The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (review)

If ever there was a true “public intellectual,” it was George Orwell. He undoubtedly would not have liked to be called one inasmuch as “public intellectuals” tend to be a somewhat pompous and self-righteous lot—attributes he detested. Orwell succeeded in becoming passionately involved in public affairs without pontificating. He steered clear of the pretentiousness and self-importance that became a hallmark of many Western intellectuals and especially those who saw themselves as social critics and members of a moralizing elite.

Orwell took stands on a wide variety of issues and was distinguished by a self-evident authenticity. Unlike other socially conscious intellectuals his authenticity was part of his character. He did not have to cultivate it self-consciously. He also managed to combine the personal and political realm without subordinating the former to the latter. His joining the ranks of the homeless and the manual laborers (described in Down and Out in Paris and London), and enlisting in the Spanish civil war (chronicled in Homage to Catalonia) does not strike the reader as posturing. He simply and naturally acted as his values impelled him to. He was a socialist and critic of capitalism without succumbing to the temptation to idealize and misread the nature of political systems that claimed socialist credentials—in his time only one existed, the Soviet Union.

The literature on Orwell is huge, and readers might wonder whether another volume is needed. The editor of this volume justifies his undertaking by suggesting that the critical literature on Orwell has become highly specialized and “somewhat inaccessible to the nonscholar” and that numerous misconceptions about Orwell remain to be dispelled. Of the sixteen British and American contributors to this volume, the best known are Bernard Crick, Robert Conquest, Morris Dickstein, and Christopher Hitchens. This is an informative volume that introduces the reader to the varied contributions of Orwell and the divergent assessments of his work. The most important disputes have been political. Did his resolute rejection of Soviet totalitarianism mean that he gave up on all varieties of socialism? Was he right to draw a moral equation between Nazism and Soviet Communism, an equation especially troubling for those on the left. Raymond Williams, among others, mounted his “political attack camou-flaged as aesthetic criticism,” as Erica Gottlieb notes.

Although Orwell’s rejection of Soviet Communism did not entail giving up on democratic socialism, he likely would have rejected the Third World Communist systems that emerged after his death. If so, he might have begun to wonder about a theory, and the associated ideals, that resisted all attempts to be realized.

There is little disagreement about the persisting relevance of Orwell’s central ideas, including his staunch rejection of moral relativism. Current-day postmodernists would benefit from recalling Orwell’s critique of those who argue “that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out to us that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.” As Morris Dickstein puts it, “Orwell treats totalitarianism as the forerunner of what we today think of as postmodern relativism.” It is a matter of historical record that twentieth-century totalitarian systems made the most-determined attacks on the notion of objective truth helped to dehumanize and mistreat vast numbers of people. But one may also argue that totalitarian systems (as well as postmodernist intellectuals) have expediently alternated between relativism and absolutism depending on circumstances.

Orwell was a hard-nosed critic of the kind of idealism that enshrined good intentions without much concern for where they led, as was the case during the 1960s and its aftermath. Orwell wrote: “it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection...