100 years of George Orwell - a thinker and writer of great influence

On the basis of the astonishing dishonesty of the ideologues and the press concerning what was happening in Spain, Orwell came to fear a future world from which the ideal of objective truth had vanished and where those who held power were able to control the future through their control over the past. It was in Spain, moreover, that Orwell first saw the peculiar corruption to which those intellectuals who attached themselves to a country or a cause were prone.

For Orwell the essence of totalitarianism was the attack it waged against freedom. After Spain he lived with a permanent dread that the liberal civilisation into which he had been born was gradually being destroyed. This was the source of 1984, the most important warning he wrote about the abuse of absolute state power in the technological age.

But Orwell did not love only liberty. He also loved equality. In Republican Spain he fleetingly experienced a world where "the working class was in the saddle". This was the kind of world in which Orwell wanted to live. His great Russian Revolution fable, Animal Farm, is essentially the story of the hope for equality cruelly betrayed.

Orwell's dreams were not complex. He fought throughout his life, as he once put it, for a world where all individuals would have enough to eat and no fear of being unemployed. He did not believe that the superwealthy and the abjectly poor could share a common universe. When he outlined his program for socialism, at its heart was the demand that no one should earn more than 10 times as much as anyone else. Nor was Orwell's passion for equality restricted to people of the West. He once asked whether it really was too much to try "to raise the standard of living of the whole world" to that of the average Briton of his day.

Equality is nowadays an unfashionable ideal. Yet I rarely discover a student who, after reading Orwell on equality, has failed to be moved or unnerved.

During the Cold War, the anti-communist right embraced Orwell for his defence of classical liberal principles against the totalitarian left. They rarely took seriously his revolutionary socialism and his loathing of privilege, which made him then, and make him still, essentially a man of the left.

In my opinion Orwell's greatest failure as a writer was his unwillingness to think seriously about the tension between the ideals he loved, liberty and equality. Even in his own age, intelligent liberals argued that in any advanced industrial society the kind of equality of which Orwell dreamed could only be achieved by the creation of the kind of oppressive state he loathed.

On one occasion Orwell wrote a brief review of the most important anti-socialist manifesto of the 20th century, Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Orwell was honest enough to admit the truth of Hayek's warning that a "collectivist" economy gives to a "tyrannical minority" terrible potential power. But because he believed that the evils of laissez faire capitalism were even worse, all he could offer as an answer to Hayek was a politics where "the concept of right and wrong" had been restored. This is astonishingly lame. In the end, because Orwell's democratic socialism was founded on ethics rather than economics, it proved utterly ulnerable to the power of the neo-liberal critique.