New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Peter Stansky, "The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War" (Stanford UP, 2023)

·43 min·2 clips

Orwell remembered the Titanic more vividly than the Battle of the Marne.

1. New Books in Military History discusses Peter Stansky’s The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War from Stanford University Press. 2. Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Peter Stansky, emeritus professor of history at Stanford University, whose earlier Orwell books include The Unknown Orwell and Orwell and the Transformation. 3. The episode asks how Orwell’s experience of war shaped his patriotism, socialism, and anti-communism. 4. Stansky says his interest in Orwell began when 1984 became a Book of the Month Club selection in the United States. 5. He connects that early reading to a Yale undergraduate essay on Julian Bell, George Cornford, Stephen Spender, and George Orwell. 6. He says Homage to Catalonia was republished in the early 1950s, which helped renew attention to Orwell’s Spanish Civil War writing. 7. Stansky describes Orwell as a historian of England rather than a literary critic. 8. He says Orwell’s family class status came from Charles Blair, a Jamaica slave owner, and from his father’s work in British India. 9. He notes that Orwell called himself a member of “the lower upper middle class,” meaning upper-middle-class without money. 10. He emphasizes that Orwell attended Eton College on half fees and wrote about the school in Such, Such Were the Joys. 11. Stansky highlights Orwell’s schoolboy militarism, including the cadet corps and a rifle he bought at age 10. 12. He says Orwell did not do especially well at Eton and was not yet a clear political figure there. 13. He links Orwell’s growing doubts about imperialism to his years in the Burma police and his wish to become a writer. 14. He identifies The Road to Wigan Pier as a turning point in Orwell’s move to the left. 15. He says Orwell admired the atmosphere in Barcelona in December 1936 and saw in it a socialist society. 16. He argues that Orwell became anti-communist at the same time because he saw communists undermining socialism in Spain. 17. Stansky says Orwell was not a theorist or a detailed planner, but he wanted equality, common decency, and frequent rotation of power. 18. He describes The Lion and the Unicorn as Orwell’s wartime argument that Britain would need socialism to mobilize society efficiently. 19. Listeners interested in Orwell, British class, Spain, and wartime socialism will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners wanting a literary close reading without political history may want to skip it.

As heard by us

Peter Stansky traces Orwell's formation through Eton, empire, patriotism, socialism, and 1984.

Peter Stansky brings George Orwell's patriotism into focus without smoothing away the central tension: a deeply patriotic Englishman who, over time, became a committed socialist.

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You want to know how an Eton schoolboy, shaped by an imperial family background, became both intensely patriotic and a committed socialist.

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