“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it."[1] George Orwell has many memorable lines, and the very impulse to compress prose into talismanic crystallization is an aspect of his own sustained, writerly negotiation with crisis. Part of an intellectual response to crisis—one imperative—can be to write clearly and directly. (Indeed, one of those famous, compact lines avers: “Good prose is like a window-pane”[2]). Yet, as Orwell’s writing continually shows, such directness is a paradoxically intricate matter.[3] I want to foreground this less well-known sentence from his brief 1938 text “Why I Join the ILP” and argue for its own epigrammatic quality. As the title suggests, this is a document of political affiliation. (And we can note that this title, too, is conspicuously compressed, anticipating later blunt, present-tense essay titles such as “Why I Write” [1946] and the chillingly-direct “How the Poor Die” [1946]). Orwell did, indeed, join the Independent Labour Party, a dissident British Socialist party, on the heels of his radicalizing experience in the Spanish Civil War. His statement of affiliation was given prominent placement in The New Leader and the brief piece provides, as the title suggests, an anatomy of the “why,” and thus a defense of joining. The piece is at once a speech-action and a reflection upon the action that it constitutes. It thus has an intrinsically dramatic quality. 

Let me turn to the one liner. Like so many of Orwell’s key formulations, this is decidedly simple prose that contains a generative complexity within it. I am struck first by its powerful quality as solicitation. On the one hand, Orwell’s invocation of “such a society as our own” is willfully specific. He is addressing a tight circle of British readers, those in the same time and the same place, in a specific historic conjuncture. “The tempo of events is quickening; the dangers which once seemed a generation distant are staring us in the face”[4]. (Again, note the first-person plural.) The air of 1930s fascism, and of impending war, hangs over this essay. And yet, by that essential oddity and uncanniness of writing, the same phrase functions as radically universal. It easily moves, in Michaela Bronstein’s phrase, “out of context,” hailing readers in different times and different places.[5] It is oddly personal and inviting. More precisely, every reader can, and even must, reinvent the circle in which this sentence places them, reactivating the question that Orwell poses. “[S]uch a society as our own”: the phrase morphs into each reader’s uneasy present-tense, even as it incorporates us into a new first-person plural. (Who reads this and doesn’t feel that it speaks to their society, and thus their thinking, as well?)  

Orwell’s phrasing, in this universal sense, concerns the nature of living in the world—or, rather, living in it as a “thinking person.” The quiet adjective is important. The sentence swiftly conflates thinking, being in the world, and desire—the desire, specifically, for change. “The intellectual in a time of a crisis.” To live in the world as a “thinking person” is to desire a different one. The very act of thinking, here, is coterminous with negation, with an agitated externality to the world as it is. I want to underline the restlessness, the universal agitation, that Orwell asserts as intrinsic to thinking in our world. If “the unexamined life is not worth living”—and we can feel Socrates’ admonition beneath the surface of Orwell’s statement—reflective life here is bound up with political desire, with “wanting . . . change.” Orwell’s line thus radicalizes thought; it turns the Socratic posture of self-reflection inside-out. This helps explain the galvanizing quality of the sentence, linked to its universal address. 

Yet if political desire is entangled with thinking, this desire is unsatisfied. Thought is turned toward the world, but remains in a suspended, unconsummated state. In this sense, Socratic pressure is turned back onto thought itself, even as it is the necessary ground of change. Here, as elsewhere, Orwell is drawn toward the restlessness of thinking but deeply skeptical of thought’s consummation—what he calls elsewhere “the lure of profundity.”[6] To think means also to resist thought’s own tempting satisfactions, or its resolution into a fully confident program or system for change. If Orwell’s sentence galvanizes the reader, as a thinking person, it also cautions us, against too quickly translating the urgency that thinking demands into imaginary resolution.