“1984”

Abstract

When 1984 first appeared, it was judged chiefly for the accuracy of its depiction of life in a totalitarian regime. The book appeared to stand or fall as political prophecy—a vision of what we might very possibly become if certain tendencies were allowed their unqualified fulfilment. There can be little doubt that in some sense Orwell intended his book to be a prophecy of this kind. As early as 1939, in an essay on Henry Miller, we find him writing:

War is only “peace intensified.” What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was generally imagined that Socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.