The Lion and the Unicorn, Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics

The Lion and the Unicorn has remained the most obscure of Orwell's major works, condemned both as a propagandistic attempt to enlist the British left in the war effort and for its erroneous prediction that the war could not been won without a socialist revolution in Britain. Yet it can also be read as Orwell's greatest single attempt to define the values of the democratic socialism to which he adhered from 1936 until his death. Patriotism represented for Orwell not the temporary need to fight for one's country, but the essential decency and democratic bias of British customs and institutions, which he believed could be wedded to socialism without producing totalitarianism. The preservation of these qualities he identified in particular with the working classes, which illuminates his views of them in his later works and demonstrates the continuity of Orwell's thought on this important political issue.