Who cares what George Orwell thought about ethics? He was not a writer whose moral philosophy was absorbed directly into social practice — not a Leo Tolstoy, whose ideas gave rise to a global anarcho-pacificist movement. On the contrary, Orwell’s ethical thought was reduced almost immediately to a rhetorical football in the influence games of the Cold War, and its only tangible legacy was the vague notion carried away by generations of schoolchildren that totalitarianism is bad because some animals are more equal than others.

This is no criticism of Orwell himself. After all, writers with much more thoroughly worked-out systems of ethics have left even less of a trace in public consciousness. The nature and extent of any writer’s influence depend upon complex institutional, political, and economic conjunctures that fall only minimally within the writer’s own control. And unfortunately, if measured by its real-world consequences, Orwell’s ethical thought matters only to the extent that it has contributed to the political agenda of its (mostly right-wing) weaponizers — whether during the Cold War or in our own century’s culture wars.

It would certainly be hard to argue that it contributed in any way to the realization of Orwell’s own — as opposed to his appropriators’ — goals. Peter Brian Barry’s George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is not in the least interested in the material effects of Orwell’s thinking, but it does inadvertently provide some examples of the kinds of political developments his work should have but manifestly did not help to advance.