The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.
Eric Arthur Blair, who is best known under his pseudonym George Orwell, was born 107 years ago this month in India, where his father was a British civil servant.
His father's job, according to Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker, was to oversee the growing
of opium, mainly for export to China.
Though young Eric's mother had herself grown up in Burma, the daughter of yet another British
civil servant, she had long since tired of Asia, and when her son was only a year old
she prevailed successfully on her husband to ship her and their two children, Eric and
and his older sister Marjorie, back to England.
Eric did not see his father again for eight years, until he was nine years old, and had
come home for Christmas vacation from his prep school, St. Cyprian's.
Here in the States, a prep school is a high school.
It preps, that is, prepares its students for college, which on this side of the Atlantic
Eric is something that comes after high school and comprises, in effect, grades 13-16.
In the England Eric Blair grew up in, however, a prep school was for children 8-13.
What it was preparing these children for was what we would call high school, but what Eric
grew up thinking of as college.
College in turn prepared you for university.
Hayek was sent to St. Cyprian's when he was eight years old, and remained there until
he was 13, whereupon he transferred for another five years to Eaton College, a very famous
and very expensive private high school, long favored by the British upper classes.
After Eaton graduated him in 1921, he never went to school again.
Why?
Orwell answered that question in an autobiographical essay called Such!
Such Were the Joys, written in the early 40s, but never published until the early 1950s,
a few years after his death, and then only in the United States.
It was not published in England until nearly 20 years after his death.
In this essay, Orwell judged the education he had received at St. Cyprian's to be inferior.
The whole process, he wrote, was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick.
Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression
that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your
brain with anything else.
Subjects which lacked examination value, such as geography, were almost completely neglected.
Mathematics was also neglected.
Science was not taught in any form.
Indeed, it was so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged, and even
Even the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were chosen with one eye
on the English paper.
Latin and Greek, the main scholarship subjects, were what counted, but even these were deliberately
taught in a flashy, unsound way.
We never, for example, read right through even a single book of a Greek or Latin author.
We merely read short passages which were picked out because they were the kind of thing likely
to be set as an unseen translation.
At St. Cyprian's, or well remembered, history was a series of unrelated, unintelligible,
but in some way that was never explained to us, important facts, with resounding phrases
tied to them.
Disraeli brought peace with honor.
Clive was astonished at his moderation.
Pitt called in the new world to redress the balance of the old, and the dates and the
the mnemonic devices. Did you know, for example, that the initial letters of, A black negros
was my aunt, there's her house behind the barn, are also the initial letters of the
battles in the wars of the roses? He also remembered the history teacher calling out
dates to the class, and the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness
to shout out the right answers, the historical events that had taken place on those dates.
and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious
events they were naming.
But worse than the pedagogical limitations of the place, in Orwell's memory at least,
were the cruelties and brutalities it employed and encouraged among its students.
Orwell remembered his years at St. Cyprian's as like being locked up in a hostile world,
A world in which you had to be perpetually on your guard against the people surrounding
At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a world
of force and fraud and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank full of pike.
Orwell knew, of course, that not everyone's home was really a warm nest.
He considered his own home to be far from optimal, for once he had become reacquainted
With his father, he had learned that, as he put it, I disliked my own father, who appeared
to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying, don't.
Still, he wrote, your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled
by love rather than by fear.
For that reason alone, Orwell argued, boarding schools are worse than day schools.
A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand.
School life was not only ruled by fear, it was best symbolized by the image of a soccer
or perhaps a rugby match.
Football, Orwell wrote, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about,
but is a species of fighting.
The lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobly boys who are good at knocking down and
and trampling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life, a continuous
triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning. It consisted in being
bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than
other people, in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them
One of the main ideas inculcated in students at St. Cyprian's was, as Orwell put it, something
Something called guts or character, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others.
The will of the headmaster of St. Cyprian's, and the will of his wife, who ran the school
with him, was imposed on the students in the form of a series of beatings, beatings administered
sometimes by the headmaster himself, sometimes by certain favored older boys, who were in
effect licensed to beat younger boys.
I remember more than once, Orwell writes, being led out of the room in the middle of
a Latin sentence, receiving a beating, and then going straight ahead with the same sentence,
just like that.
All in all, Orwell wrote, attending St. Cyprian's was about as bad as being in an army, but
perhaps not quite as bad as being in prison.
After five years at St. Cyprian's, and another five years at Eaton, Eric Blair decided he'd
Fried had enough of school and never went back. Instead, he followed in his father's
footsteps, signing up for the British Civil Service. But after spending yet another five
years as a police officer in Burma, he knew a civil service career in Asia was not for
him. He had enough saved from his years as a policeman to live for about a year, so he
quit his job and moved to Paris, where he had decided to try to make it as a writer.
His eccentric bohemian Aunt Nellie, his mother's sister, lived there.
She was, in fact, living there in sin with an anarchist named Eugène Adam.
And she was helpful to young Eric in many ways in the nearly two years he spent in Paris,
1928 and 1929.
She fed him as often as he'd let her, and her elderly anarchist boyfriend gave young
Eric much to think about under the heading of politics.
Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker says that young Eric went to Paris with an almost anarchistic
hatred of authority and returned to England nearly two years later with an even more anti-authoritarian
outlook. He was unwilling, however, to live off his aunt's largesse.
Though it took him only a few months in Paris to get into print under the name E. A. Blair,
He was unable to earn enough from his writing to pay his bills.
When he ran out of money, he lived as a bum, rather than sponge off his Aunt Nellie.
He continued this practice after returning to England late in 1929, and it was this period
of living hand-to-mouth that provided him with the experience he needed to write his
first book, a piece of thinly fictionalized reportage called Down and Out in Paris and
in London, which was published in 1933 under the name George Orwell.
Up to then all of young Eric's journalism, mostly book reviews and articles on cultural
and political subjects for weekly, fortnightly and monthly magazines, had appeared under
the name E.A. Blair.
It continued to do so for another couple of years, but starting in 1935 all those articles
Books and Reviews, as well as a steady flow of books came out under the name George Orwell,
a novel called Burmese Days, other novels called A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for
Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
There were also two volumes of reportage, Homage to Catalonia on the Spanish Civil War
and The Road to Wigan Pier on Poverty in Northern England.
None of these books sold particularly well, decently but not particularly well, and though
the periodical work became more and more frequent, it was never especially remunerative.
Eric Blair, George Orwell, scraped by, but little more.
He did this through the thirties and through the war that followed, and then, suddenly,
he hit it big.
The vehicles for his breakthrough were a short satirical novel called Animal Farm, which
tells of the efforts of the animals at the Manor Farm to overthrow their human rulers
and establish a communist utopia under the leadership of the pigs.
This was published in 1945, and a much longer, brutally naturalistic novel of a totalitarian
future called 1984, published in 1949.
These two books made Orwell rich, but he was dead from tuberculosis before the winter of
1949 and 1950 had ended, aged 46, so he had precious little time to spend any of his new
riches on anything but medical bills.
A few years after Orwell's death, as I have noted, his unflattering memoir of his years
at St. Cyprian's finally saw print in the United States, and when it did, it became
and the subject of an essay in the New Yorker by the British journalist Anthony West.
West noted that most of the terrifying things in 1984 clearly derive from the experience
described in such such were the joys.
At St. Cyprian's, West reminds his readers, the headmaster's wife seemed to be spying
on Orwell all the time and seemed by some kind of magical omniscience to know what every
In 1984, of course, every room of every dwelling is equipped with a device called a telescreen,
a sort of two-way TV. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously, Orwell wrote.
Any sound that Winston made above the level of a very low whisper would be picked up by
Moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded,
he could be seen as well as heard.
There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
How often or on what system the thought-police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.
You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Anthony West contended that if you read 1984 closely, you would see, must see, that the
The whole pattern of society in the novel shapes up along the lines of fear laid down
in such such were the joys, until the final point of the dread summons to the headmaster's
study for the inevitable beating.
In 1984, the study becomes Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, and the torturers correspond
closely to the schoolmasters.
In effect, West argued, what George Orwell did in 1984 was to send everybody in England
to an enormous St. Cyprian's to be as miserable as he had been.
The American science fiction writer C.M. Cornbluth agreed with West. In a lecture he delivered
at the University of Chicago early in 1957, Cornbluth pointed out a few other parallels
Cornblath noted, for example, that sexual activity is forbidden to Winston Smith, as
it is to a boy, under pain of dire punishment.
He noted also that there are no laws or clear-cut rules of conduct for Winston Smith to obey.
He, like a child, may transgress without meaning to. He must not only do what is right,
he must be good. Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker acknowledged in 2003 that Anthony West's
This way of reading 1984 has been rather dismissed by critics, but he wrote that there are associations
and reverberations connecting 1984 and such such were the joys, cannot be denied.
According to Bowker, Orwell certainly developed the individual consciousness to pit against
unreasonable authority while at St. Cyprian's.
The small boy waiting outside the headmaster's study for a beating is only the youthful version
of Winston Smith waiting to be summoned to Room 101.
The deceitfulness of authority, the feeling that spies are everywhere, the harsh cross-examinations,
the rote learning in an atmosphere of threat, these are all present in both essay and novel.
It seemed to Orwell, according to Bowker, that whereas most English people found it
In one of the radio talks he wrote and presented for the BBC during World War II Orwell said,
A human being is what he is largely because he comes from certain surroundings and no one ever fully escapes from the things that have happened to him in early childhood.
The following year, in an essay called Why I Write, he elaborated on this idea a bit.
Before a writer ever begins to write, or well asserted, he will have acquired an emotional
attitude from which he will never completely escape.
For if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse
to write.
Few of us today go to boarding schools.
You went to them a hundred years ago when young Eric Blair did.
Why then did so many millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean respond so
strongly to a political nightmare based on its authors' unhappy experience at an English
boarding school?
Why did these readers make 1984 not only a huge and perennial best-seller on both sides
of the Atlantic, but also, probably, the most widely influential libertarian novel ever
published. Because, as Orwell himself acknowledged, everything that happened to me at St. Cyprian's
could happen in the most enlightened school, though perhaps in subtler forms. The totalitarian
essence of the St. Cyprian's experience, the experience of being dominated, bullied, spied
on, the experience of being made to suffer pain and to look foolish by more powerful
others against whom one had no defense.
This could be visited upon a child at almost any sort of school one could imagine.
It is, then, the compulsory school experience we have to examine, not just the St. Cyprian's
experience or the early 20th century British boarding school experience.
Some libertarians like John Holt have thought about all this and decided that a society
without schools, at least for those too young to choose for themselves whether to attend
one, would be a better society. The home-schoolers who populate the movement Holt launched back
in the 1970s agree. One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover
George Orwell presents us with yet another
Another case of a writer who was not himself a libertarian as we understand the term today,
but whose last two novels, Animal Farm and 1984, have earned him a place in the libertarian
tradition.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.