, is fed in a shabby canteen whose ugliness is only surpassed by the miserable quality of the food and sedatives.[22]

III.

Notwithstanding its historical models in modern totalitarianisms, which Orwell seeks to surpass, his composition of the state of 1984 cannot deny the pattern that it copies: a social utopia in the tradition of Plato and More. An important presupposition for the smooth functioning of this perfected superstate was the state organization of sexual relations. When the dynamic of sexual energies was put in the service of the state, its smooth functioning could be certain. A similar model can be recognized in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. While the sexuality of the proles remains unconsidered, it is strictly disciplined among the Party members. As an indissoluble bond sanctioned by the state, “the only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party”.[23] This abstinence propagated by the Party has a double reason: on the one hand, “the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thought crime.”[24] On the other hand, the party’s will to power necessitates the instrumentalization of the sexual drive in the interest of an unconditional claim to power: “For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept in the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?”[25]

The conception of a “new man” is also found in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the classical social utopia, he was marked not only by a well-shaped body and great intelligence, but also by an all-embracing cultivated personality and a long life. All these attributes are reversed into their opposites in Orwell’s state of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The dominant human type is the smoothly-functioning apparatchik who only understands the Party doctrine. “They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird”.[26] The “new man” idealized by the Party is found in in the ideal of large muscular men and full-breasted women, blond, life-affirming, suntanned, and carefree. However, in reality a very different type thrives under the rule of the state of 1984: “It was curious how the beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party”.[27]

The political system in the narrow sense also has characteristics that could be compared with the structure of the government apparatus of many social utopias modified by the experience of modern totalitarian dictatorships. The ministries of “power”, “wisdom”, and “love” in Campanella’s The City of the Sun have their equivalents in those ministries forming the core of the system of rule of the year 1984 with Orwell. “The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.”[28] Unlike More’s Utopia and Campanella’s The City of the Sun, these ministries are agencies of an omnipotent state party represented by a totalitarian dictator known as “Big Brother”. He stands at the top of a social model whose stratification refers back to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941). But this classification should not conceal the fact that Orwell’s totalitarian state has at least in a formal sense a different precursor, which is older than Burnham’s scenario: the conception of an ideal state as Plato developed it in his Republic.[29]

In Orwell’s system of “oligarchic collectivism”,[30] political power is controlled by an intellectual elite consisting of two percent of the population. The top of the system, in the form of Big Brother, emerges from this “inner party” and replicates Plato’s philosopher. Like Plato’s philosopher-king, he is infallible and omnipotent. The caste of watchmen is like the “outer party”. Covering 17 percent of the total population, it acts as the “hand” of the state, which has to execute the commands of the “brain” or the inner party. Its fields of activity are defined as brainwashing, re-education, and liquidation. Finally, the mass of physically working slaves, artisans, laborers, and peasants in Plato’s ideal state corresponds to the so-called “proles”, who make up 85 percent of the population. Repressed in an existence of dull privateness, they play no role—as in Plato—as a political factor. This caste society is in principle a static pyramidal monolith. However, a selective mobility occurs between the elites and between the dominant castes and the proles in replacing “failures” in leadership positions with capable social climbers.[31] As everybody knows, Plato also provided that intelligent children of artisans and peasants were accepted in the dominant caste while, conversely, incapable descendants had to do physical work in the area of material reproduction.

However, one important difference between Plato’s estate communism and the dominating model in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be overlooked. All utopians of the classical tradition who were inspired by Plato interpreted his model of elites in a functional way. In other words, the power ascribed to them was not an end in itself but had its legitimation in the well-being of the general public. In contrast, the negative turn of the concept of the elites in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four resulted from the fact that the socio-political power of the dominant caste only knows one goal: maintaining their privileged position. “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”[32]

A will to power relieved of all normative correctives is clearly distinguished from the repression techniques of the classical utopian tradition. For them, coercive means could only be used in an “accompanying” way for the integration of individuals in the community. Actual social cohesion should be encouraged so that an optimal satisfaction of human needs is achieved—according to the degree of scientific-technical development. In contrast, the means of power in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four make themselves absolute. As a result, in their totality they constitute a system of surveillance and repression whose background is the sanctioning authority of the classical tradition. Campanella’s news services and auricular confession gave way to the “Televisor” which potentially watches over all citizens.

The truth monopoly of the classical utopian elites is supplemented in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by the “reality monopoly” of the totalitarian party which seeks to prevent the germination of any critical thought concerning the actual goals of the Party. The means to achieve this is a new manipulated language named “Newspeak” and the permanent falsification of history. In the classical utopian tradition, forced labor and, in exceptional cases, the death penalty were employed for offenses against the norms of the ideal community. Through the example of the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, Orwell shows that deviant conduct first entails “brainwashing” in the form of physical and psychic torture, then “re-education”, leading to unreserved identification with the system before the “delinquent” is liquidated. This technique of “vaporizing” had only one goal: potential adversaries of the system should disappear without being made into martyrs.[33]

IV.

Our comparative research has demonstrated that nearly all topoi of classical social utopias are present in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: from the economic and political system to the “new man” and the sexual relationships. But one decisive innovation unknown to the older utopian tradition was the abandonment of emancipation thinking, the turning point and focus of the utopian imagination. The classical utopian tradition adopted the mantra that the whole has priority over the individual, but with the expectation that its realisation could only produce a harmonious community without irrational rule and social misery.

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, this formula creates a social reality whose explicit goal is not the reconciliation of individuals with the whole. There is legitimate doubt as to whether the classical social utopia has ever reached or can reach this telos. It was attached too much to Plato’s thinking, which was allegedly subject to the higher dignity of the “general” or “universal”. Its anti-individualism did not refer structurally to the extinguishing of individuals but rather to their binding in the collective. What it opposed was that boundless egoism which made balancing particular interests with the public welfare appear obsolete per se.

This relation is presented very differently in Orwell’s gloomy utopia. The idea of a public welfare that could be the basis of a general consensus is abandoned. In its place is the absolute claim to power of a small self-styled elite which, controlling the scientific-technical resources, has only one objective: stabilization of the existing system of oppression and exploitation in a “post-history”. Considering this diagnosis, many authors think that through his dark utopia Orwell wanted to strike up the swansong to the emancipatory reason of the Enlightenment. The hero of the novel, Winston Smith, is the “last man”, so to speak, who tries to sue for his dignity against the exactions of a totalitarianism with no alternative. But he is not strong enough to resist the omnipotence of the state of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[34] In as much as the exponent of the Enlightenment, the critical intellectual, seems inwardly to agree to the authority of power, he thus legitimates the totalitarian system. In other words: he capitulates to naked violence and actually abandons emancipatory ideas.[35] Yes, it is true: Orwell regarded the destruction of humanity as possible. But does this mean that he gave up on humanity as the heritage of Enlightenment? There are good reasons to reject such an intellectual capitulation. So we have to admit that Orwell’s anthropology, against the background of which he described the deprivation of human existence, is not relativistic. As Fromm rightly emphasized, he sees existence as characterized by “its own qualities”: “an intensive longing for love, truth, justice and solidarity”.[36] Orwell, with his horrific vision of a possible society of the future, seeks to mobilize energies in the reader that rebel against such a misdevelopment.

Other facts support such an interpretation. In his novel, “what makes the hero slip, what first separates him from his environment, what breaks through the one-dimensionality”, is sexuality.[37] Sexuality is the only remaining space of emancipatory reason that has not yet been reduced to a mere rule calculus. “Not merely the love of one person,” Orwell says, “but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”[38] Orwell’s vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four thus gains the critical and subversive force immanent to Utopia from this psychic center, because it evades the control of the system. The Enlightenment as such is not denounced, but every false rationality that denies its emancipatory inheritance decays to a mere instrumental perfection.[39]

But the question is, can Orwell’s opposition to a totalitarian system that is homogeneous in itself hope for the revolutionary power of the proles?[40] The answer is no. Yet this apparent victory of the system could be a mere Pyrrhic victory. How can a regime last in the long run when it commands by decree that 4 + 4 = 5? How can a minimum level of technical efficiency be maintained without a modern machinery of oppression, when the Party claims to have the power to change natural laws according to its pleasure? In the figure of O’Brien, Orwell shows that the realization of his dark utopia represents nothing other than the transformation of humanity into a conglomerate of lunatics. In O’Brien's face, while Winston Smith is being tortured, “the faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm”[41] and “the (lunatic) exaltation”[42] of a mad man can be seen. These hints point glaringly at the self-destruction of a dehumanized system that dismisses those correctives that are indispensable for its own survival.

Literature

Alpers, Fuchs, Hahn, Jeschke 1987:  Orwell, George (1903-1950), in:  Lexikon der Science Fiction Literatur. München 1987, p. 767-768.

Crick 1984: Bernard Crick, George Orwell. Ein Leben. German Edition, Frankfurt am Main 1984.

Elias 1985: Norbert Elias, Thomas Morus’ Staatskritik. Überlegungen zur Bestimmung des Begriffs Utopie, in: Utopieforschung. Ed. by Wilhelm Voßkamp. Bd. II. Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 101-150.

Erzgräber 1985: Willi Erzgräber, Utopie und Anti-Utopie in der englischen Literatur. Morus, Wells, Huxley, Morus, München 1985.

Fromm 1984: Erich Fromm, George Orwells ‘1984’, in: George Orwell, 1984. German translation by Kurt Wagenseil, Franfurt am Main, Olten, Wien 1984, p. 335-353.

Hopkinson 1984: Tom Hopkinson, Gerge Orwell (1903-1950), in British Writers, Vol VII, New York 1984, p. 273-287.

Huxley 1988: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, London 1988.

Kahmann 1986: Bernd Kahmann, George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, in: Literarische Utopien von Morus bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Klaus L. Beghahn and Hans Ulrich Seeber, Königstein/Taunus 1986, p. 233-249.

Kumar 1987: Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Oxford and New York 1987.

Muschg 1994: Adolf Muschg, Raum 101, in: George Orwell, 1984. German translation by Kurt Wagenseil, Franfurt am Main, Olten, Wien 1984, p. 329-334.

Orwell 1984: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth etc. 1984.

Otto 1994: Dirk Otto, Das utopische Staatsmodell von Platons Politeia aus der Sicht von Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ein Beitrag zur Bewertung des Totlitarismusvorwurfs gegenüber Platon, Berlin 1994.

Schröder 1988: Hans-Christoph Schröder, Georg Orwell. Eine intellektuelle Biographie, München 1988.

Seeber/Bachem 1985: Hans Ulrich Seeber/Walter Bachem, Aspekte und Probleme der neueren Utopiediskussion in der Anglistik, in: Utopieforschung. Ed. by Wilhelm Voßkamp. Bd. I. Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 143-191. 

Seibt 1985: Utopia als Funktion abendländischen Denkens, in: Utopieforschung. Ed. by Wilhelm Voßkamp. Bd. I. Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 254-279. 

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica 1985: Orwell, George, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 8, 1985, p. 1020f.

Wells 1927: Herbert George Wells: Men like Gods, London 1927.