Reconsidering 'Animal Farm' at 80

Otago Daily Times

7 hours ago

The legacy of Animal Farm is author George Orwell's enduring commitment to socialist revolution, Glenn Burgess writes.
During the early years of World War 2, George Orwell believed England's revolutionary moment had arrived.
The defeat at Dunkirk had discredited the country's ruling elite. Their bungling had left England on the verge of invasion and defeat.
To win the war and defeat fascism, a social revolution was needed, as Orwell explained in his socialist manifesto, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). Now was the time, he argued, to turn "this war into a revolutionary war and England into a socialist democracy".
Orwell believed this revolution, though likely to be violent, would also conserve much, setting free "the native genius of the English people". England's long liberal tradition would be retained and enhanced, and the revolution would be more patriotic than class-based: "From the English-speaking culture ... a society of free and equal
human beings will ultimately arise."
However, while Orwell never overtly abandoned his commitment to socialist revolution, he quickly came to lose heart in its imminence. He came to think the war would defeat fascism but not totalitarianism, and that real socialism still lay a long way in the future.
In this mood, he wrote Animal Farm in the last months of 1943 and first half of 1944 — with much support and possibly substantial input from his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. August 17, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the novel's publication.
In September 1944, just after completing Animal Farm (it would not be published for another year), Orwell explained some of his wider purposes in a letter to the American intellectual and fellow liberal socialist, Dwight Macdonald.
The Soviet Union, Orwell thought, really did provide people with hope in a socialist future, and for that reason it would not be good to see it destroyed.
But at the same time, working people in the West needed "to become disillusioned about it and to realise that they must build their own Socialist movement without Russian interference".
The success of this might then have a "regenerative influence upon Russia" itself.
It was while writing Animal Farm that Orwell first learned something of substance about the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin and his dystopian satire, We, published in 1924.
That book became a significant influence for Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Though Orwell did not read We in full until late 1945, he knew a little about the book from Gleb Struve's anthology 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature in early 1944, and wrote to Struve to tell him it had whetted his appetite to know more about Zamyatin.
Struve's anthology quotes a passage that Orwell would pick out as important. In it, one character declares that "our revolution was the last and there can never be another". To which his interlocutor responds: "Just like numbers, revolutions are infinite and there can never be a final one."
When he adapted Animal Farm for the radio in 1946, Orwell had Napoleon the pig say: "When there has been one rebellion, there can never be another." But he must surely have had in mind the reply: "There can always be another."
It was again to Macdonald that Orwell spelled out the implications of Animal Farm in December 1946. Though "primarily" a "satire on the Russian revolution", Orwell was clear it had "wider application" as a denunciation of "that kind of revolution (violent, conspiratorial) that can only lead to a change of masters".
Revolutions can improve things, he wrote, but only when "the masses ... know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as ... they have done their job".
Orwell had earlier written in September 1944 that "all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure".
They all fail because perfection is beyond human grasp — the challenge is to fail better and in ways that improve things, as he told Macdonald: "If people think I am defending the status quo [in Animal Farm ], that is ... because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship and or laissez
faire capitalism."
Animal Farm is one of those very short and very accessible books that defy easy interpretation. Classic examples are Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1532) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516).
Though political, they are not manifestos, unlike Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn — that book sought to mobilise people behind a clear vision of an attainable better future.
Animal Farm , in contrast, is a melancholy reflection on the corruption of revolution, and the need to keep looking for a better one. — theconversation.com
■ Glenn Burgess is a professor of early modern history at the University of Hull.