George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell’s work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell’s written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality, philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell’s corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions.

While Orwell is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and the philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. Barry illuminates Orwell’s philosophical sympathies and contributions that have either gone unnoticed or been underappreciated. Philosophers interested in Orwell now have a text that explores many of the philosophical themes in his work and Orwell’s readers now have a text that makes the case for regarding him as a worthy philosopher as well as one of the greatest Anglophone writers of the 20th century.

Peter Brian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of Evil and Moral Psychology and The Fiction of Evil as well as several papers in ethics, applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. He has contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, and George Orwell Studies.