1984
George Orwell, formally Eric Blair, will have gone on to write one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society, 1984. Orwell's most famous book and perhaps one of the most important and dark political satires ever written is parodying many different institutions that existed all around the world in 1949 when he wrote the book. George Orwell's 1984 is a political allegory attacking totalitarianism.
Orwell witnessed the danger of absolute political authority first hand in an age of advanced technology, in Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union. He illustrated that danger harshly in 1984, when he wrote the book in 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the television had become a fixture in the family home. Orwell’s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitor interminably by means of the telescreen seemed terrifying, yet possible. Further fear was instilled at the thought that Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five years into the future.
However the world that had been radically instilled fear into, that Orwell envisioned never transpired. Rather than being overwhelmed by totalitarianism, democracy ultimately won out in the Cold War, as seen in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Yet 1984 remains an important novel, in part for the alarm it sounds against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for its penetrating analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms of control. Orwell said that 1984 was written “to alter other people’s ideas of the kind of society they should strive after.”
View Full Essay
