75th Anniversary edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm REVIEW

What makes this edition of Animal Farm unique and especially valuable is a new forward by Serbian born novelist, Tea Orbrecht and a new afterward by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist, Russell Baker.

As most of us know, Animal Farm was based on the Russian revolution of the early 1900s. At the time of the revolution, Russia had been under of the control of a series of dictatorial authoritarian czars for several decades and was definitely chaotic and not a “functioning society”. And, of course, after the revolution, the authoritarians who seized power in the name of “helping the people” ended up making the plight of the people as bad, if not worse than before the revolution. 

This is a quote from the Orbrecht’s Forward:

 “Wouldn’t George Orwell be thrilled to know that we no longer have need of a text that so explicitly decries authoritarianism, fearmongering, tribalism, historical erasure, factual manipulation, and war as an engine of national pride? That Animal Farm has served its purpose and is now nothing but a fairy tale.” “Reader, I jest.”

Orbrecht’s hope for mankind is that:

“We will never be isolated enough to keep signs of danger to ourselves as we once did.” 

Baker’s afterward gives the reader valuable insight into George Orwell and his motives for writing the book. 

And if anyone has any doubts as to who Orwell was writing about, Russell Baker is not hesitant to put actual historical names to many of Orwell’s characters in the book. Baker, keeping in mind that Orwell also wrote 1984, leaves little doubt that Orwellian means the evils of totalitarianism.

Everyone should read or reread this 75th edition of Animal Farm with a consciousness of current events in Europe and the United States. And also, being mindful of Peter Drucker’s concept of a “Functioning Society of Institutions”. 

Drucker felt that no organization or country can be a functioning society unless it gives individual members social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate power. The former establishes the basic frame of social life; the purpose and meaning of society. The latter shapes the space within the frame...But only a legitimate power can have authority and can exact and command that social self-discipline which alone makes organized institutional life possible. Illegitimate power, even if wielded by the best and the wisest, can never depend upon anything but the submission to force. On that basis a functioning, institutional organization of social life cannot be built (Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man 1942, pp. 28-36). In The End of Economic Man (1933), Drucker speaking about the lack of meaning for the masses in Europe, pre-WW II, said that a functioning society would be the only resistance to the totalitarianism onslaught (p. 248).

Drucker, much like George Orwell spent much of his career warning the world about what happens when institutions or societies don’t give people status, function, purpose, meaning, autonomy, respect, and freedom from totalitarianism. In other words, A Functioning Society.

Where would the world be without George Orwell and Peter Drucker, considering that Animal Farm is published in 70 languages and has sold 12 million copies. And Drucker wrote 39 books and published hundreds of articles?

It should be noted that George Watson, writing in 2004 in Vol. 54 of History Today, (The Eye-opener of 1939 or How the World saw the Nazi-Soviet Pact), wrote that Hitler astounded the world by signing a pact with Stalin. Watson reports that George Orwell called it an eye-opener, and said that Hitler’s National Socialism is, in fact, socialism and is emphatically revolutionary. Peter Drucker in The End of Economic Man, foresaw that Hitler and Stalin would have to unite as totalitarian forces and as a meeting of socialist minds. A year later, Watson wrote that one of the few who agreed with Drucker was George Orwell who wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) that it was inevitable that the two socialists (Hitler and Stalin) would plan the future together.

There is no evidence in the management or leadership literature that Drucker and Orwell collaborated on fighting totalitarianism. It’s unfortunate that these two great minds didn’t put their minds together to more emphatically warn the world that, in Albert Einstein’s words, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”