Orwell’s Political Ideals

19 October 2018

“George Orwell is watching you and you’re watching him.” Dr David Dwan’s latest book, Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals was published this week by Oxford University Press.

David Dwan, Tutorial Fellow in English at Hertford, examines the whole sweep of Orwell’s writing in this new book, showing how literature can be a rich source of political wisdom.

Published just a month after Orwell’s personal papers were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register – officially designating them as among the most significant documents in human history – Dwan’s book reassesses the political ideals of their ubiquitous author.

“Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times, yet partly due to this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque,” says Dwan, referring to the political era of Trump in which Nineteen Eighty-Four regularly tops the US bestsellers list. “His writing confirms deep and widely shared intuitions about political justice,” Dwan continues, “but much of its enduring fascination derives from the fact that these intuitions don’t quite add up.”

Liberty, Equality and Humbug accounts for these inconsistencies by exploring the broader moral conflict at the centre of Orwell’s work and the troubled idealism it yields.

The book is published by Oxford University Press and can be ordered from their website.