Liberty, Equality, and Humbug Orwell's Political Ideals

George Orwell is watching you and you're watching him. Britain pays its respects in the form of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Lecture and, more recently, Orwell Day. A statue of Orwell now stands outside Broadcasting House in London and he continues to tower over broadsheet journalism. His ghost is repeatedly summoned in the House of Parliament and in schools across Britain. In Europe and the US citizens confront the perennial question: 'What would Orwell say?'

Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times, yet, partly due to this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque. His writing confirms deep and widely shared intuitions about political justice, but part of its enduring fascination is the fact that these intuitions don't quite add up. David Dwan accounts for these inconsistencies by exploring the broader moral conflict at the centre of Orwell's work and the troubled views of justice it yields. Examining the whole sweep of Orwell's writings, but paying particular attention to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this book shows how literature and narrative in particular can be a source of political wisdom.

David Dwan, Associate Professor, Hertford College, University of Oxford

David Dwan is Associate Professor at Hertford College, Oxford. Prior to joining Hertford he held lectureships at Queen Mary, University of London, Queen's University, Belfast, and the University of York. His research addresses the relationship between literature and intellectual history, particularly moral and political philosophy, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. He has an interest in Irish writing and his first book The Great Community (Field Day, 2008) examined the evolution of cultural nationalism in Ireland. He co-edited (with Christopher Insole) The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke and has published articles on a variety of figures from Rousseau to Woolf.