In the decade following his demoralised return in 1927 from service with the colonial police in Burma, George Orwell quite determinedly widened his circle of experience. Afflicted with a condition of 'bad conscience' in Burma, he explains, he was driven by the need to escape 'not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants' (148). This feeling dictated the kinds of experience he would pursue: living on the rough with tramps and beggars in England; menial work in the cellars of fancy Parisian restaurants; wandering the streets of poverty in England's depressed North; fighting with the Catalonian workers' militia during the Spanish Civil War. Although Orwell recalls embarking on this programme out of a commitment to 'failure' - 'Every suspicion of self-advancement . . . seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying' - these ventures paradoxically inaugurated his success as a nonfiction writer: the authority of direct experience strengthened the impression of truth in his reportage about circles of social and political life remote from most of his readers.

George Orwell considered Animal Farm (1945) his breakthrough, the book which brought together his gifts as a novelist with his commitment as a political writer. 'Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole', he wrote in his 1946 essay 'Why I Write'. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, turned the storyteller and journalist into a political writer, and the experience of fighting in that war alongside idealistic young Trotskyists and anarchists made him deeply hostile to the Soviet Union. He felt that Stalin had damaged the Republican cause in Spain in his effort to control it, just as he had betrayed the revolution at home. As Orwell saw it, the Soviet Union had become a brutal dictatorship built around a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. He was especially incensed by the apologetics of its Western sympathisers, who felt that the cause of building socialism in a backward country excused many abuses. As he saw it, the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany in the 1930s made his own political commitments inescapable. 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it'. Above all, he adds, 'what I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art' (CEJL, 1:28).

In May 1949, the American journal, Partisan Review, carried a contribution by George Orwell to the controversy surrounding the award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound earlier that year. Pound's fascist sympathies, his violent anti-Semitism and his wartime collaboration inevitably called into question the judges' decision so soon after the war. In his contribution, Orwell argued that as far as he was concerned if Pound's poetry was judged deserving of the prize then it should be awarded to him regardless of his politics. Nevertheless, he went on to insist that 'one ought to keep Pound's career in memory and not feel that his ideas are made respectable by the mere fact of winning a literary prize'. Pound, he pointed out, was 'an ardent follower of Mussolini . . . and never concealed it'. His embrace of fascism was quite open and unashamed, although Orwell believed that his underlying motivation was, in fact, hatred of Britain and the United States, and more particularly, of 'the Jews'. Pound's wartime broadcasts for fascist Italy 'were disgusting' and Orwell remembered 'at least one in which he approved the massacre of the East European Jews and “warned” the American Jews that their turn was coming presently'. If the murder of the Jews 'in the gas vans' had still been going on, then the decision to award Pound the prize would have been 'undesirable', but this was no longer the case. If the judges believed Pound's poetry worthy of the prize then he should receive it, but, Orwell went on, they should have stated 'more firmly' that Pound's political opinions were 'evil'. The very deliberate use of the word 'evil' here is quite unusual in Orwell's writings. He made the point in an aside that he personally thought Pound's poetry 'entirely spurious'.

George Orwell is a central figure in recent debates about the relationship between contemporary academics and their publics. Since the late 1980s, the notion of the public intellectual has spread through bestselling books, the use of the term by journalists, various 'top public intellectual' contests, academic research and even a PhD programme in the 'Public Intellectual'. Long before the currently popular term 'public intellectual' was ever used, Orwell helped create and then exemplified the role of the independent 'gadfly' intellectual who writes clearly and with conviction to a general educated audience. Recent commentators on the public intellectual have not emphasised two of the most important and interesting aspects of the reception of Orwell. Orwell was not an academic, but his ideas have entered into university debates and discussion in a very substantial way without there being an Orwell 'school of thought' or a formal canonisation of him as an academic 'founder' of a discipline. Second, Orwell is at the very centre of debates about the politics of the literary critic as an 'amateur' non-professionalised vocation in this age dominated by the influence of the university professor. Each of these two questions will be discussed below, before ending on some brief thoughts on how Orwell can help us think about the possibilities of what might be called the 'global public literary intellectual'.

The experience of reading George Orwell's essays is special - bracing, illuminating, invigorating. It is not the specific judgements Orwell makes as much as the action of his thinking and the movement of his feeling that distinguish him. He took stands on issues; he had convictions and expressed his principles. But this is not the defining fact about Orwell as a literary figure, as an artist. He is a great essayist because of the experience he creates for readers - a provocation of the intellect, an education of the intelligence, which includes but exceeds the positions he advocated. Orwell aims in his essays to make readers more self-conscious, more aware of how we think and feel.

A demanding writer, Orwell requires close attention and incites self-scrutiny. In his literary enterprise, if not in his style, he is akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson, for in his essays Orwell exhibits 'man thinking' (Emerson's phrase in 'The American Scholar', 1837), and the Emerson-like creation of unorthodox thinking is his goal. Self-reliance and non-conformity: these are Emerson's central terms, and they signify Orwell's ambition and activity as a writer of essays as well.

The immediate impact of Orwell's sentences and paragraphs is not Emersonian: Emerson is more allusive and harder to fathom from line to line. But an intention as essayists unites them: like Emerson, Orwell shapes sentences that disconcert and surprise readers; he impels us to feel discontented with stock ideas and conventional opinions. Orwell resolutely believed in common sense (he called this his ‘belly-to-earth attitude’), but at the same time he recognises that common sense is hard to acquire, and this is because false kinds of common sense saturate society, culture and politics. Genuine common sense is needed to counter what we have come unthinkingly to accept as ‘common sense’ – the received views that all of us are accustomed to and that we tell ourselves we know are true.

To say that England made George Orwell is both true and far more complicated than it seems. After all, there is, and always has been, more than one England. In the first half of the twentieth century there were Englands of the left and of the right; a hopeful and idealistic England and a depressingly pessimistic England. There was an England of law and liberty, and (especially in wartime) an England infected by strains of totalitarianism. Of course the nation was riven by class, but Disraeli's 'Two Nations' had by now divided into several new subgroups: the old working class (for instance) had split between those who enjoyed some of the trappings of mass affluence and those mired in permanent unemployment.

Orwell knew all of these Englands, perhaps better than any other author of his generation. His contemporaries tended to focus on particular social niches, with middlebrow writers writing about Middle England, proletarian writers concentrating on proles, and Bloomsbury intellectuals telling all you need to know about Bloomsbury. But Orwell had a genius for ranging across the boundaries of class, culture, ideology and literary fiefdoms. He was a sociologist of remarkable breadth, and his writings, taken together, may offer the most comprehensive profile of modern English society ever produced by one individual. He was able to explore and explain all of the many coexisting Englands, because he half-belonged to each of them.

Dear George,

Until you entered my life, I vaguely imagined I would become a professor much like those whom I had admired as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, a specialist in Wordsworth's Prelude or a scholar who had mastered the minutiae of literary modernism. Your work and legacy have served as my introduction to intellectual life, indeed my passport to contemporary cultural history.

I am often asked what it was that drew me to you. After all, I've been reading and pondering your work for a long time. Indeed, I've written hundreds of pages about your writings, and I've returned to them again during the editing for this Cambridge Companion to your work. The answer that I find myself giving is that you inspired me - because you lived what you wrote and you wrote out of the depths of your experience.

As I delved more deeply into your life and work, I also discovered a few surprising personal links between us. In fact, my father worked as a day labourer just two miles away from the Gloucestershire working-class hospital in Scotland in which you convalesced. His peasant father in County Donegal, Ireland felt sympathy with Irish nationalists (like Sean O'Casey, whom you reviled) and flirted with communism. Certainly you would have castigated my grandfather as a knee-jerk socialist and an Irish revolutionary agitator. (And what about me? Would you, George Orwell, have liked me? I'm a vegetarian, a sandal-wearing religious believer, an Irishman, a Catholic. The odds are against it!)

George Orwell was primarily a political writer. In his essay 'Why I Write' (1946), Orwell stated he wanted 'to make political writing into an art'. While he produced four novels between the years 1933 and 1939, it was clear that his real talent did not lie in traditional fiction. He seems instinctively to have understood that the documentary style he developed in his essays and his semi-autobiographical monograph, Down and Out in Paris and London (1932), was unsuitable to the novel format. Ultimately, the reason for this is simple - what profoundly interested Orwell were political questions. His approach to politics evolved during the decade of the 1930s along with his own idiosyncratic journey from English radical to his unique, eccentric form of socialism.

Orwell claimed he had an unhappy youth. If one believes the memories of those like his neighbour Jacintha Buddicom, who knew him as a carefree, fun loving young boy, Orwell's claim of unhappiness seems exaggerated. In his essay 'Such, Such Were the Joys', he portrays his school, St Cyprian's, as an unpleasant amalgam of snobbery, bullying and petty acts of tyranny. The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, something Orwell himself understood. 'Whoever writes about his childhood must beware exaggeration and self-pity', he wrote of his years at St Cyprian's.

Orwell's experiences at Eton were more positive. Although he failed to distinguish himself academically, he received a solid education, one that he drew on for the rest of his life. But what is true is that in these years Orwell first began to carve out for himself the persona of the outsider, a role he would play the rest of his life.

A Revolutionary in Love With the Past

It is a commonplace observation to say that George Orwell was something of a paradox. A product of the lower upper middle class (he was precise about such matters) who admired the working classes, he also was a socialist who savaged his fellow leftists for their inconsistencies. Most interestingly, Orwell was an internationalist while at the same time a fervent patriot.

Orwell's critical sense of patriotism sets him apart from the generation of English radicals of the 1930s and 1940s, most of whom were Marxists of various stripes. It was his patriotism that inspired Orwell in the grim early days of the Second World War when Great Britain seemed on the brink of invasion and defeat. His patriotism was instinctive, not the result of some philosophical analysis and because of that, it enabled him to reach beyond left wing circles to a wider audience.

In developing his ideas on patriotism Orwell made a major contribution to English thought. In his key writings between 1940 and 1942 'My Country, Right or Left' and especially The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell helped rescue the concept of patriotism from the ash heap of history where it had lain since the First World War.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is misread if not read in the context of its time - around 1948: a postwar world brutally and arbitrarily divided into spheres of influence by the great powers; the atom bomb exploded; and the fictive London of Winston Smith a recognisable caricature of the actual postwar London that Orwell had walked, and that this author can vividly remember. And three common misreadings can be challenged on biographical evidence. Firstly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not his last will and testament: it was simply the last book he wrote before he happened to die. Secondly, it was not a work of unnatural intensity dashed off hastily by a man choked with a subconscious death-wish and regressing while writing the novel to childhood memories of his preparatory school (as some claim is demonstrated by his essay on school days, 'Such, Such Were the Joys' - as if the world of Stalin and Hitler did not exist). Thirdly, the book does not represent a repudiation of his democratic socialism as so many American reviewers assumed; for he continued to write for the Tribune and American left wing journals right up to his final illness, during the time of the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Yet for someone who consciously sought to become the master of the plain style, and is famous for it, it is astonishing how many varied interpretations have been put upon Nineteen Eighty-Four – the most famous of his works, although I think not his best. It has been read as deterministic prophecy, as a kind of science fiction or a dystopia, as a conditional projection of the future, as a humanistic satire on contemporary events, as a total rejection of socialism of any kind, and as a libertarian socialist – almost an anarchist – protest against totalitarian tendencies and abuses of power both in his own and in other possible societies. Most bad or partial readings occur through not grasping the context of the time – the immediate postwar period.

THE POLITICS OF LYING

Socrates' introduction of the Republic's notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3 (414b-c). “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody - including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” Grand lie? Noble lie? G. R. F. Ferrari has a good note on the issue: “The lie is grand or noble (gennaios) by virtue of its civic purpose, but the Greek word can also be used colloquially, giving the meaning 'a true-blue lie,' i.e. a massive, no-doubt-about-it lie (compare the term 'grand larceny').” This is not the only point on which there might be argument about the translation. Some prefer to “lie” the more neutral “falsehood” (which need not imply deliberate deception), others “fiction ” (perhaps trying to prescind from questions of truth and falsehood altogether). Cornford had “bold flight of invention.” I think “lie” is exactly right. But the argument for that will emerge later, in section II.

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato's good city: a myth of national or civic identity - or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city's differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other.

The story of Er, a Pamphylian soldier who died in battle but several days later returned to life on his funeral pyre and reported what his soul had seen and heard in the world beyond, brings the Republic to a close in a visionary mode whose complexity tests the limits of understanding. For three (overlapping) reasons, the narrative raises more questions than it can answer: first, because it undertakes the profoundly ambitious task of presenting a symbolic perspective on the whole of reality, a figurative equivalent of Book 6's theme of “the contemplation of all time and all being” (486a); second, because its densely allusive texture yields a surplus of possible meanings that cannot be adequately encompassed by any single interpretation; and third, because it stands in a kind of challenging counterpoint, combining harmony and dissonance, with the rest of the Republic. Plato weaves into the account of Er's experience numerous strands from the materials of Greek philosophy, science, religion (not least, mystery religion), poetry, historiography, and even visual art. This fascinating multiplicity of sources and associations is not my primary concern here, though some pointers will be provided parenthetically as I proceed. I do, however, want to explore the character of the passage as an elaborate piece of philosophical writing, rather than as the vehicle for a set of putative authorial beliefs. While the myth’s overall significance as an ultimate (i.e., cosmic and eternal) vindication of justice looks clear enough at first sight, it leads us, I shall contend, into realms of irreducibly difficult interpretation.

The Republic is traditionally subtitled “On Justice,” and when we begin reading the dialogue, it seems clear that justice is to be its central topic. Book 1 in fact could be read as an independent dialogue specifically about justice, on the model of those Platonic dialogues devoted to the discussion of single topics, topics such as piety in the Euthyphro, the highly elusive sōphrosunē in the Charmides, or understanding in the Theaetetus. So we might imagine Book 1 as an aporetic dialogue with a central eponymous character and dedicated to an investigation of justice, a dialogue entitled perhaps “Thrasymachus” with the subtitle “On Justice,” the subtitle that Thrasyllus in fact gave to the entire Republic.

But as we read further into the dialogue, and particularly as the argument begins to develop in Book 2, the focus of the discussion appears to shift to a larger concern, a concern with the general topic of virtue, and specifically virtue in relation to individual happiness. When I was first introduced to the Republic as a student, I was told that it is about this question of the relation of virtue to happiness, either in the form of the question of the rewards of virtue or in the form of the cognate question of whether there is a conflict between duty and interest. It is in terms of this larger question that the dialogue is often presented; the surface question remains one concerning the nature of justice, but the larger question that is seen to emerge is some version of the question of whether virtue is sufficient for happiness.

A curious thing happens at the beginning of Republic 2. Socrates and Glaucon are seen to have sharply divergent opinions regarding Socrates' success in his preceding conversation with Thrasymachus. Socrates is sufficiently pleased with how things went that he is ready now to leave. He has made his argument against Thrasymachus who sought, first, to locate justice in the camp of vice and ignorance and, second, to claim for injustice greater profitability than justice (354b). To be sure, Socrates berates himself at the end of Book 1 for letting the question of the nature of justice get away and pursuing these lesser matters instead. And although he there insists - as he frequently does in Plato's dialogues - that until he has knowledge of the nature of a thing he can know nothing else about it, he registers no real doubt about the outcome of his arguments. Indeed, at 368b he says to Glaucon and Adeimantus that “in what I said to Thrasymachus I thought I showed that justice is better than injustice.” The only reason Socrates feels he must stay is because, as he observes, “you did not accept it from me.” Glaucon, and apparently Adeimantus as well, are, then, far less sanguine about Socrates' performance than Socrates himself is. What Socrates regards as a done deal, Glaucon and Adeimantus make him see as a mere “prelude” (357a).

Whether or to what degree Plato's Republic is a utopian work depends on what one means by “utopia,” a word with a notoriously wide range of meanings. I shall simply stipulate that by “utopia” I mean a description of an imagined society put forward by its author as better than any existing society, past or present. The limiting case (relevant to the Republic) is the portrayal not just of a better society but of the best society. I call a “mere utopia” a description of an ideal society meant or recognized by its author to be an impossible society - a society in some sense better than any historical society, but which could never actually exist.

Socrates calls his ideal city “Callipolis.” Did Plato think Callipolis was realizable? Did he really believe that the city he portrays in the Republic is the best human society? As with so much else in Plato, scholars disagree. One mainstream interpretation, which fits most easily the surface of the text and which I share, is that Plato intends the society described in the Republic to be a utopia that is not a mere utopia. Socrates paints a picture in words of the best human society, one difficult but not impossible to realize.

Compared with classical Athens, or indeed with any society existing today, the conditions in Callipolis are extraordinary. Communism of property, abolition of the family, tight control of every aspect of life by the philosophical ruling class, maximal “unity” of thought and feeling among the citizens – features such as these have led critics from Aristotle onward to criticize Callipolis as so contrary to human nature as to be both impossible and undesirable.

In the Republic Plato's fictional character Socrates develops an elaborate argument to support the thesis that justice pays, because only the just, not the unjust, have access to happiness. The procedure that Socrates adopts in order to make this argument is of a special sort. He derives claims about the human soul from claims that he makes about human society - the polis or “city.” It is a procedure of crucial importance within the work as a whole.

Where and how is the comparison between city and soul introduced (section I)? What developments does it subsequently undergo (section II)? In which passages of the dialogue are characteristics of the soul derived from characteristics of the city, and what are these characteristics (section III)? How far does the similarity between city and soul extend, and what does Socrates do when he comes up against its limits (section IV)? How does the fact that the procedure is analogical influence the conception of the soul (section V) and of the city (section VI) in this dialogue? What role do causal relations between city and soul have to play - city coming to be formed by soul (section VII), and soul coming to be formed by city (section VIII)?

The interpretation presented in this chapter is one that I have elsewhere substantiated against the background of the extensive scholarly literature on the topic. I can do no more than allude to this debate here. Often, where I differ from the (older) scholarly consensus, those points of difference result from a broader difference of methodology. Accordingly, I offer a brief account of my methodology in section IX. The chapter concludes with a summary of its results (section X).