George Orwell on politics and war

Intellectual freedom versus economic centralization 1984 and George Orwell ’ s

TO THE END of his life, George Orwell remained a socialist. In “Why I Write” (1946), we find his programmatic statement: “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.”* Orwell had fiercely attacked the attitude of capitalist society towards the poor in Down and Our in...

Old George Orwell Got It Backward: Some Thoughts on Behavioral Tax Economics

It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously ‘‘behavioral’’ inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether individuals are susceptible to manipulation, or even exploitation, by the people who comprise the sta...

Down and almost out in Scotland: George Orwell, tuberculosis and getting streptomycin in 1948.

Preventive War and Democratic Politics

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

FROM POLITICS OF WAR TO POLITICS OF PEACE – NORTHERN UGANDA: Whose War, Whose Peace & Whose Justice