PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Thomas Pynchon has a new introduction to George Orwell's 1984. A snippet:

What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was working on 1984 is Orwell's despair over the postwar state of "socialism." .. Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. "For somewhat complex reasons," he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of 1984 , "nearly the whole of the English left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as 'Socialist,' while silently recognising that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by 'Socialism' in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like 'democracy' can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously." We recognise this "sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse - the identification and analysis of doublethink.

I've always been convinced that this theme in Orwell was much inspired by his reading of Hayek's chapter eleven, "The End of Truth" in The Road to Serfdom. Orwell read and reviewed Hayek's book in 1944, during during the period in which he was writing 1984. The title of Pynchon's piece in the Guardian is "The Road to 1984". I've never seen a detailed scholarly investigation into this matter -- if only such work had any prospect of being done in our contemporary universities.

UPDATE: Amazingly, the Amazon.com Sales Rank for Hayek's The Road to Serfdom continues strong at # 1249. Even more amazingly, Orwell's 1984 is ranked # 382. And of course, there are other editions of both books which are selling other additional copies.

Posted by Greg Ransom