George Orwell -
The Ethics of Equality
By Peter Brian Barry
Oxford University Press - £19.99
While Orwell retained ''the most evil memories of Spain,'' Homage to Catalonia also recalled breathing ''the air of equality,'' a more favourable memory. If ''Hatred of hierarchy is the animating passion of his social criticism,'' Homage to Catalonia nicely illustrates what the absence of hierarchy looks like in practice.
('Spanish Bombs – Orwell's Egalitarianism').
The pigs of Animal Farm famously transformed the seventh commandment into the inegalitarian ''ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS,'' but they also help to illustrate a stubborn challenge to luck egalitarianism: the problem of expensive tastes.
('The Problem of the Pigs – Orwell's Egalitarianism').
If nothing else, this book lays bare George Orwell's inexorable search for social logic and political home-truths, as seen through through the occasional misty lens of philosophical grounding. The latter of which I'm sure Mr. Orwell would no doubt balk at with regal rage – he did after all, twice refer to John-Paul Sartre as ''a bag of wind.''
And who am I to argue?
Although to my mind, any new and intimately well-researched argument with regards Orwell, can only be a good thing; even if only from a purely selfish perspective as it gives one ample reason to indulge in yet more Orwellian reading.
From a purely philosophical perspective, Peter Brian Barry has herein written a well-contested argument that Orwell did indeed lean towards philosophy, far more than might often be considered the case. Albeit in the Introduction, he does write that he ''was at best indifferent to academic and abstract philosophy if not outright hostile to it.''
Be that as it may, George Orwell - The Ethic of Equality makes for both interesting and intrinsic reading.
As the above two opening quotes alone clarify, there's always an abundance of socio-politico food for thought where Orwell is concerned, especially where fresh and colourful assertions leap off the page – of which the following is a prime example: ''If philosophers have not come to any consensus about how to understand Orwell, neither has anyone else. Incompatible and mixed characterizations of Orwell are legion: he has been called ''an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual,'' a ''moral hero'' but a ''foolish idealist;' a ''Tory anarchist'' but an ''ambivalent'' and ''unsophisticated'' one; a ''half Tory, half Socialist;'' the secular prophet of socialism'' albeit a ''failed one;'' a revolutionary in love with the past – at least, a revolutionary in love with 1910 – as well as ''a revolutionary personality'' and a revolutionary patriot, but also a libertarian radical and a sentimental liberal. He has been said to resemble Don Quixote, John the Baptist, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Bertrand Russell, Simone Weil, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Hamlet, Candide, Samuel Johnson, George Gissing, George Bernards Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, D. H, Lawrence, Robinson Crusoe, Aldous Huxley, Charlie Chaplin, and still more. These characterizations can't all be right. No wonder so many of Orwell's commentators have found him terminally inconsistent or contradictory'' ('George Orwell: Philosophical Outsider').
It could be said that said inconsistency and contradictory presence is what partially amounts to Orwell being ''the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century.''
Either way, this is a truly terrific book, with humongous amount of forensic insight.
To quote Tony Burns of Nottingham University, it: should be read by all those who have an interest in the interface between philosophy, politics and literature.''
David Marx
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