George Orwell, Animal Farm

The animals overthrow the farmer. Then the pigs become the farmers. Orwell said it was about Stalin. The pattern it describes has outlasted Stalin by seven decades and counting.

About the work

Animal Farm was published in August 1945, just as the Second World War was ending and the Soviet Union was being celebrated in the West as a key ally against fascism. Orwell, a democratic socialist, had difficulty finding a publisher willing to criticize the Soviet Union at a moment when it was politically inconvenient to do so. Frederick Warburg published it after several refusals, including one from T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who reportedly suggested that the pigs needed to be more sympathetic as a governing class.

The novel is a beast fable, a form with a long tradition in European literature from Aesop through La Fontaine. Animals on Manor Farm, led by the pigs, overthrow their human owner Mr. Jones and establish a collective governed by the principle that "all animals are equal." Over the course of the narrative, the pigs consolidate power, rewrite the farm's founding principles, exploit the other animals, and ultimately become indistinguishable from the human farmers they replaced. The final line -- "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" -- is one of the most quoted conclusions in English literature.

Orwell described the book as primarily a satire of the Stalinist corruption of the socialist ideal. He had been thinking about it since at least 1937, when he witnessed the suppression of non-Stalinist leftist groups during the Spanish Civil War. In his preface to the Ukrainian edition (1947), he wrote that the novel was specifically about the Soviet myth and that he hoped it would expose the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The allegory maps onto Soviet history with considerable specificity: Old Major stands for Marx and Lenin, Napoleon for Stalin, Snowball for Trotsky, the dogs for the secret police, Squealer for the state propaganda apparatus, and the various episodes correspond to events such as the collectivization of agriculture, the purge trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the Tehran Conference.

But the novel's staying power owes something to the fact that its central pattern -- a revolution that reproduces the structures of the regime it overthrew -- is not unique to the Soviet experience. Readers have applied the novel to post-colonial governments, corporate cultures, university politics, and virtually any situation in which a new leadership promises liberation and delivers something else. The applicability is not accidental. Orwell chose a form -- the animal fable -- that generalizes by design.

Things to notice

The Seven Commandments and their modification. The original principles of Animalism are written on the barn wall after the revolution: whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy, whatever goes upon four legs or has wings is a friend, no animal shall wear clothes, no animal shall sleep in a bed, no animal shall drink alcohol, no animal shall kill any other animal, all animals are equal. Over the course of the novel, each commandment is quietly modified to justify the pigs' increasing privileges: beds are allowed if you define them properly, alcohol is permitted, killing becomes necessary for the protection of the farm. Finally, all seven commandments are replaced by a single maxim: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." The modification of language to serve power is one of Orwell's central themes, and he develops it more fully in 1984. Notice that the modifications happen gradually and are accompanied by Squealer's explanations, so that the other animals accept each change as reasonable in the moment.

Squealer and propaganda. Squealer is the pig who handles communications, and his function is to provide persuasive explanations for every reversal and betrayal. He uses statistics to prove that conditions are improving even when they are visibly deteriorating. He rewrites the history of the revolution to remove Snowball's contributions. He invokes the threat of Jones's return to justify any hardship. Squealer represents the propaganda apparatus of totalitarian states, but he also represents something more general: the ability of those in power to shape narrative. The other animals are not stupid, exactly, but they are poorly educated, overworked, and unable to remember events clearly enough to challenge Squealer's version. The novel suggests that the control of information is most effective when the population is too exhausted and confused to resist it.

Boxer and the exploitation of loyalty. Boxer the cart-horse is the hardest worker on the farm, the most devoted to the revolution, and the most betrayed by it. His two maxims -- "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right" -- encapsulate a kind of loyal working-class consciousness that the novel treats with deep sympathy and brutal honesty. Boxer gives everything to the farm, and when he collapses from overwork, the pigs sell him to the knacker and use the money to buy whiskey. The scene in which the van comes to take Boxer away, and Benjamin the donkey reads the writing on its side, is one of the most devastating moments in the novel. It is also worth noticing that Boxer never questions the system that exploits him. His response to every hardship is to work harder. The novel does not mock this response; it mourns it.

The dogs and political violence. The dogs that Napoleon raises from puppies function as his personal enforcers. They appear at key moments to intimidate, to drive Snowball from the farm, and to terrorize the other animals into false confessions during the purge scene. The dogs represent the secret police and the apparatus of political violence, but they also represent the way that coercive force operates in the background of political life, visible enough to produce compliance but not so visible as to undermine the claim that the government operates by consent.

Snowball vs. Napoleon. The rivalry between Snowball and Napoleon maps onto the Trotsky-Stalin split, but it also raises a structural question: would things have been different if Snowball had won? The novel does not answer this directly, but it provides some evidence. Snowball is more genuinely interested in education and collective decision-making, but he is also politically naive, and he is easily outmaneuvered by Napoleon's willingness to use force. Some critics have argued that the novel's pessimism extends to the suggestion that revolutionary leadership is always prone to corruption, regardless of the intentions of individual leaders. Others have argued that the specific historical allegory is more precise than that, and that Orwell is making a claim about Stalinism specifically rather than about revolution in general.

The unreliable memory of the animals. One of the novel's subtler techniques is the way the animals' memories degrade over time. They cannot quite remember whether the original commandments included the qualifications that have been added. They cannot quite remember Snowball's role in the Battle of the Cowshed. They are not sure whether conditions were better or worse under Jones. This uncertainty is not presented as a failure of the animals but as a condition that the pigs exploit. When the past is uncertain, the present can be described however the powerful wish to describe it. This theme connects Animal Farm directly to 1984.

The ending and the dinner party. The novel's final scene, in which the pigs entertain a delegation of human farmers, is structured around a moment of recognition. The animals watching through the window see the pigs and the humans sitting together, and then they hear a quarrel erupt over a card game -- both sides have tried to play the ace of spades. The detail is important because it suggests that the pigs and the humans are not merely similar but that they are competitors in the same game. The revolution has not produced a new kind of society; it has produced new participants in the old one.

Questions to ask

Is the novel's pessimism about revolution total, or is it specific to the kind of revolution it describes? Does Animal Farm argue that revolution is always betrayed, or that revolution under certain conditions is betrayed? What would a successful revolution look like in the world of this novel?
How does the fable form affect the novel's meaning? By using animals instead of people, Orwell makes the story simpler and more general, but he also removes many of the specificities that would allow for a more nuanced political analysis. What is gained and what is lost?
Is Benjamin the donkey, who sees what is happening but does nothing to stop it, a figure of wisdom or of complicity? What responsibility does the novel assign to those who understand the corruption of power but refuse to act?
The novel describes a situation in which the exploited animals are complicit in their own exploitation -- they vote for resolutions they do not understand, they accept explanations that contradict their own experience, and they work themselves to death for leaders who despise them. Is this a realistic portrayal of how political manipulation works, or is it condescending to the working class?
Orwell wrote in his proposed preface (unpublished during his lifetime) that the most important quality for a writer was the freedom to report what he had actually seen, without regard for political orthodoxy. How does this principle relate to the novel's treatment of the animals' inability to remember what they have actually seen?

What critics have argued

Seize the Day as historical allegory. The dominant mode of Animal Farm criticism, especially in the decades immediately following publication, treated the novel as a historical allegory to be decoded. In this reading, the task of the critic is to identify the real-world referents for each character and event. This approach has been productive but also limiting, because it tends to treat the novel as a puzzle to be solved rather than as a work of literature to be interpreted. When the allegory is fully decoded, there is little left to discuss.

C. M. Woodhouse, in a 1954 introduction, argued that the novel's enduring importance lay in its demonstration that totalitarianism does not require malevolent intent; it can develop from the gradual accumulation of small compromises, each of which seems reasonable in isolation. Woodhouse saw the novel as a warning about the incremental nature of political corruption.

John Newsinger, in Orwell's Politics (1999), situated the novel within Orwell's broader political commitments, arguing that it is not an attack on socialism but an attack on the specific form of bureaucratic authoritarianism that had captured the Soviet state. Newsinger emphasized Orwell's continued commitment to democratic socialism and his frustration that Animal Farm was being read as a general indictment of left-wing politics.

Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), used Animal Farm briefly as an example of how Western literature encodes assumptions about who is and is not capable of self-governance. Said noted that the novel's framework -- animals who attempt to govern themselves and fail -- could be read as reinforcing the colonial argument that certain populations are not ready for independence. Said was not arguing that Orwell intended this reading but that the fable form carries ideological freight that exceeds the author's intentions.

Post-colonial and Third World readings. Since the mid-twentieth century, the novel has been widely read in post-colonial contexts as a description of the betrayal of anti-colonial revolutions. In many newly independent nations, the leaders who had fought for liberation established authoritarian regimes that replicated the structures of colonial rule. The novel's pattern -- revolution followed by the corruption of revolutionary ideals by a new elite -- maps onto these experiences with uncomfortable precision. These readings treat the novel as less about the Soviet Union specifically and more about a recurring political dynamic.

The preface controversy. Orwell wrote a preface for the novel called "The Freedom of the Press" in which he described the difficulties he had getting the book published and criticized the British intellectual climate for its unwillingness to criticize the Soviet Union. The preface was not published during Orwell's lifetime; it first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1972. Some critics have argued that the preface is essential for understanding the novel, because it makes explicit the political context and Orwell's intentions. Others have argued that the novel should be read on its own terms, regardless of what Orwell said about it elsewhere.

Christopher Hitchens, in Why Orwell Matters (2002), defended Orwell against charges from both the left and the right, arguing that Orwell's commitment to empirical truth-telling and his willingness to criticize his own political allies made him a model for intellectual integrity. Hitchens acknowledged the novel's limitations but argued that its central insight -- that power corrupts and that the corruption of language is both a symptom and a tool of that corruption -- remains essential.

About the work

Things to notice

Questions to ask

What critics have argued

Further reading