Historical Approach Reflected In Orwellian Art

Orwellian Art refers to the unique style of British writer, George Orwell’s political literature and its artistic characteristics, including its profound political and literary ideas and as well as his simple and clear language style. Exactly speaking, it’s a perfect fusion of Orwell’s political pursuit of independence and passion of simplify the language.In all his brilliant works there were two masterpieces standing out:a political allegory "Animal Farm" and a dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four". They were complementary with each other, took the operation of power mechanism before and after the revolution as its focus, gave a penetrating description and analysis to the totalitarian regime, and present themselves respectively as a symbol of Pre-Totalitarianism Age and Post-Totalitarianism Age. And as political metaphors these the range of two novels transcended far beyond the historical context in which the author lived, denoted a new meaning to the eternal "history" by liberating the old conception from the yoke of "Historicism". In the mean time explored the inner reasons of why "Historicism" would launch a tide of totalitarianism.Centered on Karl Popper’s theory of "History Indeterminism", the paper is going to give a critical introduction to Major (a character in Animal Farm)’s historicism theory to deconstruct the method "Historicism" applied, i.e., historical prophecy. Next, from an angle of political historical philosophy the paper will give an interpretation to the historical approach reflected in Orwellian Art, illustrating how his two great works break down the political myth, which holds that "a revolution would gain independence and freedom once for all".The thesis is divided into five parts.Introduction serves as a general survey on George Orwell’s pilgrimage experience as a political writer.Chapter one makes a brief critique on the themes of Orwell’s two great works, i.e., the historical morality that Animal Farm and Ninety Eighty-Four carried. Chapter two made a systemic interpretation on the historicism revolutionary theory held by Major (a character in Animal Farm) with an application of Karl Popper’s method of "falsifying" and his theory "History Indeterminism". The paper extracts from his speech of his procedures to predict the future course of the history, namely,"the Syllogism of Historical Prophecy", then adopt a reversed order, criticize the third step, the second step and the first of the syllogism in turns.Chapter three mainly gives a critical introduction to Major’s historical prophecy on the methodological level. The first part gives an general on Major’s, including its theoretical assumption of autonomy of sociological, theoretical basis of economic historicism, the theoretical method of sociological determinism and the prophecy of theoretical clues of class analysis, concludes that historical descriptions is not as object as the experimental results, so that the method of scientific prediction which applied in the field of natural science does not fit the field of historical prophecy. The second part points that the potential morality that historicism carried is anti-civilization. It also further noticed that Majorist pigs never really intent to liberate the masses from their heavy responsibility, only to use their deepest dissatisfaction to create an ideal, perfect dreamingly world so as to prevent the masses from facing the reality. Thus historicism creates in the mass an immoral morality, always advocating a persuasion, telling them to keep a close eye on reality and personal right. This is the very nature its anti-civilization. The third part extracts the framework of regime of Animal Farm as an independent sociological model, gives a diagnostic review on Major’s historical prophecy on the methodological level, reveals that the essential reason leads historicism to totalitarianism lie in its character of anti-reason, from the practical point the winning of democracy will never be attained by a utopia prophecy but an institutional engineering. The historical determinists totally regardless of the important role that reason played in the social construction because they all regard that historical prophecy is far above it. Such idea will inevitably lead to a lack of scientific thinking in dealing with social problems and a reason mechanism in its powers distributions, thus historicism becomes a breeding ground for totalitarianism; besides, due to its strong refutation of the role that reason played in social life and fierce propaganda of individuality must hold an absolute obedience to the collective body lead the vast majority hold a negative succumb to the leadership, so that a fertile ground for the growth of totalitarianism come into being. This paper gives an interpretation to the principles of democratic social reconstruction of piecemeal Social engineering in opposition to Utopian social engineering, points out that the limitations of historical prophecy lies in that metaphysical historical determinism abandon a scientific social construction method of "piecemeal social engineering" arbitrarily, and only restore the position that reason played in social reforms and could a democratic institutional framework be established, provide us the possibilities of launching any non-violent reform and a democratic mechanism to guard a permanent democracy.At last, a conclusion was drawn from the proceeding analysis, demonstrating that according to Orwell’s philosophical approach towards history, history bears no mean itself, historical prophecy cannot serve as a scientific a method and historicism revolutionary theory is not a scientific theoretical weapon. Orwell’s political literature not only overthrows historicism revolutionary theory, but also enlightens a new view of reviewing the history, a new, just historical approach----in replace of shifts of regimes, we should take the pursuit of an open society as the standard of judging the historical progress. This is what we should firmly advocate.