ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits George Orwell’s critique of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) as a critique of fascism and also as a critique of technocratic realism. By characterizing Orwell’s critique and his subsequent publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author demonstrates how speculative fiction can be used to understand the same “presumption of one reality” that inheres in economic orthodoxy. He presents the value-based economic approach as grounded in a kind of “speculative reasoning” that responds to the technocratic foundations of modern economic thinking, proposing the introduction of a “fairy” figure in economic reasoning.
