Three Views of Revolution

Abstract

This paper is addressed not to Orwell and his work, but to the intellectual origins of those new forms of dehumanizing authoritarianism which are popularly designated as “Orwellian”, and are, alas, widely in force in calendar year 1984. Many of the origins of this totalitarian tendency lie in the dominant political faith of the modern world: the belief in revolution. I believe that close study of the body of experience in which the ideas of the modern revolutionary tradition originated—Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—shows that the new authoritarianism of our times owes a great deal to the two new types of revolutionary belief based on nationalism and socialism that grew out of the French Revolution and have dominated world revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. These two European-based traditions differ far more than is generally realized from the liberal, constitutional tradition of the earlier American Revolution.