George Orwell is famous for his two final fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.These two works are sometimes understood to defend capitalism against socialism. But as Orwell was a committed socialist, this could not have been his intention. Orwell's criticisms were directed not against socialism per se but against the Soviet Union and similarly totalitarian regimes. Instead, these fictions were intended as Public Choice-style investigations into which political systems furnished suitable incentive structures to prevent the abuse of power. This is demonstrated through a study of Orwell's non-fiction works, where his opinions and intentions are more explicit.Keywords: Orwell, Public Choice, socialism, totalitarianism, Neoconservatism JEL Categories: B24, B31, D72, P20, P30, Z11 1 Perhaps no author is more famous for his anti-communist writings than George Orwell. Two of his novels in particular -Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four -are so well-known that they have entered common currency. For example, such phrases as "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" (Animal Farm in Complete Novels 69) and terms as the "memory hole"(Nineteen Eighty-Four in Complete Novels 970) have entered into household parlance (cf. Howe, "1984: Enigmas of Power" 98 and Calder, "Orwell's Post-War Prophecy" 154f.). And it is colloquial to describe as "Orwellian" any statement which contains some internal contradiction or obfuscatory language meant to conceal an unsavory truth (cf. Deutscher, "1984-The Mysticism of Cruelty" 119). It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Orwell's works, especially these two fictions; indeed, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are sometimes assigned by conservatives as the quintessential refutations of socialism and communism.And yet it is often unknown to these same conservatives that Orwell was himself a socialist! (John Newsinger, Orwell's Politics, p. ix.) And as a socialist, Orwell could not possibly have intended to condemn collectivism outright. Therefore, any reading of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four which interprets these works as criticizing collectivism and extolling the market economy, must necessarily be a false interpretation. The question then is, what did Orwell intend to convey in these works? To the credit of the conservatives, it must be admitted that their interpretation of Orwell's fictions as anti-socialist does in fact square quite nicely with the actual texts of those fictions. The only problem is that this anti-socialist interpretation contradicts Orwell's own personal life and convictions as a socialist. The challenge is to find an interpretation which accounts for what we know about Orwell himself as a socialist, while at the same time doing as much justice to what the actual texts themselves say, as does the conservative anti-socialist interpretation.As Lane Crothers notes, there is a special difficulty in interpreting Orwell, for he advocated a socialist economy while simultaneously warning about the totalitarian poten...
