The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times

Abstract

Though 1984 is often praised for its prescience, critics in Orwell’s time and ours have also condemned its pessimism. Orwell’s despair, the argument goes, undermines the power of his warning, representing a retreat from politics, a betrayal of socialism, and a repudiation of utopianism. This article draws on the text of 1984 and Orwell’s contemporaneous writings to reassess his thinking on power, socialism, and utopia and to reconsider 1984’s appeal to the political imagination. Characterizing Orwell’s late political sensibility as one of desperate radicalism, the article demonstrates that Orwell remained both a socialist and a steward of the utopian imagination and that he feared totalitarianism because it threatened to expunge utopian ideals from historical consciousness. 1984 depicts a world in which this effort has nearly succeeded, rendering Orwell’s present as a moment of choice between an egalitarian future and a future of permanent hierarchy.