Background
The protagonist, Winston Smith, secretly hates the Party and Big Brother; in the event, he approaches O’Brien, a high-level member of the Inner Party, believing him part of the Brotherhood, Goldstein's conspiracy against Oceania, Big Brother, and the Party. Initially, he appears as such, especially in giving Winston a copy of Goldstein’s illegal book, which O’Brien says reveals the true, totalitarian nature of the society the Party established in Oceania; full membership to the Brotherhood requires reading and knowing The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the true title of "the book". When alone in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop, Winston examines the book, before reading it, noting that it was:
| “ | A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein |
” |
Despite the term "oligarchical collectivism" featuring nowhere else in the novel, it alludes to the Party’s ideology English Socialism, Ingsoc, in Newspeak. Winston reads two long excerpts establishing how the three totalitarian super-states – Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia – emerged from a global war, thus connecting the past and the present, and explains the basic political philosophy of the totalitarianism that derived from the authoritarian political tendencies manifested in the first part of the twentieth century.
Read more about this topic: The Theory And Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism
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