George Orwell and the Incoherence of Democratic Socialism

Michael Makovi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: George Orwell's famous fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty Four were intended to advocate democratic socialism by portraying undemocratic forms of socialism as totalitarian. For Orwell, democracy was a political institution which would limit the abuse of power. But there are several problems with democratic socialism which ensure its failure. In Orwell's novel A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell's views of economics and politics are inconsistent and conflicting in a way that ensures democratic socialism will not succeed on Orwell's terms. Democratic socialism in general is criticized according to F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and John Jewkes's The New Ordeal by Planning, whose arguments differ crucially from those against market socialism by Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny. An economic analysis of the political institutions of democratic socialism shows that democratic socialism must necessarily fail for political (not economic) reasons even if nobody in authority has ill-intentions or abuses their power.

Keywords: Orwell; Hayek; democratic socialism; market socialism; totalitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B24 B25 B31 B51 B53 D70 I2 I20 J00 J20 J30 J47 P10 P20 P30 P50 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/62527/1/MPRA_paper_62527.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/66282/1/MPRA_paper_66282.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70111/1/MPRA_paper_70111.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70160/1/MPRA_paper_70160.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:62527

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().