Language and political reality: George Orwell reconsidered

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...

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

Direct Democracy and Political Efficacy Reconsidered

Some studies have contended that direct democracy has secondary benefits unrelated to its impact on policy. In particular, recent scholarship claims that the American ballot initiative process enhances political efficacy. We began with concerns about the logic and empirical methods underlying this conclusion. We connect this research to the broader political psychology literature and in doing s...

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...

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Implications in Three Persian Translations of “Animal Farm”

This study draws on a comparative framework to evaluate the translation of political implications in three Persian translations of the novellaAnimal Farm (by George Orwell), using  Fairclough’scritical discourse analysis (CDA) model. The study regards political implications and ideologies as a mode of background knowledge shared by writers and audiences in the source language. Fairclough’s mode...