George Orwell Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

History

Democracy’s Endgame?

A plea for sustaining the infrastructure of hope

January 31, 2024 • by Elzbieta Matynia

Though surrounded by these largely man-made fires, we’ve at least been trying to put them out. It would be so much easier, though, to fight these fires if they were not fueled by massive efforts to dismantle the democratic order....

Politics

The Big Lie

When the January 6 Select Committee chose this phrase to headline the second day of hearings they identified Donald J. Trump and his confederates as 21st century fascists

June 13, 2022 • by Claire Potter

The message from Republican politicians and their right-wing media flacks about the televised hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, which have now completed their second day? They don’t matter. “Nothing to see here!” they are all quacking, as they have ...

Higher Ed

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

July 30, 2020 • by Eileen Hunt Botting

In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

Feature

Reflections on the Development of a Post-truth Regime

Donald Trump and the politically correct

July 27, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; i.e., the class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology We sociologists know that each idea, each creative expression, each truth claim appears ...

Reflections on the Development of a Post-truth Regime

Uncategorized

The Political Psychology of the President

Freud Not Orwell on Trump and his Lying

January 30, 2017 • by Sanford Schram

Throughout it all, Trump has acted in his grand style as the head of his yet-to-be-relinquished business where he did not report to any board of directors. Alternatively, he followed suit as that celebrity television personality who played himself as that sole decision-maker of his private business. He has been ...