{"id":2858,"date":"2021-04-05T13:33:47","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T18:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=2858"},"modified":"2024-05-10T20:23:27","modified_gmt":"2024-05-11T01:23:27","slug":"freedom-and-free-will-in-a-dystopian-welfare-state-anthony-burgess-darkly-humorous-a-clockwork-orange-the-2008-prometheus-hall-of-fame-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/freedom-and-free-will-in-a-dystopian-welfare-state-anthony-burgess-darkly-humorous-a-clockwork-orange-the-2008-prometheus-hall-of-fame-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom and free will in the welfare state: Anthony Burgess\u2019 A Clockwork Orange, the 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the Prometheus Blog’s Appreciation for Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange,\u00a0t<\/em>he 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.\u201d<\/em> \u2013 Anthony Burgess<\/p>\n

By Michael Grossberg<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

A Clockwork Orange\u00a0<\/i>may not be remembered or read as widely today as some other dystopian novels, but it arguably ranks among the best-written, most shocking and most plausible works of that seminal 20th century genre.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Today, British writer Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel is far better known from director Stanley Kubrick\u2019s vivid 1971 film. Yet, the nightmarish novel rightly was included on\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/i>magazine\u2019s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Even if you\u2019re a fan of the controversial film version (as I am), Burgess\u2019 novel is well worth reading for its own sake \u2013 especially for its imaginative style, dark humor, inventive slang language, and insightful portrait of a disturbing future in a culture corrupted by a bloated and obtrusive welfare state.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Most dystopian novels – from\u00a0We\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Anthem\u00a0<\/i>to\u00a0Nineteen Eighty Four\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Fahrenheit 451\u00a0<\/i>(all previous Prometheus Hall of Fame inductees) \u2013 portray outright dictatorships in cautionary tales about totalitarianism of all flavors of the extreme Left and Right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But the bleak narrative of\u00a0A Clockwork Orange\u00a0<\/i>remind us that government need not go to such extremes to become oppressive, unjust and deeply inhuman. Few works dissect and dramatize better the authoritarian potential inherent in the perversions, corruptions and excesses of the modern welfare state and its attendant bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

With undercurrents of black comedy and savage satire, Burgess\u2019s revelatory tale is notable for its evocation of the interrelated cultural, social and legal factors inherent in the growth of the British welfare state.<\/p>\n

In particular, Burgess dramatizes the impact of obtrusive government on the prospects and expectations of younger generations. The welfare state’s inevitable and deepening culture of dependency becomes so dispiriting and even unmanning that young people – especially young men – tend to become ripe instigators, and victims, of a bored and toxic youth subculture, often embracing violence (in Burgess’ plausible scenario, extreme “ultraviolence”) for kicks.<\/p>\n

Set in the near future in an England where the disturbing political trends of the mid-20th-century British welfare state have accelerated, sparking increasingly dysfunctional crime and violence while the bureaucracy of police, courts and other state institutions has worsened, the novel centers on Alex, a 15-year-old British thug with a teenage gang.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A gleeful and irresponsible ne-\u2018er-do-well at the start of the story, Alex thoroughly enjoys his wasted life as a street smart but overconfident gang leader, gleefully ignorant of higher culture – except for his beloved Beethoven and Bach.<\/p>\n

Alex remains unapologetic and \u201cultraviolent\u201d until he is betrayed by his gang buddies, sick to death of his careless domination. Set up by his gang to be captured by the police after he gets carried away and murders a wealth elderly woman in a brutal home invasion, Alex becomes grist for the mill of the welfare state\u2019s criminal-justice and medical-health bureacracy.<\/p>\n

Sent to prison, Alex is subjected to an experimental government-mandated form of aversion therapy, tantamount to brainwashing, designed to undermine or deny the possibility of free will by dehumanizing individuals.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the key line of dialogue in the novel \u2013 and one repeated by two different characters \u2013 is \u201cWhen a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s a strong clue to the novel\u2019s libertarian theme linking free will and freedom.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Burgess appreciated and often used irony. From Alex\u2019s perspective, the new technology blocking his taste for \u201cultraviolence\u201d becomes the ultimate inhuman horror when, the choice of background music during the aversion therapy inadvertently establishes an additional involuntary aversion to Beethoven.<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, Burgess, a prolific linguist, wove into the story an imagined future Anglo-Russian teen slang that\u2019s quite visceral and palpable. Interestingly, Burgess also was a prolific composer, and the musicality of his dialogue should be noted as one of the most distinctive aspects of the novel and also one of its chief assets.<\/p>\n

For example, Alex\u2019s criminal friends are dubbed \u201cdroogs\u201d while the drug-added drinks they imbibe at a favorite bar is called \u201cmilk-plus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost as alien as a foreign language but strangely familiar in its extrapolation of British culture, the dialogue helps establish the story\u2019s strange and surreal tone \u2013 and perhaps was the key factor sparking extraordinary praise from contemporary British author Roald Dahl of\u00a0A Clockwork Orange\u00a0<\/i>as a \u201cterrifying and marvelous\u201d book.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Burgess’ perverse coming-of-age story, with its ironic themes of comeuppance and redemption, might best be read today from W.W. Norton’s restored 2012 50th anniversary edition. (It’s somewhat different from the 1962 original, but carefully researched to better reflect Burgess\u2019 intent from his manuscripts.)<\/p>\n

Like much of Burgess\u2019 other fiction,\u00a0A Clockwork Orange <\/i>subtly but\u00a0laudably reflect his mid-20th-century commitment to classical liberalism \u2013 closer to modern libertarianism than 21st-century left-liberalism and very different from the more recent decay of more-statist liberalism into an authoritarian progressivism increasingly hostile to freedom of speech and press, other civil liberties, due process, individual rights, reason and objectivity itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Even more foundational than political philosophy to Burgess’ vision was his conviction that the foundation of liberty is intimately connected to the fact of our free will \u2013 and that every human being has the capacity to think clearly, face reality and choose freely between good and evil.<\/p>\n

With his deep understanding of history and human nature, Burgess recognized and wove into his fiction the reality that the decision to choose the good is not always easy or automatic. Every individual faces the challenge \u2013 especially as they mature \u2013 of striving to become ethical and responsible while also grappling (as Alex does) with the daemonic, impulsive and joyous energies of the creative (but wild) inner self.<\/p>\n

Burgess often upheld the intertwined values of reason, liberty and personal responsibility in his fiction and essays \u2013 but never more imaginatively than in\u00a0A Clockwork Orange.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Anthony Burgess in the 1960s (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note: Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a prolific English author, critic, translator and composer who wrote novels, screenplays, librettos, essays, reviews and more than 250 musical works.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
A Clockwork Orange,\u00a0<\/i>his most famous work (largely because of the Kubrick film), was named by Modern Library readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 21st century.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Burgess\u2019 other novels included the Enderby quartet,\u00a0Earthly Powers, 1985\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Wanting Seed.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>He also wrote literary reviews, the screenplay for the 1977 TV mini-series\u00a0Jesus of Nazareth<\/i>;\u00a0<\/i>studies of classic writers, such as James Joyce; and translations of\u00a0Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus Rex\u00a0<\/i>and the opera\u00a0Carmen<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\n

* Coming up soon on the Prometheus Blog:\u00a0<\/strong>An Appreciation of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s The Lord of the Rings,\u00a0<\/em>the 2009\u00a0Prometheus\u00a0Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

* See related\u00a0\u00a0introductory essay<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 about the LFS\u2019 40th\u00a0<\/sup>anniversary retrospective series of Appreciations of past Prometheus Awards winners, with an overview of the awards\u2019 four-decade history.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Other Prometheus winners:<\/strong>\u00a0For a full list of winners \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the recently updated and enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0on the LFS website.<\/p>\n

* Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 an essay in the June 2020 issue of the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the modern genre.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit volunteer association of libertarian sf\/fantasy fans and freedom-lovers.
\nLibertarian futurists believe cultural change is as (or more) vital as political change in achieving universal individual rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the Prometheus Blog’s Appreciation for Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange,\u00a0the 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.: \u201cWhen a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.\u201d \u2013 Anthony Burgess By Michael Grossberg A Clockwork Orange\u00a0may not be remembered or read as widely today as some other dystopian novels, but … Continue reading Freedom and free will in the welfare state: Anthony Burgess\u2019 A Clockwork Orange, the 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43,2353,1924,160,8],"tags":[62,134,973,974,315,358,977,978,581,975,976,452,972],"class_list":["post-2858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appreciations","category-book-reviews","category-comic-works","category-hall-of-fame","category-review","tag-a-clockwork-orange","tag-anthony-burgess","tag-aversion-therapy","tag-brainwashing","tag-bureaucracy","tag-classical-liberalism","tag-comeuppance","tag-coming-of-age","tag-dystopia","tag-free-will","tag-roald-dahl","tag-violence","tag-welfare-state"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-K6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2858"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7497,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2858\/revisions\/7497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}