I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton, Orwell’s old school. Not coming from a family with any Eton connections (a portion of my fees was paid by the school), I had refined a test: if a boy’s father had gone there, then that boy’s grandparents had been rich enough, in the early nineteen-fifties, to come up with the money. And, if his grandparents had been rich enough, the chances were that his great-grandparents had had enough cash to send Grandpa there in the nineteen-twenties—and back and back, in an infinite regression of privilege. There were probably hundreds of boys whose family wealth stretched so far back, into the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, that, for all intents and purposes, the origin of their prosperity was invisible, wallpapered over in layers and layers of luck.

It seemed extraordinary to a member of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie that these boys were incapable of answering two basic questions: How did your family make its money? And how on earth did it hold on to it for so long? They were barely aware of their enormous, unearned privilege; and this at a time of deep recession and Mrs. Thatcher, in which English fields became battlegrounds and policemen on horseback fought with armies of striking coal miners. I spent my time at that school alternately grateful for its every expensive blessing and eager to blow it up. Into those receptive hands fell Orwell’s 1941 pamphlet “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” with its own war cry: “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.” And also: “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. . . . A family with the wrong members in control.”

“The Lion and the Unicorn” is a powerfully radical pamphlet, published at a time when Orwell thought that the only way for the British to beat the Nazis was to make the war a revolutionary one. British capitalism had been culpably inefficient, he argued. Its lords and captains had slept through the nineteen-thirties, either colluding with or appeasing Hitler. There had been a long period of stagnation and unemployment. Britain had failed to produce enough armaments; as late as August, 1939, Orwell notes, British dealers were still trying to sell rubber, shellac, and tin to the Germans. By contrast, the Fascists, stealing what they wanted from socialism and discarding all the noble bits, had shown how efficient a planned economy could be: “The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. . . . However horrible this system may seem to us, it works.” Only by shifting to a planned, nationalized economy and a “classless, ownerless” society could the British prevail. Revolution was not just desirable but necessary. And what was needed was not just a change of heart but a structural dismantling, “a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.”

During the nineteen-forties and fifties, a social revolution did take place in Britain. Though it would not be Orwell’s idea of a fundamental shift of power, his writing certainly contributed to the quieter change that occurred when the Labour Party won the 1945 election, ousted Winston Churchill, and inaugurated the welfare state. After the war, Orwell became most famous as a left-baiting anti-totalitarian, but he did not change his opinion that vast, systemic change was necessary in order to make Britain a decent and fair country to live in: he continued to make the case for the nationalization of major industries, tight government regulation of income disparity (he originally proposed that the highest income be no more than ten times the lowest), the winding up of the Empire, the abolition of the House of Lords, the disestablishment of the Church of England, and reform of the great English boarding schools and ancient universities. This revolution, he thought, will be a curious, ragged, English thing: “It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere.”

Nowadays, Orwell’s imprecision about exactly how this revolution might come about seems telling, because, despite the fighting words (“At some point or other it may be necessary to use violence”), his vagueness seems a kind of wish fulfillment, as if a nice muddled revolution might spontaneously emerge from the gentle London fog. “A real shove from below will accomplish it,” he writes, in “The Lion and the Unicorn.” Ah, that will do the trick.

But there is a difference between being revolutionary and being a revolutionary, and journalists are not required to be tacticians. More striking is that Orwell premises the economic viability of his socialistic planned economy on the economic success of the Nazis’ planned economy, and, in turn, premises the viability of the Nazis’ planned economy only on its efficiency in wartime. Nazism worked, to use Orwell’s verb, because it was good at producing tanks and guns in wartime, but how good would it be at building hospitals and universities in peacetime? He doesn’t say. So the example of efficient Fascism is what inspires the hope of efficient socialism. Orwell seems never to have realized the economic contradiction of this, at least explicitly. Perhaps he did realize it, unconsciously, because later works, such as “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), worry away at the Fascistic temptation inherent in the socialistic, planned, collective economy—the “classless, ownerless” society.