A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
The state cured his violence. Now he can't choose anything.
For you if
you want to understand state control of the individual through a novel that refuses to let you be comfortable on any side of the argument
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Alex is fifteen, violent, and free. A teenager who chooses evil with the same autonomy that makes human goodness meaningful. When the state captures him and removes that choice through aversion therapy, Burgess asks the question the novel will not let you avoid: is a person who cannot choose evil still a person? The invented slang — Nadsat, a Russian-inflected argot — forces the reader to work, to learn, to be disoriented, which is itself a punk act. Burgess was not glamorizing violence. He was naming something the state does that is more frightening than the violence it claims to cure: the erasure of agency in the name of order. The Kubrick film made this look cool. The novel makes it look like what it is: a political horror story about what governments do to young bodies when those bodies refuse to comply. The most important novel ever written about free will as a political condition rather than a philosophical abstraction.
Where This Book Lives
- Themes
- free willstate control
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
A Clockwork Orange(1971)
dir. Stanley Kubrick
State violence dressed up as your rehabilitation.
In a near-future Britain, teenage gang leader Alex is imprisoned for ultraviolence and subjected to an experimental state conditioning program meant to strip him of the capacity for violent choice. Adapted from Anthony Burgess's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to resolve the discomfort — Alex is a monster, and the state's "cure" is its own kind of monstrous. Pedagogical in forcing the question of whether choosing evil is more human than being engineered into goodness.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
