It is not the expression of a pre-existing social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold ourselves and our neighbors to account.
If justice is referred to in Newspeak, it is not the justice of individual dealings, but ‘social justice’, the kind of ‘justice’ imposed by a plan, which invariably involves depriving individuals of things that they have acquired by fair dealing in the market. Newspeak does not merely impose a plan it also eliminates the discourse through which human beings can live without one. Reality destroys their plans, and their language is actively at war with reality, seeking both to reshape it and to prevent its being understood (almost exactly Orwell’s depiction of Newspeak). Where “ordinary language warms and softens Newspeak freezes and hardens.” It imposes ideological rigor on the messy world, with which ideologues only dare engage at arm’s length anyway. Newspeak is the language of repudiation and denunciation, of argument by assertion and the sorting of the world into immutable good and bad categories.
the worst kind of leftist) Louis Althusser: They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.Īnd, later in the book, in response to a blanket dismissal of most modern philosophers-thinkers as different as Descartes, Hegel, and Kant-as “empiricists” by the French leftist (n.b. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language-which is to describe reality-is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. While it was Orwell who coined the term, “the capture of language by the left is far older, beginning with the French Revolution and its slogans.” The variety parodied by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that of “the Socialist International and the eager engagement of the Russian intelligentsia,” but Newspeak is a worldwide phenomenon. One of the through-lines of Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is the origin and development of Newspeak. If you read no further, at least least my recommendation of the book: it’s excellent. Rather than write a more traditional review of the book, I wanted to offer some choice bits. Last night I finished Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a hefty critique of leftist philosophers and theorists.
Since Sir Roger Scruton died in January, I have been on what I call the Roger Scruton Farewell Tour, reading those books of his that had until then sat unread on my shelf-and then some.
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