nicky_m98's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
The essays started out great and slowly got worse. I loved the first essay ‘England your England’ and also found ‘Shopkeepers at War’ very interesting however ‘The English Revolution’ repeated a lot of the same ideas and information that were included in the first two essays and it made it harder to read. I still really enjoyed reading Orwell’s idea of Socialism though and am glad I read this.
freddie_and_the_reading's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
notwellread's review against another edition
4.0
Orwell acknowledges this elusive ‘commonality’ to English culture, but I disagree that so much has changed with the times (“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840?” – p.13). I think something of the spirit of a country must stay the same. For England in particular, although our history is turbulent, it is a continuous one – the island has never been deserted or undergone a genocide that would rub out the previous population completely (traces of the Britons, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons have all survived despite the historical adversity against them). The ‘fundamental’ personality, whatever it is, stays the same.
Orwell tends to talk down the English intellectual culture, and continues this in the second and third parts with his disdain for the ‘intelligensia’, the class of which he was originally a member. However, some of his generalisations are objectionable: we do have notable philosophers (More, Hobbes, Hume, Locke), in conjunction with our true talent: English people specialise as writers – that’s where we excel in creativity. However, Orwell does address this later on. I strongly disagree that literature can’t cross frontiers (p.26) – how could Orwell have believed this given the widespread reception and applicability of his own work? So many books deal with political and social issues that span multiple countries, and any serious literature dealing with the human condition is necessarily cross-culturally applicable. The cynosure of English literature – Shakespeare – is often called ‘the universal poet’, and his works have been shown to adapt extremely well to settings in every culture and time period imaginable. Although any work of art may be susceptible to its cultural context, ultimately all you need is a translation, if that.
Even small characteristics can be telling of common mentality. Cruelty to animals is a distinct difference between nations that Orwell downplays, but probably seems more significant to the modern reader. His point about the English as hobbyists is true – crosswords specifically are still very popular. We resist regimentation, unlike the French and Germans (although the common dilemma of the acceptability of murder ‘for your country’ still applies to us). ‘Gentleness’ gets a mention, and I think this is a valid point. We still don’t learn foreign languages, and lean towards the old comfort of ‘splendid isolation’. I think that, as Orwell says on p.12, it’s fine and warranted to identify general differences between countries – we are very distinct, especially in Europe. However, Orwell’s view makes Englishmen at large seem simple-minded, which is not the case – even where we’re overly concerned with the trivial over the practical, it’s still better to be engaged than idle, and doesn’t match up with our merits and achievements on paper.
Orwell also downplays our history a little too much: of course we should avoid the mentality of the jingoistic minority he describes (p.18), who sound like UKIPpers to me, but I think most people could still name a military victory – Waterloo and Trafalgar come to mind, or Agincourt if you want a land battle specifically. (He’s right about Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade though – the same poem would not have found popularity in another country.) Although the navy has always been important to us, we don’t place them in the same esteem as Americans do with their servicemen: though I think this is a modern phenomenon over there, we can see that military men get a bad rap in Austen (General and Captain Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and in Pride and Prejudice, Colonel Fitzwilliam and, of course, George Wickham), excepting Colonel Brandon.
He points out that naval victories are marked out in our history, but that there’s no such thing as a ‘naval dictatorship’; I’m inclined to say he’s right with a view to ‘recent’ history (I mean the last two or three centuries), but I would cite the Athenians’ Delian League (in the 5th century BC) as a counter-example – naval dictatorships are possible; they’re just uncommon. Maybe a better point would be that naval dictatorships tend to be more about imposition of authority on other states than in one’s homeland – a point about thalassocracy and colonialism (both British and Athenian) could work here. His points about the rule of law are sound, though I fear more rich people are willing to sell us out now (as the Russia-Brexit connection sadly demonstrates).
In times of crisis, we band together, but this is not always enough to avert crisis, let alone to incite real change (the cause that Orwell champions in the latter parts of this mega-essay). We do the same thing, not the right thing (p.27) – this is a problem when the people in charge don’t have public interests in mind (a problem Orwell addresses later). I agree with his problems about ‘mentality’, but I think Orwell may be selling us short because of his aversion to class differences: he wishes to celebrate the working class (which is understandable) but this leads him to diminish the middle and upper classes, almost to the point of pretending that that’s all there is. He shouldn’t disregard the historical achievements of high culture, or of the learned mentality, and we shouldn’t either – we should call England ‘Albion’ more often.
On the bright side, our sense of togetherness saves us from overt hostility. It also means that we’re mostly tolerant of others, and that differences of opinion don’t have to carry too much resentment at the end of the day.
On the other hand, the rich, even if they’re not deliberately hostile, are primarily interested in their own advantages, and are not afraid to sabotage their own people to get them: they were (and are) self-interested, but not necessarily pro-Fascist. His complaints about the rich and their lack of scruples over their business decisions (see the quote above) reminds me a little of today’s fiasco over selling arms to Saudi Arabia, even if they are purportedly allies to the west. However, once war is imminent, surely businesses will opt to focus on arms and metal industries, and the government can become ‘patrons’ of sort and commission what’s needed out of the military budget, so this needn’t be an insurmountable problem. Orwell’s solution is not the only solution. However, he also notes problems with the media (p.52): “the press…lives on its advertisements and therefore is interested in keeping trade conditions normal”: this is still very much a problem today.
Orwell compares England to a Victorian family (p.30): everyone has a right to feel included, but the wrong ‘relatives’ hold sway, in a difficult, stiff, awkward environment. The ‘good’ people, in Orwell’s eyes (generally young, always working-class) have little to no power. I think this is a critical but mostly fair assessment of British culture: then and now, we were really ‘made’ by the Victorians and their mores, and as a naturally (small-‘c’) conservative country not much has changed. In fact, this sort of structure may have worked rather well in the 18th and 19th centuries, before (according to Orwell) the ruling class qualitatively deteriorated as they became less relevant. In Ancient Greece, aristocratic influence declined as democracy became popular; similarly, as the English middle class gained political influence through votes, the aristocracy’s importance declined, combined with the ‘social decay’ of businessmen entering the upper class and ruining their exclusivity. It doesn’t help that the older people who dominate the ‘Victorian family’ structure (p.54-5) tend to be rather clueless about change, and with the passing of time they don’t know what’s going on (and this has never become clearer than today, when so many MPs are clueless about how the Internet works, and the role it plays in people’s lives). It’s only natural that they become Conservatives who long for the ‘good old days’.
However, Orwell sees the classes as static, which I feel may be an oversimplification that favours his own view of the classes ‘at war’: the working class become middle-class over time, in habits and economically, so they don’t take political action as one might expect – they either work for the prospect of a better life, or don’t care enough to do so – but that isn’t in line with most socialist discourse.
Leading on to the relationship between the economy and the war effort, there’s much focus on weapons manufacturing and how to stimulate it: however, I feel like Orwell slightly twists the narrative again for his own argument. We were undeniably old-fashioned in our tactics in 1914, especially in the use of horses, bayonets, and the like, but by the end of the war we’d progressed remarkably, inventing tracer bullets, aircraft carries, and the tank. (This is not to mention perhaps the most significant invention, radar, which was not conceived until the Second World War.) There was a big difference between 1914 and 1918: we learned our lesson, although we would have to learn it again in the Second World War. Orwell’s criticism is fair, but I feel he was neglectful on the point of adaptation.
Another point that could use elaboration is the navy: part of our disadvantage was that, militarily speaking, seapower was less relevant by that time than it had been in the 18th and 19th centuries, and is still in decline today. This inevitably threw the empire (and its governing class) into imbalance, creating another obstacle for the aristocracy. In conjunction with this, I disagree that, as Orwell says, the navy is less aristocratic than the army – it’s definitely favoured by the wealthier classes, then and now, and generally considered more specialised, but this may have changed over time (today the working class dominates the army). Since this, again, demonstrates the relationship between military activity and social class, I think this a relevant point. There have always been at least a handful of wealthy patriots, and it has historically never been abnormal for noblemen to die in battle (although, for obvious reasons, they tend to have a lower mortality rate than foot soldiers).
Given all of this context, we generally expect the rich to be free market conservatives (then and now), but their position does not necessarily lend to a proclivity for the far right. The Nazis provided government-funded public projects (p.49), showcasing their collectivist wartime streak (or, controversially, the ‘socialism’ in the ‘national socialism’ misnomer), but the rich liked that they remained rich. Fascism is alien to the upper class (p.35) because they’re not disciplinarian or, indeed, ideological in general, though it’s worth noting Edward VIII’s Hitlerian sympathies, not mentioned here. This may not have been the long-term state of affairs, but perhaps in wartime people are more prone to take things one day at a time. Fascism is efficient through state control, and benefits from showcasing this, but doesn’t need to interfere with the rich, although there are cases where this can and does happen. I’m inclined to think that the Conservative Party today, despite appearances, may not be so partial to fascism either, but more motivated by an opportunistic desire to ‘stick it to the left’, as with the American Republican Party (demonstrated by their cosying up to the DUP), perhaps spurred on by a false sense of security, accustomed to being the ones in power themselves. Even in the war the upper class wouldn’t give up their privileges (p.57), which is quite sad. I can understand Orwell’s concerns here, and it almost makes me glad that the hardships of the war forced things to turn around.
Orwell is right that one of our great weaknesses as a country is our anti-intellectual streak (pp.39-40), particularly in the working class: we’ve never had ‘room’ for intellectuals, in contrast with France, and we treat ‘cleverness’ as a cause for suspicion. I don’t think many would find this assessment surprising: the common culture is never intellectual, and intellectual life is inherently isolating (involving lots of quiet reading and lectures with only the like-minded in attendance). They have more in common with their European counterparts, although the latter are generally far less ostracised.
On the positive side, despite this problem, we still manage reasonable self-awareness about our own collective flaws, often where other countries tend to self-aggrandise. In fact, I would link this trait to the pacifistic misjudgements of Orwell’s time: I find it hard to believe that some pacifists were really pro-Hitler (p.62) when the image of fascism relies so heavily on militarism, but if we take Orwell at his word this corroborates my theory. I think the British were aware of their own militaristic shortcomings, paired with the guilty conscience borne by an imperial history, and, although I make no excuse for them, this may have produced the disastrous foreign policy of the time.
This is where things become more difficult for reviewing purposes: I can see Orwell’s logic, and how the socialist system could have worked, but this doesn’t make it the only effective path (and we know with hindsight it proved not to be), or that, if it had been established, it would have provided a successful system after the war. His points about socialism in wartime are valid, but a capitalist government can achieve the same things by demanding production (or offering money in return for it) quite easily. We live in a capitalist state, but not an entirely free-market one – the government still has leverage, albeit through capitalistic means, and ultimately this is in large part the approach that they actually implemented.
Orwell’s p.92 point about the distinction between being defeated and accepting defeat is extremely powerful, but also distinctly Churchillian – a figure he neglects to mention. I don’t expect him to predict the future, but I wonder where Orwell would have fit him into all this: like Nelson, he exemplifies the upper-class naval officer leading Britain through the war, despite being the opposite of a socialist, and despite typifying the old ruling class that Orwell argued was dying out. He seems to be the main weakness to the argument. So, why was Churchill ultimately the one who took down the Nazis? I’m not sure if there’s a consensus among historians, but it seems to me he simply did what needed to be done while the war was ongoing, but was not necessarily concerned with working towards a more egalitarian society, and certainly didn’t share Orwell’s views (on the economy or on, say, the liberation of India). This attitude worked spectacularly in wartime, but did not make him popular PM after the fact. Ultimately, I think it came down to strategy rather than ideology, though Orwell would probably not be happy with that conclusion.
Orwell tends to talk down the English intellectual culture, and continues this in the second and third parts with his disdain for the ‘intelligensia’, the class of which he was originally a member. However, some of his generalisations are objectionable: we do have notable philosophers (More, Hobbes, Hume, Locke), in conjunction with our true talent: English people specialise as writers – that’s where we excel in creativity. However, Orwell does address this later on. I strongly disagree that literature can’t cross frontiers (p.26) – how could Orwell have believed this given the widespread reception and applicability of his own work? So many books deal with political and social issues that span multiple countries, and any serious literature dealing with the human condition is necessarily cross-culturally applicable. The cynosure of English literature – Shakespeare – is often called ‘the universal poet’, and his works have been shown to adapt extremely well to settings in every culture and time period imaginable. Although any work of art may be susceptible to its cultural context, ultimately all you need is a translation, if that.
Even small characteristics can be telling of common mentality. Cruelty to animals is a distinct difference between nations that Orwell downplays, but probably seems more significant to the modern reader. His point about the English as hobbyists is true – crosswords specifically are still very popular. We resist regimentation, unlike the French and Germans (although the common dilemma of the acceptability of murder ‘for your country’ still applies to us). ‘Gentleness’ gets a mention, and I think this is a valid point. We still don’t learn foreign languages, and lean towards the old comfort of ‘splendid isolation’. I think that, as Orwell says on p.12, it’s fine and warranted to identify general differences between countries – we are very distinct, especially in Europe. However, Orwell’s view makes Englishmen at large seem simple-minded, which is not the case – even where we’re overly concerned with the trivial over the practical, it’s still better to be engaged than idle, and doesn’t match up with our merits and achievements on paper.
Orwell also downplays our history a little too much: of course we should avoid the mentality of the jingoistic minority he describes (p.18), who sound like UKIPpers to me, but I think most people could still name a military victory – Waterloo and Trafalgar come to mind, or Agincourt if you want a land battle specifically. (He’s right about Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade though – the same poem would not have found popularity in another country.) Although the navy has always been important to us, we don’t place them in the same esteem as Americans do with their servicemen: though I think this is a modern phenomenon over there, we can see that military men get a bad rap in Austen (General and Captain Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and in Pride and Prejudice, Colonel Fitzwilliam and, of course, George Wickham), excepting Colonel Brandon.
He points out that naval victories are marked out in our history, but that there’s no such thing as a ‘naval dictatorship’; I’m inclined to say he’s right with a view to ‘recent’ history (I mean the last two or three centuries), but I would cite the Athenians’ Delian League (in the 5th century BC) as a counter-example – naval dictatorships are possible; they’re just uncommon. Maybe a better point would be that naval dictatorships tend to be more about imposition of authority on other states than in one’s homeland – a point about thalassocracy and colonialism (both British and Athenian) could work here. His points about the rule of law are sound, though I fear more rich people are willing to sell us out now (as the Russia-Brexit connection sadly demonstrates).
In times of crisis, we band together, but this is not always enough to avert crisis, let alone to incite real change (the cause that Orwell champions in the latter parts of this mega-essay). We do the same thing, not the right thing (p.27) – this is a problem when the people in charge don’t have public interests in mind (a problem Orwell addresses later). I agree with his problems about ‘mentality’, but I think Orwell may be selling us short because of his aversion to class differences: he wishes to celebrate the working class (which is understandable) but this leads him to diminish the middle and upper classes, almost to the point of pretending that that’s all there is. He shouldn’t disregard the historical achievements of high culture, or of the learned mentality, and we shouldn’t either – we should call England ‘Albion’ more often.
On the bright side, our sense of togetherness saves us from overt hostility. It also means that we’re mostly tolerant of others, and that differences of opinion don’t have to carry too much resentment at the end of the day.
On the other hand, the rich, even if they’re not deliberately hostile, are primarily interested in their own advantages, and are not afraid to sabotage their own people to get them: they were (and are) self-interested, but not necessarily pro-Fascist. His complaints about the rich and their lack of scruples over their business decisions (see the quote above) reminds me a little of today’s fiasco over selling arms to Saudi Arabia, even if they are purportedly allies to the west. However, once war is imminent, surely businesses will opt to focus on arms and metal industries, and the government can become ‘patrons’ of sort and commission what’s needed out of the military budget, so this needn’t be an insurmountable problem. Orwell’s solution is not the only solution. However, he also notes problems with the media (p.52): “the press…lives on its advertisements and therefore is interested in keeping trade conditions normal”: this is still very much a problem today.
Orwell compares England to a Victorian family (p.30): everyone has a right to feel included, but the wrong ‘relatives’ hold sway, in a difficult, stiff, awkward environment. The ‘good’ people, in Orwell’s eyes (generally young, always working-class) have little to no power. I think this is a critical but mostly fair assessment of British culture: then and now, we were really ‘made’ by the Victorians and their mores, and as a naturally (small-‘c’) conservative country not much has changed. In fact, this sort of structure may have worked rather well in the 18th and 19th centuries, before (according to Orwell) the ruling class qualitatively deteriorated as they became less relevant. In Ancient Greece, aristocratic influence declined as democracy became popular; similarly, as the English middle class gained political influence through votes, the aristocracy’s importance declined, combined with the ‘social decay’ of businessmen entering the upper class and ruining their exclusivity. It doesn’t help that the older people who dominate the ‘Victorian family’ structure (p.54-5) tend to be rather clueless about change, and with the passing of time they don’t know what’s going on (and this has never become clearer than today, when so many MPs are clueless about how the Internet works, and the role it plays in people’s lives). It’s only natural that they become Conservatives who long for the ‘good old days’.
However, Orwell sees the classes as static, which I feel may be an oversimplification that favours his own view of the classes ‘at war’: the working class become middle-class over time, in habits and economically, so they don’t take political action as one might expect – they either work for the prospect of a better life, or don’t care enough to do so – but that isn’t in line with most socialist discourse.
Leading on to the relationship between the economy and the war effort, there’s much focus on weapons manufacturing and how to stimulate it: however, I feel like Orwell slightly twists the narrative again for his own argument. We were undeniably old-fashioned in our tactics in 1914, especially in the use of horses, bayonets, and the like, but by the end of the war we’d progressed remarkably, inventing tracer bullets, aircraft carries, and the tank. (This is not to mention perhaps the most significant invention, radar, which was not conceived until the Second World War.) There was a big difference between 1914 and 1918: we learned our lesson, although we would have to learn it again in the Second World War. Orwell’s criticism is fair, but I feel he was neglectful on the point of adaptation.
Another point that could use elaboration is the navy: part of our disadvantage was that, militarily speaking, seapower was less relevant by that time than it had been in the 18th and 19th centuries, and is still in decline today. This inevitably threw the empire (and its governing class) into imbalance, creating another obstacle for the aristocracy. In conjunction with this, I disagree that, as Orwell says, the navy is less aristocratic than the army – it’s definitely favoured by the wealthier classes, then and now, and generally considered more specialised, but this may have changed over time (today the working class dominates the army). Since this, again, demonstrates the relationship between military activity and social class, I think this a relevant point. There have always been at least a handful of wealthy patriots, and it has historically never been abnormal for noblemen to die in battle (although, for obvious reasons, they tend to have a lower mortality rate than foot soldiers).
Given all of this context, we generally expect the rich to be free market conservatives (then and now), but their position does not necessarily lend to a proclivity for the far right. The Nazis provided government-funded public projects (p.49), showcasing their collectivist wartime streak (or, controversially, the ‘socialism’ in the ‘national socialism’ misnomer), but the rich liked that they remained rich. Fascism is alien to the upper class (p.35) because they’re not disciplinarian or, indeed, ideological in general, though it’s worth noting Edward VIII’s Hitlerian sympathies, not mentioned here. This may not have been the long-term state of affairs, but perhaps in wartime people are more prone to take things one day at a time. Fascism is efficient through state control, and benefits from showcasing this, but doesn’t need to interfere with the rich, although there are cases where this can and does happen. I’m inclined to think that the Conservative Party today, despite appearances, may not be so partial to fascism either, but more motivated by an opportunistic desire to ‘stick it to the left’, as with the American Republican Party (demonstrated by their cosying up to the DUP), perhaps spurred on by a false sense of security, accustomed to being the ones in power themselves. Even in the war the upper class wouldn’t give up their privileges (p.57), which is quite sad. I can understand Orwell’s concerns here, and it almost makes me glad that the hardships of the war forced things to turn around.
Orwell is right that one of our great weaknesses as a country is our anti-intellectual streak (pp.39-40), particularly in the working class: we’ve never had ‘room’ for intellectuals, in contrast with France, and we treat ‘cleverness’ as a cause for suspicion. I don’t think many would find this assessment surprising: the common culture is never intellectual, and intellectual life is inherently isolating (involving lots of quiet reading and lectures with only the like-minded in attendance). They have more in common with their European counterparts, although the latter are generally far less ostracised.
On the positive side, despite this problem, we still manage reasonable self-awareness about our own collective flaws, often where other countries tend to self-aggrandise. In fact, I would link this trait to the pacifistic misjudgements of Orwell’s time: I find it hard to believe that some pacifists were really pro-Hitler (p.62) when the image of fascism relies so heavily on militarism, but if we take Orwell at his word this corroborates my theory. I think the British were aware of their own militaristic shortcomings, paired with the guilty conscience borne by an imperial history, and, although I make no excuse for them, this may have produced the disastrous foreign policy of the time.
This is where things become more difficult for reviewing purposes: I can see Orwell’s logic, and how the socialist system could have worked, but this doesn’t make it the only effective path (and we know with hindsight it proved not to be), or that, if it had been established, it would have provided a successful system after the war. His points about socialism in wartime are valid, but a capitalist government can achieve the same things by demanding production (or offering money in return for it) quite easily. We live in a capitalist state, but not an entirely free-market one – the government still has leverage, albeit through capitalistic means, and ultimately this is in large part the approach that they actually implemented.
Orwell’s p.92 point about the distinction between being defeated and accepting defeat is extremely powerful, but also distinctly Churchillian – a figure he neglects to mention. I don’t expect him to predict the future, but I wonder where Orwell would have fit him into all this: like Nelson, he exemplifies the upper-class naval officer leading Britain through the war, despite being the opposite of a socialist, and despite typifying the old ruling class that Orwell argued was dying out. He seems to be the main weakness to the argument. So, why was Churchill ultimately the one who took down the Nazis? I’m not sure if there’s a consensus among historians, but it seems to me he simply did what needed to be done while the war was ongoing, but was not necessarily concerned with working towards a more egalitarian society, and certainly didn’t share Orwell’s views (on the economy or on, say, the liberation of India). This attitude worked spectacularly in wartime, but did not make him popular PM after the fact. Ultimately, I think it came down to strategy rather than ideology, though Orwell would probably not be happy with that conclusion.