The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221083286
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 267–278

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221083286

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The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984:

Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian

Times

Matthew B. Cole

1

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Abstract

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 con-

sciousness. 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.

Keywords

Orwell, 1984, dystopia, utopia, socialism, totalitarianism

Three intersecting trends have prompted a renewal of

interest in George Orwell’s1984. Commentators invoke

Orwell as a prophet of our “post-truth”era (Kakutani

2018;Levy 2016), with its fake news, conspiracy theories,

and viral disinformation. Orwell warned “that the very

concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”

(CEJL, II:258), an anxiety expressed in 1984’s vision of a

ruling Party whose “collective solipsism”(1984, 266)

subsumes past and present to an ever-f‌luctuating stream of

propaganda.

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After the Trump administration debuted the

concept of “alternative facts,”1984 sold hundreds of

thousands of copies (Rodden 2020, 4). As Dorian Lyn-

skey notes, a novel synonymous with “totalitarianism”

during the Cold War and with “invasive technology”

during the 1980s is today “most of all a defence of

truth”(2019, 265). Even so, the post-truth phenomenon

triangulates with political and technological develop-

ments ref‌lecting Orwell’s concerns. Analysts of authori-

tarianism recruit Orwell to explain how leaders like

Trump, Orb´

an, and Putin solidify power through disin-

formation, censorship, and propaganda (Applebaum

2020,Pomerantsev 2019,Snyder 2018). And the Or-

well who foresaw a world of telescreens, Thought Police,

and Big Brother’s all-pervading gaze, where there was “no

way of knowing whether you were being watched at any

given moment”(1984, 3) reasserted his ubiquity after

Edward Snowden brought the NSA’s secret mass sur-

veillance programs to public attention. This Orwell is

channeled in works on “supercharged”surveillance states

from the US to China (Chesterman 2011,Susskind 2018,

Strittmatter 2020), and others concerned with the pro-

liferation of corporate digital surveillance (Zuboff 2019).

It is easy to see, then, why a recent biography hails

Orwell as “a man of our time”(Bradford 2020) and why

commentators persist in asking “What Would Orwell

Think?”about everything from smartphones to Brexit to

“cancel culture.”In these contexts, 1984 remains the

central source of Orwell’s moral authority. But doubts

about the intellectual resources that Orwell’s work pro-

vides have surfaced alongside these tributes and hagi-

ographies. However, “Orwellian”the 21st century may

appear, does 1984 offer any counsel beyond despair? The

bleakness of 1984 is apparent and for many readers

1

Harvard College Writing Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,

USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew B. Cole, Harvard College Writing Program, Harvard University,

One Bow St #235, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Email: mbenjamincole@fas.harvard.edu