On Failed Totalitarianism

George Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949. By then many of its major themes had been anticipated, both in conservative literature and in the internal debates of the democratic left (and in such earlier antiutopian novels as Zamiatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World).

Yet, in another sense, Orwell was a forerunner: the major theoretical works on totalitarianism as a political regime—on its origins, history, and internal character—...