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i. introduction
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." 1 This paradox, as Raymond Williams observed many years ago, "has passed into ordinary language."2 For Williams, George Orwell's paradox was a timeless statement about the gap between principle and practice.3 Such a disparity may say something about the inadequacies of our practices, but it just as easily raises doubts about our theories. To this extent, the true provocation in the paradox of the pigs has largely gone unnoticed: not only does it expose the false egalitarianism of a specific regime it also raises tough questions about the coherence and viability of equality as a theoretical principle. Animal Farm gives a narrative form to these problems, but the ways in which it does so have rarely been explored.
Those who have examined Orwell's tale have understandably focused on its immediate polemical function: its damning indictment of contemporary Bolshevism.4 The tale is, of course, a transparent allegory of the fate of communism in the U.S.S.R., but it also casts its discussion on a more general level. As Orwell himself explained, "I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application."5 Orwell's professed intentions are hardly the ultimate key to the tale's meaning, but they do emphasize a breadth of reference that is an irreducible feature of its form. By casting events as a farmyard fable, Orwell gives historical particulars a peculiarly extended life and broadens the scope of the questions the narrative raises.
This generality gives the novella a special "kind of permanence" in the eyes of some, although it makes it a particularly obnoxious piece of propaganda for others, one that appears to convert the specific failings of Bolshevism into a transhistorical morality-tale about the intrinsic shortcomings of communism per se.6 It may not have been part of Orwell's polemical intention to deliver this sweeping rebuke, but it is certainly how the novella has functioned for generations of readers.7 I wish to suggest, however, that the generalities the novella trades in are more comprehensive than either its critics or advocates usually suggest. The story can be read as a criticism of any number of political ideologies-communism, liberalism, democracy-partly because it...