badgenome on 28 April 2012
| Mr Khan said: Orwell was a socialist? I figured he was one of those radical anti-socialists. What was the point of Animal Farm then? |
Anti-Stalinism.
Orwell was both a socialist and what's generally called a left-libertarian, the divide between left- and right-libertarians being that right-libertarians see economic freedom as an inalienable part of individual liberty. He had a fundamental distrust of authority and dislike of dogmatism that made him a strange kind of socialist. But while he seemed sadly resigned to the fact that socailism is collectivist and will pretty much invariably lead to despotism, he distrusted the free market so much that he thought it would be worse than tyranny (probably owing to the fact that he lived in a very classist society).
