Meet the author: Christopher Snowdon on You Do Not Exist: An Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was a prescient warning about how a small group could use technology, manipulate language and rewrite history to impose a totalitarian regime on society. It feels like the novel for 2024. Regularly quoted, turned into endless memes, sometimes so ubiquitous it feels clichéd, what more is there to say?

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the UK publication of Orwell’s classic dystopia, the Institute of Economic Affairs has republished the novel with a new introduction by Christopher Snowdon.

Snowdon’s You Do Not Exist: An Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four is not an introduction in the classic sense, more a companion. Nor is this a biography of Eric Arthur Blair. Instead, Snowdon delves into the Orwell archives to show that the seeds of the roots, inspiration, economics of the novel were sown many years before it was written and to present a fresh political perspective on the masterpiece.

Snowdon argues – contentiously – that Orwell had misconceptions about economics that made him too gloomy about the postwar world, believing in the inevitable demise of liberal capitalism and making him pessimistic about the rise of totalitarianism. Why did he believe all this and – as liberalism and capitalism seemed to thrive after the war – was he wrong? However, as liberalism is now – in 2024 – under huge strain, capitalism on the defensive to the point of eating itself, and totalitarian policies embraced by liberal democracies, perhaps his pessimism was merited? Or is it too easy to draw definitive political conclusions from Orwell’s work?

Over the years since his death, conservatives, socialists and libertarians have all been keen to claim Orwell as one of their own. Perhaps he speaks for all of us. Does he speak for you?

Free copies of You Do Not Exist: An Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four will be available on the day, or it can be downloaded as a PDF here.

SPEAKERS
Christopher Snowdon
head of lifestyle economics, Institute of Economic Affairs; author, You Do Not Exist: An Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four, co-host, Last Orders

CHAIR
Bruno Waterfield
Brussels correspondent, The Times