1984: The Definitive Dystopian Classic on Totalitarian Power (Authorized Orwell Edition)

What can be said about this book that has not already been said? Orwell’s despondent view of an evil utopia hits all the right notes. His vision into a near-possible future is stunning, depressing and all too understandable. A warning, a final prophesy written by a spirited visionary in the final stage of his life. Many have read this book early in their youth, most likely as part of their educational upbringing. 1984 and Animal Farm are standard, pedantic texts battle ready for disaffected youth to sink their teeth into. This book, among the greats, seems boundless in the echoes and touchstones resounding within its tome. In revisiting the text many years later, one will find that Orwell’s words seem strangely even more relevant than they were at first blanch. Perhaps even more so than they were when original meted out and scratched into paper during the author’s self-imposed exile in the Scottish isle that was his final home so many years ago. There are so many elements here that have such deep and broad depth that will keep this work of literature relevant for many more years. Orwell invented the terms “Big Brother” and “Thought Crime” and dove unrepentantly into issues of privacy, personal freedom and individualism. All this before the revolution of the internet! He also fretted over the degradation of language (OMG!) and the breakdown and bastardization of society’s communal bonds, family bonds, bonds of friendship and the abolishment of simple love. His vision of a mechanized society (one that even turns books out by machines), is more than a decry by a luddite so much as it concerns the debasement or obliteration of the individual and sense of self. Orwell’s main thrust seems to be right at the heart of man and the core inner lust for domination and power, simply for its own sake. That ever-present evolutionary tendency to thrive at all costs without purpose or direction, and the ability of that singular impetus to take over and distort all else toward its own end. He digs that up out of the blackest parts of the human heart and disgorges it upon the shoreline of society receding tide as if to say, “This too is what you are. Do not kid yourself.” For me, this book was rough. The tone was bleak. Throughout. Unflinchingly somber and hopeless. Yet, the story of the protagonist and his struggle amid this world turned upside down, is relatable and believable. Despite the obvious despair and immeasurable odds, we do feel for Winston Smith (the protagonist) and we do root for him. We follow him in his desperation to find something, some way to express himself and make a dent in the impenetrable wall that has become the totalitarian society which he is a part. We feel his constant fear and ever present distrust of everything—almost. The little glimmers of possibilities, even when they are squashed, keep your interest and balance the grim-gray that pervades everything. One thing that struck me was that the female character Julia, is an interesting addition. She has a good amount of gumption and serves more than just a goal or love interest. She is fleshed out pretty well and adds a lot of dimension to the story by sharing the protagonist’s goals, but also coming from a slightly different more realistic viewpoint. Another thing I found interesting in reading this book in present time was how insular the story is. We are just as stuck as the protagonist. All news of the outside world and the society is filtered to the reader through the regime in power. We never really know who to trust or when something might be real or made up or mere speculation. Nothing ever really seems certain. The story never ever escapes this – there is never an Oz-like “Man behind the Curtain” moment. Not really. We are told how some things work, and sometimes by sources that are deemed more reliable than others, but we don’t truly find out. This tight view point, keeps up a claustrophobic feeling that forces the storyline to remain connected to the protagonist’s individual struggle. Even though Winston Smith is concerned with larger concepts and a revolutionary struggle on a society level–the story remains individualistic. However, the tale is not a man’s struggle with himself, it is a man’s struggle to find himself among others; the interrelatedness of things and how important that is. The totalitarian regime in power has distorted this effect and is manifesting control by continually putting up road blocks and pseudo-constructed, societal norms to hamper true progress and growth. Even still, the individual struggles to find their place in society. As the story goes on, I think it is clear that most of this doomed society continues to struggle with this. And the powers that be, must expend an immense amount of effort and expense to constantly suppress this. In the end, can that really work? Have a care. Big Brother is watching. Podcast: If you enjoy my review (or this topic) this book and the movie based on it were further discussed/debated in a lively discussion on my podcast: "No Deodorant In Outer Space". The podcast is available on iTunes, YouTube or our website.

It’s a classic for a reason. I enjoyed the book and wish I’d read it sooner like many of my peers.

Time to read this book again If you haven’t read this book since you were required to read it in high school or college, many years or decades ago, it’s extremely worthwhile to read it again. Much has happened since you last read it. You’ve also changed you’re own perspective. I last read it in high school in 1974, but was recently motivated to read it again after reading Anne Applebaum’s fantastic book, Iron Curtain, which reconstructs, from the everyday-person’s point of view, how after WW II, the Soviet Union conquered Eastern Europe and wiped out civil society in Eastern Europe after conquering it. I’ve heard the phrase “dystopian world” used to describe this book, and I disagree. This book is a clear reaction to and comment on the Soviet takeover of it’s own country and especially Eastern Europe that was occurring while Orwell wrote. Orwell, who I just learned died young at age 46 years old, just a few years after the book came out in 1949, wrote this book in 1947 in the middle of that take over, and it is interesting to read it again, 75 years later, to hear Orwell’s thoughts on what was occurring, as it was occurring anew. As I am writing this in 2023, Russia is trying to wipe out Ukrainian culture, saying it never was a country, systematically bombing its museums and cultural buildings and television towers, forcing residents to use Russian money and passports, and forcing schools in Ukraine to only use the Russian language and Russian textbooks. The Wagner group story in Russian is being changed. In Russia there isn’t a television screen in everyone’s home, like a bathroom mirror, as depicted in the book, but, not too far off the mark, everyone is on the internet, and the Russian thought police certainly monitors what people type and post. I do have to say that for the last few hours of the book, I just waited to get it done with…the extended torture scenes where Orwell shows us how torturing Winston brainwashes him, the long appendix where the narrator goes over the 1984 dictionary, the idea of a permanent war with minimal true destruction as a way of controlling the population. I thought it was interesting that the book is premised on a nuclear war happening in the 1950’s, and the world being broken up into Russian, USA/British, and China spheres of influence—-actually not too far from where we are now, minus the nuclear war, assuming Ukraine doesn’t heat up. It is interesting that Russia has survived as a thought-controlling type of government. This was likely all new when Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1947. Lastly, as I am a lot more experienced compared with when I read this book in high school in 1974, I can now appreciate Orwell’s severe sarcasm. Orwell is not quite funny, but very frequently I found myself smirking and shaking my head. I did the audiobook, and Simon Prebble did well. As a parting thought, in our capitalist society our every thought is monitored by companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and then sold and used to make money and manipulate what we do and think. Much of this information is also searchable by our own government under search warrant. Congressional hearings about this are currently underway. Don’t mistake me, I’m far from saying anything positive about Russia, but just saying….

Great book. I read it in highschool but decided to reread it and still just as good. Whether you’ve read it before or it’s your first time, I absolutely recommend!

This book can appear boring at first. However once you keep reading you discover some invaluable truths about what is going on today and it really makes you question what you have been taught. Winners write history. That has been proven already. Great book.

It’s easy to dismiss Orwell’s masterpiece as a quaint and dated dystopia, a banal nightmare of the future cobbled together in 1948 out of the dingy present and the recent past: the bombed out London of the novel looks like nothing so much as that city under the blitz. The scarcities and rationing, the war frenzy, the propaganda and paranoia required no imagination to describe. They were right in front of him. Critics use Orwell’s merciless reportorial skill as a brief against his imagination. His grim fantasy is all too realistic. It fails both as fantasy and prophesy. The titular date has come and gone, they point out. The world is not divided into three super powers perpetually at war; no telescreens invade our privacy. No all-powerful totalitarian state controls our lives, which are in fact more free and prosperous than anyone could have imagined at the bleak and dreary end of the Second World War. Of the computer and the internet, plausibly the most significant new developments since that time, Orwell had not an inkling. But this superficial reading of the book, whereby we comfort ourselves with the fact that we drink Bombay Sapphire rather than Victory Gin, is tragically naive and misguided. In fact every basic concept, every philosophical and political development Orwell addressed in his book has come to pass almost exactly as described. Orwell analyzed the way people driven by the need for power actually think. This is the most useful insight in his book, delivered by the Grand Inquisitor O’Brien: “The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury, or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture … How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” To this bleak vision the battered and terrified Winston Smith has one reply: “Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.” Of course in the novel it is Winston Smith who is defeated and obliterated, after learning to love Big Brother. The story is unrelenting, a harsh tragedy in which the human spirit is crushed, and the future is too horrible to contemplate. The good guys lose. They are forced to betray their deepest beliefs and emotions, gutted of their souls and left to wander the streets like hollow eyed ghosts. Evil wins, over and over again, with a shriek of glee and blare of military music. The book ought to be profoundly depressing And yet it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading the book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. Winston Smith knows no one will ever read his journal … but people will be reading the novel that contains it for as long as books exist. The authors of the Newspeak dictionary exult in the destruction of language; the mandarins of the inner Party continuously dismantle all passion and morality and truth. But the novel itself, with its vivid prose and ferocious probity creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share. A masterpiece. Read it. If you've already read it, read it again.

I was looking for a high quality hardback edition that might last for a long time. This edition is a medium quality version in my opinion. The binding is not very thick and the pages are thin and stuck together. I will keep looking. Note that I have the paperback and one of the Hardback versions from this listing, but the review only shows paperback for some reason.

" ' How is the dictionary getting on?' Said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise. 'Slowly,' said Syme. "I'm on the abjectives. It's fascinating.' He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak ... 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. ' We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a singe word that will become obsolete before the year 2050 ... 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words' ... 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.' " - George Orwell, '1984' "Logic, therefore, as the science thought, or the science of the process of pure reason, should be capable of being constructed a priori." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy ("a priori" is defined as deduced from self-evident premises) By revealing the concept of "Newspeak" in his great dystopian novel '1984', George Orwell, while dying of tuberculosis, cryptically attempted to expose to the world one of the great crimes of government against humanity; the systematic suppression/subversion of essential tools of reasoning; both in language and science. Central to this crime is the deliberate suppression of the science of formal logic. (Formal logic, invented by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., is the science of evaluating arguments in order to determine if they are correctly reasoned. ) I will fully explain. You see, the masses haven't been taught formal logic by State controlled public schools or media for many generations. (In his book ' The Underground History of American Education' John Taylor Gatto informs his readers that this deliberate dumbing down of the population through State controlled schools was adopted nationwide just after the completion of the U.S. Civil War.) Don't believe me? Just go out and ask some average U.S. adults how to determine if a deductive argument is both valid and sound; or the difference between a formal and an informal logical fallacy. (Both are very basic and essential knowledge of formal logic.) You'll find that not one in twenty have any idea. This is not an accident. The terrible and murderous lies of our governments rely upon the masses being misinformed, ignorant, and intellectually crippled. And our State controlled schools and media have done this job very well, I'm sorry to say. "Ignorance is strength."-George Orwell, 1984 The list of criminal conspiracies, committed by the oligarchs who control our governments, are difficult for most people to psychologically accept. They include the subversion of free systems of government, fraud, illegal war, and genocide on an almost unimaginable scale. Here are a few for which the available evidence is simply overwhelming: (1) Arab terrorists did not carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001. (2) Man never walked on the moon. (3) HIV does not, and never did cause AIDS, and our governments have always been aware of this fact. (4) JFK was not murdered by a lone assassin. (5) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified U.S. entry into the Vietnam War was a hoax. (6) The homicidal cyanide gas chambers of the holocaust are a fraud, devised by the Allies to dehumanize the German enemy, and generate support for the people and state of Israel. The Germans never murdered anyone with cyanide gas. There are many, many more bloody lies, as you will see, if only you will accept George Orwell' s invitation to finally become conscious. "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within... But the proles, if only somehow they could become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet--!" -George Orwell, 1984 ------------------------------------------------------- Here are few quote/definitions regarding formal logic that I hope you will find useful. "Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." -Thomas Jefferson "We ought in fairness to fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those facts." -Aristotle, Rhetoric "The truth or falsity of a statement depends on facts, not on any power on the part of the statement itself of admitting contrary qualities". -Aristotle, Categories "We suppose ourselves to posses unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and further, that the fact could not be other than it is" -Aristotle, Posterior Analytics "The province of Logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence. In so far as belief professes to be founded on proof, the office of Logic is to supply a test for ascertaining whether or not the belief is well grounded." -John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843) "Fallacious reasoning is just the opposite of what can be called cogent reasoning. We reason cogently when we reason (1) validly; (2) from premises well supported by evidence; and (3) using all relevant evidence we know of. The purpose of avoiding fallacious reasoning is, of course, to increase our chances of reasoning cogently." -Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 1976, second edition "The fallacy of suppressed evidence is committed when an arguer ignores evidence that would tend to undermine the premises of an otherwise good argument, causing it to be unsound or uncogent. Suppressed evidence is a fallacy of presumption and is closely related to begging the question. As such, it's occurrence does not affect the relationship between premises and conclusion but rather the alleged truth of premises. The fallacy consists in passing off what are at best half-truths as if they were whole truths, thus making what is actually a defective argument appear to be good. The fallacy is especially common among arguers who have a vested interest in the situation ttho which the argument pertains." -Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (1985) "Aristotle devides all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premises, the material from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) sophistic is the method in which the form of the conclusion is false, although it seems correct. These three last properly belong to the art of Controversial Dialectic, as they have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself; that is to say, they aim at victory." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy "The hypothesis most likely to prove right must do the following: 1. Include all known facts; 2. Not over-emphasize any part of the evidence at the expense of the rest; 3. Observe the laws of probability as established by previous investigation; 4. Avoid logical contradictions; 5. Stay as simple as possible without ignoring any part of the evidence. Hypotheses which violate any one of these requirements are Forced Hypotheses." -James Johnson, Logic and Rhetoric (1968) "This is the argumentum ad verecundiam. It consists in making an appeal to authority rather than reason, and in using such an authority as may suit the degree of knowledge possessed by your opponent. Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment, says Seneca; and it is therefore an easy matter if you have an authority on your side which your opponent respects. The more limited his capacity and knowledge, the greater is the number of authorities who weigh with him. But if his capacity and knowledge are of a high order, there are very few; indeed, hardly any at all. He may, perhaps, admit the authority of professional men versed in science or an art or a handicraft of which he knows little or nothing; but even so he will regard it with suspicion. Contrarily, ordinary folk have a deep respect for professional men of every kind. They are unaware that a man who makes a profession of a thing loves it not for the thing itself, but for the money he makes by it; or that it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it... There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted. Example effects their thought just as it affects their action. They are like sheep following the bell-wether just as he leads them. They will sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that it's acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever... When we come to look into the matter, so-called universal opinion is the opinion of two or three persons; and we should be persuaded of this if we could see the way in which it really arises. We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves. Thus the number of these lazy and credulous adherents grew from day to day; for the opinion had no sooner obtained a fair measure of support than its further supporters attributed this to the fact that the opinion could only have obtained it by the cogency of its arguments. The remainder were then compelled to grant what was universally granted, so as not to pass for unruly persons who resisted opinions which everyone accepted, or pert fellows who thought themselves cleverer than any one else. When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty; and henceforward the few who are capable of forming a judgment hold their peace. Those who venture to speak are such as are entirely incapable of forming any opinion or any judgment of their own, being merely the echo of others' opinions; and, nevertheless, they defend them with all the greater zeal and intolerance. For what they hate in people who think differently is not so much the different opinions which they profess, as the presumption of wanting to form their own judgment; a presumption of which they themselves are never guilty, as they are very well aware. In short, there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself? Since this is what happens, where is the value of the opinion even of a hundred millions? It is no more established than an historical fact reported by a hundred chroniclers who can be proved to have plagiarised it from one another; the opinion in the end being traceable to a single individual." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy (1831)

Increíble ambientación, y gran historia. Deberían hacerle una película o serie. El personaje principal, Mrs Smith, encaja perfectamente con el ambiente.

Great book for student of political majors

كويس

Great book, a must read! The cover really fits with the theme of the book and looks great on the shelf

Roman le plus connu de George Orwell, devenu un classique de la SF dystopique, 1984 est un livre à lire au moins une fois dans sa vie. Je l'avais lu adolescente en Français, étudié le film en cours d'Anglais, j'ai voulu le relire en VO. Si vous suivez mes "C'est lundi, que lisez-vous ?", vous savez que j'ai pris du temps pour le relire. En effet, même si le niveau d'Anglais m'est accessible, ce livre demande une certaine concentration en VO, et chez moi c'est souvent bruyant avec les enfants ! Pour les quelques personnes qui ne connaissent pas l'intrigue, 1984 est l'histoire de Winston Smith, anti-héros, dont le rôle sert finalement à dépeindre les rouages d'une société totalitaire. Je parle d'anti-héros parce que son personnage est assez lâche, et quand il agit c'est de façon plutôt stupide. On ne peut pas dire que l'on s'attache vraiment à lui, mais il représente parfaitement le résultat de la dictature dans laquelle il évolue. L'histoire se présente en trois parties, la première expose la société gérée par le Parti et le symbole que représente Big Brother. La seconde est consacrée à l'histoire d'amour et la rébellion de Winston. La dernière est le résultat de cette-dernière. Si je dis qu'il faut lire ce livre au moins une fois, c'est pour la façon très juste avec laquelle l'auteur décortique le fonctionnement d'une société totalitaire. De l'embrigadement des jeunes, à la manipulation de l'information, en passant par la surveillance constante, 1984 est à la fois un rappel historique et actuel (cf la Corée du Nord ou même la Chine) et un avertissement pour le futur.