In 1962, a little-known professor of English published an important book that demonstrated how the experience of the twentieth century gave the lie to the misplaced optimism of the nineteenth century… From Utopia to Nightmare by Chad Walsh (Harper Collins, 1962) Almost no one remembers Chad Walsh anymore. Our loss. A professor of English at Beloit [...]
There is tremendous need for conscious and vigorous action to shape and reshape our behavior in accordance with virtue, the common good, and God’s Law. What could studying grammar have to do with saving our culture..? In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell sounds an almost despairing note: Most people who [...]
Following the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the American public suddenly discovered that the Russians had utterly divergent geopolitical interests from Americans. Animal Farm’s positive reception in Great Britain was far exceeded by its smashing success in the United States. The initial American reaction to Orwell’s fable came in the form of a favorable [...]
“Animal Farm” hit a nerve at the right psychological moment in America, just when the pro-Soviet fellow-traveling movement was beginning to unravel. What havoc “a little squib” can cause! Seven decades ago, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in the United States. Its publication launch was August 26, 1946, almost exactly a year after its [...]
“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.” G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, August 17, 1918 The problem with the world in which we find ourselves is that it exists on the level of platitude. People no longer think, they merely regurgitate what they’ve been taught. Thus, for instance, all thoroughly [...]
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” –George Orwell […]
“You think, I daresay, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words— scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language right down to the bone. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In [...]
Despite his blistering attacks on all forms of socialism in his fiction, many scholars have considered George Orwell a socialist. Yet his leftism was merely “by accident,” a reaction against the commercialism and crassness of the Western world of his day. Unlike the first two British dystopian writers, George Orwell was a colonial, born in [...]
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy did not, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark [...]
In the twentieth century, no novelist exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion, in Britain and America, than did George Orwell. Also Orwell was the most telling writer about poverty. In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Yet because he could discern no source of abiding justice and [...]
George Orwell It is ironic that more than a half century after George Orwell’s death, the famous socialist pundit is perhaps most appreciated by political conservatives. This fact highlights his ambivalent intellectual legacy. But something should also be said about Orwell’s literary legacy, lest we overlook the shortcomings of an otherwise brilliant author. Liam Julian in [...]
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. [...]
George Orwell Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards [...]
One of the many advantages in reading the Great Books is that truly Great books have the ability to remove us from our present moment and take us somewhere else, expose us to different ideas, issues, and landscapes, and then return us to our own. This enables us to see our own world, and more [...]