Ingsoc

Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Fictional origins

It is clear that "English socialism" (Ingsoc) emerged within the Socialist Party. However, the origins of Ingsoc have been obscured, as the Party continually rewrites history.

Oceania appears to have emerged as a formal political union of the United States and the countries of the British Commonwealth, which later annexed the remainder of the Americas and all of Southern Africa. Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein led the Party to power in Oceania after a revolution of some kind. After the Party achieved control of Oceania, Ingsoc became the official governing ideology and other political beliefs were increasingly marginalized. Goldstein and Big Brother later became enemies, and differed in their interpretation of Ingsoc.

As political philosophy

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, describes the Party’s ideology as an Oligarchical Collectivism, which “rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism”. It is noteworthy that, in the terms of the book, this ideology would be a form of doublethink.