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The Lion and the Unicorn, Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gregory Claeys
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Abstract

The Lion and the Unicorn has remained the most obscure of Orwell's major works, condemned both as a propagandistic attempt to enlist the British left in the war effort and for its erroneous prediction that the war could not been won without a socialist revolution in Britain. Yet it can also be read as Orwell's greatest single attempt to define the values of the democratic socialism to which he adhered from 1936 until his death. Patriotism represented for Orwell not the temporary need to fight for one's country, but the essential decency and democratic bias of British customs and institutions, which he believed could be wedded to socialism without producing totalitarianism. The preservation of these qualities he identified in particular with the working classes, which illuminates his views of them in his later works and demonstrates the continuity of Orwell's thought on this important political issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , April 1985 , pp. 186 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1985

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References

Notes

1 The text is in Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 2:74–133.Google Scholar

2 The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982)Google Scholar. All further references here will be to this edition, the introduction to which is very useful, if too brief, to situate the text more analytically.

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31 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 38–39Google Scholar. It is probably fair in this sense to say, as Keith Alldritt has done, that the proletariat embodied for Orwell the closest approximation to a “natural unified life” he was able to find (The Making of George Orwell, pp. 74–75).Google Scholar

32 The Complete Novels of George Orwell, p. 454.Google Scholar

33 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 40–41Google Scholar. In a review of Jack Hilton's English Ways Orwell emphasized of prewar English working-class life that “it was a good civilisation while it lasted, and the people who grew up in it will carry some of their gentleness and decency into the iron ages that are coming” (cited in Thomas, Edward, Orwell, p. 57Google Scholar). See also Orwell's comments in “Culture and Democracy,” Victory or Vested Interests?, ed. Cole, G. D. H. (London: Gollancz, 1942), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

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35 Collected Essays, 3:51–52Google Scholar. There is very little secondary literature on this book, though some reviews are reprinted in Meyers, Jeffrey, ed., George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 313–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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37 The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 113Google Scholar. See also “Patriots and Revolutionaries,” pp. 239–40.Google Scholar

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39 See the comments of Wood, Neal, Communism and the British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 73Google Scholar. John Wain, however, has argued that Orwell was not so unfair to the intelligentsia, and recants his own earlier views on this question (“Orwell and the Intelligentsia,” 75–76).Google Scholar

40 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 63–64Google Scholar. But in “Patriots and Revolutionaries” Orwell did argue of the middle class that their patriotism “when it comes to the pitch, is stronger than their sense of self-interest” (p. 235).

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45 Meyers, Jeffrey, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, p. 192Google Scholar. In part this impression can be gained from the fact that Orwell wrote that the aim of the book was “to reconcile patriotism with intelligence” (The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 30Google Scholar). Intelligence here is, however, intended in the general sense of The English Genius rather than in the more limited meaning of middle-class skills and education.

46 The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 45.Google Scholar

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52 Ibid., pp. 27, 47–48. Kubal, David, among others, has argued that The English People is more tentative on the question of socialismGoogle Scholar (Outside the Whale, p. 42).Google Scholar

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55 On interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four see in particular Crick, Bernard's introduction to his edition of the text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

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58 On Orwell and Burnham see Maddison, Michael, “1984: A Burnhamite Fantasy?” Political Quarterly, 32 (1961), 71–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 164–65.Google Scholar

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64 Ibid., 3:424.

65 For the arguments against this view, see Lee, Robert A., Orwell's Fiction, p. 123.Google Scholar

66 Orwell, George, Animal Farm (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 15, 30, 66–7, 104–105, 75–76.Google Scholar

67 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 175, 210Google Scholar; Crick, Bernard, ed., Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 31.Google Scholar

68 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 11, 55, 59–61Google Scholar. This primitive patriotism is of course also exercised in public “Hate” sessions.

69 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 60–1, 74–77Google Scholar; Collected Essays, 3:435Google Scholar. The separateness of the proles from the Party is in this sense essential to Orwell's whole argument.

70 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 175Google Scholar. See Ashe, Geoffrey, “Second Thoughts on 1984”, pp. 289–90Google Scholar; Lief, Ruth Ann, Homage to Oceania, pp. 39–49Google Scholar; Thomas, Edward, George Orwell, pp. 90–92Google Scholar; Harris, Harold, “Orwell's Essays and 1984”, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

71 Collected Essays, 4:214Google Scholar. Compare, however, ibid., p. 424. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the Party itself is corrupt in at least three ways: laxity of sexual morals, persistence of thoughtcrime, and the madness of those like O'Brien who suffer from delusions of grandeur.

72 Orwell's fears of a correlation between political despotism and the possession of nuclear weapons are expressed in the Collected Essays, 4:424.Google Scholar

73 Ibid., 2:299.

74 To have suggested that members of the intelligentsia might someday lead the proles would have made Orwell's hopes much more firmly evident in Nineteen Eighty-Four, if jeopardizing the moral complexity of its construction.