Totalitarianism Theme Analysis

George Orwell once wrote: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been [...] against totalitarianism.” Animal Farm, Orwell’s tale of the titular farm animals’ takeover of a provincial English farm and their development of a totalitarian state there, is no exception. Totalitarianism is a form of government in which the state seeks to control every facet of life, from economics and politics to each individual’s ideas and beliefs. Different totalitarian states have different justifications for their rule, but Animal Farm suggests that all totalitarian regimes are fundamentally the same: those in power care only about maintaining their power by any means necessary, and they do so by oppressing the individual and the lower classes.

While Animal Farm is, most directly, a pointed critique of the USSR, the totalitarian regime established by Joseph Stalin in the early 20th century. However, the book also implies at various points that the USSR was not—and indeed, isn’t—the only totalitarian regime worth critiquing. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Jones’s running of Manor Farm reads as similarly totalitarian and despotic to Stalin’s regime. Mr. Jones spends his time drinking and hires corrupt, unfeeling cronies to run the farm while his animals toil their lives away, only to be slaughtered or otherwise killed gruesomely when they’re no longer useful to him. The animals’ lives are short and guaranteed to be lived in hunger, while Mr. Jones lives in relative luxury and believes that the natural order of things is that he, as a human, should be the one in charge of his animals. After the animals overthrow Mr. Jones and Napoleon the pig takes over the farm, the animals themselves begin to emulate this oppressive hierarchy despite basing their initial uprising on the notion that all animals are equal. At the end of the novel, it’s possible to see that if the other farmers who visit Napoleon’s Animal Farm aren’t yet running totalitarian farming establishments already, the hunger to do so is definitely there—Mr. Pilkington notes that it’s commendable that Napoleon manages to eke so much labor out of his animals while providing so little in the way of food and other care. This makes it clear that the tendency for a government or organization to lean toward totalitarianism is often present, even if it’s not always evident in practice at a given time. In other words, Napoleon as a totalitarian dictator isn’t an anomaly—he’s part of a much larger tendency of powerful leaders to consolidate and hoard as much power as possible.

The way that Napoleon, Stalin, and other leaders, fictional and real, achieve these totalitarian states is by controlling every aspect of life in their state. Napoleon demonstrates that this is particularly achievable through offering education and elite job training to some, while denying those opportunities to many—while also assuring the “many,” through propaganda and pro-state events, that things are as they should be. While the pig Snowball takes it upon himself to attempt to educate everyone on Animal Farm, Napoleon insists that it’s not worth it to educate the animals who are already adults and instead, it’s better to focus on educating the youth. This does several things. First, by having an uneducated adult population, Napoleon ensures that those adults won’t be able to teach their offspring to think and potentially push back on him. Those adults also won’t be able to push back themselves, both because of their own illiteracy and because of how little power they have to begin with. Then, while Napoleon uses “youth” to describe who he wants to educate, the youth are at first just the dogs’ nine puppies and later, are just the 31 piglets he fathered. Educating the puppies turns them into nine vicious adult dogs that mirror the Soviet secret police and go on to help Napoleon maintain his rule, while the young pigs represent an educated and powerful ruling class. Essentially, when Napoleon mentions educating youth, he very purposefully doesn’t include the young chicks, ducklings, calves, or foals in the term, thereby relegating them to a position in society where they’re unable to advocate for themselves or for change—or indeed, even to understand that speaking up is something they can or should do.

In addition to controlling education and advancement opportunities, the novel also illustrates the role of propaganda in a totalitarian state. From Napoleon’s initial takeover of Animal Farm to the very end of the novel, he skillfully deploys propaganda in the form of the Seven Commandments themselves, as well as the skilled orator pig Squealer and the pig Minimus, who composes songs and poems that praise Animal Farm and Napoleon. Importantly, much of what the pigs write and say to the other farm animals comes in the form of absolutes, as when Old Major says initially that animals should never concede that they might have common interests with men, or when Squealer insists that the pigs need all the food they can get—or else Mr. Jones will surely return. Importantly, the exhausted and uneducated animals have complete trust that Napoleon has their best interests at heart—something Squealer reminds them of constantly—in addition to the inability to recognize the pigs’ propaganda efforts for what they are. In this way, Napoleon creates a cult of personality around himself that is fueled by fear, ignorance, and the deeply-held belief that Napoleon’s version of Animal Farm (while still short on food and requiring hard work) is the best possible scenario.

Animal Farm offers no real remedies for  overthrowing totalitarianism. Indeed, the end of the novel, in which both pigs and humans are revealed to be equally corrupt and interested in presiding over totalitarian states, is extremely grim. However, the very existence of the novel itself allows readers to understand how a totalitarian state comes into being, gains power, and holds onto it. Knowing how this process happens and has happened historically, as well as recognizing one’s own power to not let this happen in the first place, the novel suggests, are the best thing readers can do to guard against totalitarianism in their own lifetimes.