George Orwell’s 1984 is just as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1949.
More than 75 years after the iconoclastic British socialist wrote his ninth and final book—a dystopian cautionary tale that explores themes of totalitarianism, censorship, and surveillance—politicians and commentators across the ideological spectrum still invoke Orwell’s name to support their arguments, often in conflicting ways.
In Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century—winner of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography—College of Arts and Sciences professor Laura Beers examines the writer’s ideas about social injustice and political deception and why they are still critical today. The historian also explores how Orwell’s writings on free speech address the proliferation of misinformation and the emergence of cancel culture; highlights his critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire; and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.
“I think that Orwell’s writing, and particularly his political writing, has a lot to offer us, and the vision that he offers—both the warnings against the ways that politics can go wrong, but also the more optimistic vision of the better world that he hopes to see that emerges in some places in his writing—has a lot of enduring value, despite the fact that his gender politics give me a serious ick factor,” said Beers during her book talk at Politics and Prose, just down the street from campus.
Named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker, Orwell’s Ghosts was inspired by Beers’s AU class West in Crisis, 1900–1945, which explores the major social, cultural, and political events that remade Europe, including the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, nationalism, and anti-colonial independence movements.
Beers challenged students in the class—who read seven of Orwell’s books, including Animal Farm and his debut novel Burmese Days—to consider how he might interpret today’s political landscape.
“AU students in particular are very tuned in to current events, and they started making all these connections between Orwell’s writing in the early 20th century and our current political moment,” Beers said. “It was some of those conversations and seminars that got me thinking about the continued relevance of a lot of what he has to say to the politics to today.”
She notes that many people cite Orwell to argue against censorship, as in a 2017 Colorado court case in which a baker refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, claiming that doing so would violate his right to free speech and religious freedom—an argument some described as “Orwellian.”
But is that the true meaning of the word?
Beers emphasizes that Orwell’s philosophy was rooted in two key principles: free speech and truth in speech. “Famously, in 1984, Orwell defines freedom as the freedom to say that two plus two equals four—not the freedom to say that two plus two equals five,” Beers said. “This tension—between the right to speak freely and the responsibility to uphold truth—remains central to debates today.”