ABSTRACT
An apparently deep and unbridgeable gap separated Thomas Stearns Eliot, the architect of a new poetry animated by a rich symbolism, and George Orwell, the exponent of a committed writing aimed at the fusion of political and aesthetic realities. The rejection of industrialization and the awareness of the disruptive effects produced by the advent of mass society, in fact, produced in Eliot a religious sensibility aimed at an intellectual rehabilitation of a moribund faith. Eliot considered fascism and Bolshevism to be covert religious ideologies which lacked an adequate conception of economics and prevailed only by virtue of their emotional appeal. Orwell's statement, according to which "It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual", together with his critical considerations on consumerist society does not seem very distant from the reflections contained in The Idea of a Christian Society.
