George Orwell as a Public Choice Economist

Michael Makovi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: George Orwell is famous for his two final fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These two works are sometimes understood to defend capitalism against socialism. But as Orwell was a committed socialist, this could not have been his intention. Orwell's criticisms were directed not against socialism per se but against the Soviet Union and similarly totalitarian regimes. Instead, these fictions were intended as Public Choice-style investigations into which political systems furnished suitable incentive structures to prevent the abuse of power. This is demonstrated through a study of Orwell's non-fiction works, where his opinions and intentions are more explicit.

Keywords: Orwell; Public Choice; socialism; totalitarianism; Neoconservatism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B24 B31 D72 P20 P30 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-pke and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/64161/2/MPRA_paper_64161.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/67244/2/MPRA_paper_64161.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/67426/1/MPRA_paper_67426.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: George Orwell as a Public Choice Economist (2015)
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:64161

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 ().