Wigan Pier or The Rocky Road to Socialism: George Orwell and the Romantic Critique of Industrialism.

Abstract

This paper argues that George Orwell’s Socialism was not arrived at in a smooth, linear or unproblematic trajectory. Rather, it was the outcome of a fraught experiential process, conceived of, first and foremost, as an ethical mandate to “see and smell” the material conditions of degradation into which decadent capitalism had issued. This experiential dimension had to be complemented by a critical elucidation of class prejudice in its different manifestations and also, crucially, of the real blocks to action engendered by official leftist outlooks. Orwell’s conclusion is a wholehearted endorsement of the romantic critique of industrialism found in conservative authors such as Carlyle and Lawrence: a frontal assault on the instrumental logic of modern progress guided by an organic ideal of society