George Orwell and the Tory-Radical Tradition

Download or read book George Orwell and the Tory-Radical Tradition written by William Edward Laskowski and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The often-noticed contradictions in George Orwell's writings can be explained by placing him in a long-standing tradition in English letters, the Tory-Radical. Although critics (including Orwell himself) have briefly remarked on his affinities with this tradition, it has never been clearly defined. Basically, the Tory-Radicals constantly strive to balance the claims of the individual (the Tory component, as Hazlitt terms it) against the duties which that individual owes to the solidarity of the group (the Radical strain). This tradition can be said to have begun with Swift, been carried on by Cobbett, been commented on (and to a certain extent exemplified) by Hazlitt, have grown to fruition in the various strains of Medievalism during the nineteenth century (such as those of Carlyle, Disraeli, Ruskin, and Morris), and culminated in the polemical writings of Chesterton and Belloc during the first decades of the twentieth century. Although theirs is not a formulaic political program, the chief thrust of the Tory-Radicals is political. They fear a domination of the few over the many -- and above all, over the individual. The individual finds the sense of self, both political and personal, almost entirely in the past, which forms the Tory-Radicals' basis of evaluative comparison. In the same vein, they base their economic theories on the independence of the individual: self-sufficiency (autarchy, as Orwell termed it). Finally, the Tory-Radicals are notorious for their insistence on simple, clear prose -- "like a window pane." Orwell's ultimate contribution to this tradition is the late pair of contradictory linguistic statements, "Politics and the English Language" and the invented language Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. While Orwell insists in the essay that "the fewest and shortest words" are the most desirable, Newspeak reveals Orwell's fear that such a truncated language, totally divorced from abstract meanings, can impose a tyranny much more long-lasting than any windy or pretentious bureaucratese could ever lead to. This linguistic "doublethink" is the culminating example of the tension that the Tory-Radical tradition produced in Orwell--P.ix-x.