Concept
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Overview
Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian speculative fiction novel by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final completed book. Thematically, it centres on totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours. Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been regarded as a classic and has been acknowledged for its impact on twentieth-century literature.
The story takes place in a fictional future. The year is believed to be 1984, but this is uncertain. Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Orwell described his book as a "satire", and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable", while also stating he believed "that something resembling it could arrive". The novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated. Parallels have been drawn between the novel and real-world totalitarianism, mass surveillance and violations of freedom of expression, among other themes.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of dystopian and political fiction. It popularised "Orwellian" as an adjective, and many terms used in it have entered common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "Thought Police", "thoughtcrime", and "Newspeak", as well as the expression "2 + 2 = 5". Time magazine included it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors' list and number 6 on the readers' list. In 2003 it was listed at number 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. It has been adapted across media, most famously as a film in 1984 starring John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton and Richard Burton.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In the welcoming of new fact, and in the suspicion of dogmatism as regards the universe at large, the modern spirit should, I think, be accepted as wholly an advance. But both in its practical pretensions and in its theoretical despair it seems to me to go too far. Most of what is greatest in man is called forth in response to the thwarting of his hopes by immutable natural obstacles; by the pretence of omnipotence…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
States what Nineteen Eighty-Four is; the author is tied to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the knowledge graph.
A French artist, indifferent to politics, attentive only to his painting, suddenly finds himself called upon to shoot Germans, who, his friends assure him, are a disgrace to the human race. A German musician, equally unknowing, is called upon to shoot the perfidious Frenchman. Why cannot the two men declare a mutual neutrality? Why not leave war to those who like it and bring it on? Yet if the two men declared a…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
States what Nineteen Eighty-Four is; the author is tied to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the knowledge graph.
On one hand, thinking deprived of its normal course takes refuge in academic specialism, comparable in its way to what is called scholasticism. On the other hand, the physical agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
States what Nineteen Eighty-Four is.
Philosophers who discussed Nineteen Eighty-Four
Related ideas
- Antisemitism
- BBC News
- George Orwell
- Anarchism
- G. K. Chesterton
- Great Britain
- Cult of personality
- Neologism
- Joseph Stalin
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Censorship
- Internet Archive
- Leon Trotsky
- Spanish Civil War
- Marxism
- The Guardian
- BBC
- Providence, Rhode Island
- Noam Chomsky
- October Revolution
- Christopher Hitchens
- Propaganda
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Place in the tradition
Part of Descriptivist theory of names.