Craig L. Carr Orwell, Politics, and Power (2010)

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.Revolting Pigs 832.Had Orwell been more comfortable with Marx, he might have noticed thatMarx was no proponent of economic equality a decidedly modern liberalnotion.For Marx, the concerns associated with the ideals of justice, liberty, andequality are simply the moral norms of bourgeois capitalism that would not livebeyond the communist transformation.While Marx could not speculate on themoral order that would replace bourgeois morality, he was confident that itwould not be the morality of capitalism.There is something ironic, then, aboutOrwell s insistence in Wigan Pier that socialists abandon Marxist jawbreakerslike dialectical materialism and endorse liberal ideals like liberty and justice.This is precisely what socialists working in the shadow of Marx could not do,as the logic of dialectical materialism makes plain.However, we can and per-haps should note that Orwell was one of the first liberals to notice that liberalmorality has room to challenge the justness of the distribution of social goodscontrolled by the vicissitudes of the capitalist market alone.For modern liberalsworking in the shadow of John Rawls, this view is now rather commonplace (Cf.Rawls, 1971).3.Orwell is quoted to this effect by John Newsinger.See Newsinger, 1999: 117 8.4.George Woodcock has masterfully detailed Orwell s provocative use of animalsthroughout his fiction and notes that Orwell apparently rather disliked cats(Woodcock, 1966: 72 5).But Orwell disliked rats more than this, and thisparticular animal, missing in Animal Farm, follows him throughout his fiction,ending in his strategic use of the animal in Nineteen Eighty-Four.5.For the classic contributions to elite theory, see Mosca, 1939; Pareto, 1968; andMichels, 1959.See also Mills, 1956.6.Bowker has noticed that Orwell lived in close proximity to a farm in Englandactually named Manor Farm when he was working on the novel, and the obvi-ous presumption is that this is the source of the name (Bowker, 2003: 308).Butthis hardly justifies the conclusion of a happy coincidence, for there were otherfarms with different names in the region as well and Orwell specifically chose totake this particular name.No doubt the happy presence of this particular farmhelped Orwell work a degree of consistency into his literary enterprise.7.It is not clear, from the standpoint of political science, that all constitutionalregimes need an institution to play this legitimating role, but political stabilityis certainly enhanced if they do in fact have an institution that fulfills thispolitical purpose.Though as a consequence of political practice rather thanconstitutional design, the Supreme Court has come to provide this service inthe United States, for example.5Technologies of PowerThe focus of Orwell s political thought does not change substantially fromAnimal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four.The theme of failed political idealsremains constant in the second and far more elaborate work.The scourgeof political power continues to loom as the center piece of his concern, andthe threat it increasingly poses to simple decency drives his obsession aboutsignaling the need to keep the liberal tradition alive.But Nineteen Eighty-Four delves more deeply into two key elements of the political decay Orwellfeared.The first of these involves a more thorough exploration of how totalitar-ian control might actually emerge in liberal political cultures than anythingthat can be found in Animal Farm.Orwell believed he lived at a pivotalpolitical moment in the history of the west because the techniques of con-trol what I want to call the technologies of power developed by the upperclass have achieved such a heightened sophistication that now, for the firsttime in history, the upper class can manage the thorough and effectivedomination of the middle class.Prior to the refinement of these technolo-gies of power, the control exercised by the upper class was invariablylimited.But this, Orwell supposed, had changed with the coming of moder-nity, and he believed totalitarian control now to be a real possibility for thefirst time in human history.The second aspect of political decay that Orwell explores in NineteenEighty-Four involves something that I want to call the psychology of power.The existence of sophisticated technologies of power that make totalitariancontrol possible is hardly enough, in its own right, to bring about the politi-cal decay Orwell feared.Before any of this becomes worrisome, there mustbe an inclination or desire on the part of the upper class to want to exercisesuch power and to seize totalitarian control of society in order to cement84 Technologies of Power 85its position.O Brien, Winston Smith s tormentor/savior, may seem, at leaston a superficial reading, like an immoral beast.But he explains with shock-ing clarity the defining feature of Oceania, namely that power in Oceaniahas become its own end not a means to some desired end, but an endin itself (Orwell, 1961: 217 21).This seems not only desperately immoral,but also terribly silly.Nonetheless, Orwell supposed that this psychologicaltransformation is the real threat to a decent society and the real sourceof totalitarianism.So, to make the horrors of Nineteen Eighty-Four a realpossibility, and consequently to offer his posterity a real political warningand not just a scary story, Orwell had to explain how such a psychologicaltransformation is both realistic and possible.Orwell thought he saw both these conditions looming on the politicalhorizon.Together they make totalitarianism a real possibility and presagethe final collapse of the liberal revolution.His political theory is first of alla call to arms to defend against this possibility.But his political writings areof theoretical interest only if this call to arms is well founded.They are wellfounded, in turn, only if his understanding of the technologies of poweris accurate and his concerns about the psychology of power are sensibleand believable.Orwell s importance as a political thinker hangs on thesetwo points, and it is time now to see if his fear of totalitarianism, and hispolitical theory more generally, can be vindicated.His portraiture of thetechnologies of power will concern me here, and I will turn to his review ofthe psychology of power in Chapter 6.1In his traditional literary fashion, Orwell explores the emergent technolo-gies of power in the little drama that details Winston s cure at the able handsof O Brien.O Brien s defeat of Winston takes place on three separate levels:the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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