1984

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are the great modern classics of “Negative Utopia”—not dramas of what life might be… but nightmares of what it is becoming.

The world of 1984 is one in which eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity, in which the Party keeps itself in power by complete action over man’s actions and his thoughts. As the lovers Winston Smith and Julia learn when they try to evade the Thought Polic, and then join the underground opposition, the Party can smash the last impulse of love, the last flicker of individuality.

But let the reader beware: 1984 is more than a satire of totalitarian barbarism. “It means us, too,” says Erich Fromm in his Afterword. It is no merely a political novel but also a diagnosis of the deepest alienation in the mind of Organization Man.

George Orwell writes with a swift clean style that has come down from Defoe. Like Defoe, he creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing—from the first sentence to the last four words… words which might stand as the epitaph of the twentieth century.