Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today's tyranny Beauty has never been so political

When I first read L.P. Hartley’s neglected dystopian novel Facial Justice, published in 1960, I found it whimsical and utterly implausible. Rereading it after six decades, I find it one of the sharpest warnings of the 20th century. John Sutherland, introducing the 2014 Penguin Classics edition, called it Hartley’s 1984; but today Hartley’s tyranny feels in many ways more recognizable than Orwell’s Soviet sadism. His is a world of soft coercion, therapeutic supervision, bureaucratic language traps and moralized conformity, all administered in the name of fairness. While Orwell feared the boot, Hartley feared the mask. 

In Facial Justice, England has been devastated by the nuclear armageddon of a Third World War in which most of humanity has perished. In the New State that emerges, beauty is rationed, envy criminalized, and an unseen ruler governs survivors through loudspeakers. Freedom has been exchanged for security, individuality for fairness, and politics for management.

The ruler is known as the DD, or Darling Dictator. He addresses the populace as “Patients and Delinquents” in the reassuring tones of a radio host. Equality and Envy — the two Es — are the positive and negative poles of the regime. If one citizen possesses what another lacks — especially female beauty, grace or charm — resentment follows, threatening social harmony. Physical differences that confer distinction must therefore be managed: women judged too attractive are “betafied” by surgery and compelled to wear standardized masks lest they provoke jealousy among their less favored sisters. Those judged too plain may be improved. The state does not abolish beauty. It regulates it.

What sounded absurd in the Sixties now feels oddly familiar. We inhabit a culture obsessed with facial images: filtered faces, injectable faces, algorithmically rewarded faces. We denounce beauty privilege while monetizing attractiveness on an industrial scale. Hartley, who was probably gay, though perhaps not sexually active, was described by Ottoline Morrell as a well-mannered, dull, fat man. He grasped that physical appearance would become political terrain.

His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies, long before words like hijab, chador and burqa entered the Western lexicon. In the Islamic Republic, female appearance has long been a matter of state concern. Compulsory veiling, morality patrols, regulation of adornment, suspicion of autonomous female beauty: these are not incidental features but part of a wider attempt to police the public sphere.

Veiling is usually justified in terms of modesty: protection against spiritual harm, challenges to personal space and privacy, and the potentially disruptive effects of the male gaze. Yet many educated Muslim defenders also present it in egalitarian terms. The veil, they argue, reduces the erotic and status competition generated by female display. This competition is not only between men. Women compete with other women in the currency of appearance and desirability; men compete for access to that currency and for the honor associated with controlling it. Hartley would have recognized the logic instantly. Beauty confers individual social capital. Therefore, like other forms of capital, it must be managed.

A woman may lose sleep over another woman’s eyelashes as easily as a man may lose his reason over her face. Hartley’s satirical observation is that envy, once treated as a political principle rather than a moral infirmity, can justify almost anything. If beauty wounds the unbeautiful, beauty must be corrected. If distinction generates grievance, distinction must be flattened. If desire unsettles public order, desire must be masked.

Iran also supplies a paradox Hartley would have relished. For decades Tehran has been one of the world capitals of cosmetic surgery, especially rhinoplasty. Nose jobs became so common that bandages themselves turned into status symbols, sometimes worn by women who could not afford the actual procedure. Alongside this ran a discreet market in hymenoplasty: the restoration of virginity through surgery in a society publicly committed to premarital chastity. Beneath official modesty flourished a commerce in self-presentation, concealment and bodily correction.

Hartley’s New State works by the same contradiction: moral severity above ground, restless vanity below. His heroine, Jael 97, is not liberated from beauty by the regime’s doctrine. She is made more conscious of it. The mask that is supposed to abolish comparison intensifies it. The women who have been betafied remain alert to gradations of face, figure and charm. They read one another’s defects and advantages with the acuity of prisoners studying rank. The more the state tries to abolish vanity, the more vanity migrates into coded signs, furtive glances and forbidden longings.

Michel Foucault, who famously enthused about the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, saw in it a form of political spirituality: a revolt against the deadening managerialism of Western modernity. He was fascinated by a popular uprising that seemed not merely economic or ideological, but metaphysical — a revolt conducted in the name of sacrifice, martyrdom and collective transformation. What he seems to have missed was that rebelling against managerial discourse simply generates new management criteria. The Islamic Republic did not abolish bureaucracy. It sacralized it, bringing the body, the street, the classroom, courtship ritual and the female face under new forms of supervision.

Hartley, who came from a privileged background and despised proletarian aspiration, saw more clearly than Foucault how regimes will “discipline and punish” whatever their revolutionary provenance. They may govern not only through prisons and police, but through faces, clothing, shame, sexual codes and approved emotional display.

His insight gives Facial Justice a relevance far beyond Iran. It applies wherever appearance becomes a moral index; wherever language is policed less by law than by fear of social exclusion; wherever individuals learn to anticipate the judgment of unseen wokeism. Nobody commands; but everyone must comply. He anticipated the way contemporary, market-driven power prefers to regulate conduct without seeming tyrannical. His unseen dictatorship rules through announcements, inspectors, slogans and the mediated presence of loudspeakers. Citizens hear the Voice more often than they see authority embodied. Public life becomes a sequence of nudges, rituals and behavioral corrections. Hartley’s inspectors are not jackbooted thugs but smiling officials in magnificent flamboyant outfits. They cajole rather than bully. 

Similarly, Hartley’s language regime has many contemporary echoes. Citizens must navigate verbal booby-traps. Formulaic gestures accompany approved terms. One says the right thing in the right tone at the right moment, even though, as in most tyrannies, accepted speech may be coupled with hints of ironic disdain. Any formal slippage is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. Effective censorship works in this manner. If people internalize the code, the censor need not bother.

Facial Justice also anticipates the marriage of politics and therapy. In the New State, cinemas show murders and violent crime not for pleasure but as aversion treatment. Emotional responses are recalibrated by experts. Today’s equivalents are milder, but the impulse is recognizable: trigger warnings, compulsory sensitivity training, therapeutic disciplinary language, institutional concern with “harm”, “safety”, “trauma” and “wellbeing”. These terms may often be necessary and humane. Hartley’s warning is not that distress is unreal, but that once distress becomes a governing category, authority acquires a new moral vocabulary. The patient must be protected from himself; the delinquent must be cured of his delinquency; the citizen must be adjusted.

Hartley’s satire, though gentler than Orwell’s, has bite, with green, even hippyish conceits about nature in the nuclear wasteland. Flowers are scarce and revered because plants are believed to suffer. Trees too acquire an almost sacred status: to damage one is treated less as practical vandalism than as moral transgression. Plastic and synthetic replicas are safer and more manageable than living plants. This should be read as a warning against moral systems that lose proportion. Once politics becomes a competition in purity, absurdity is quick to follow.

Why did Hartley, best known for The Go-Between, write so bizarre a fantasy? One answer may lie in his old-fashioned Tory dislike of the leveling temper of post-war Britain: ration-book drabness, bureaucratic earnestness, the suspicion of privilege and excellence. But Facial Justice is more than a hymn of Waugh-like reactionary nostalgia, though there may be elements of such. It is also a protest against confusing resentment with justice.

Here the book still has relevance. Much contemporary rhetoric promises dignity but delivers flattening. We are urged to celebrate diversity while distrusting distinction, praise individuality while policing deviation, expand freedom while narrowing acceptable opinion. The contradiction is not accidental. Modern egalitarian culture often wants difference without hierarchy, identity without inequality, self-expression without offense, beauty without envy, and freedom without risk. These are admirable aspirations until they are made administratively compulsory. Hartley recognized that a society which cannot tolerate the wounds produced by comparison may end by mutilating the things compared.

The invisible ruler in Facial Justice gives the novel particular relevance to contemporary Iran. Richard Bulliet — Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University and one of America’s foremost scholars of Iran and Islamic society — recently reflected on the possibility that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Rahbar, or Supreme Leader, may not just be avoiding public appearances for his own safety, having seen his father and much of his family wiped out in an American air strike. He may choose to remain unseen while authority continues to flow through networks of Revolutionary Guards, and other officials. In Shi‘ite political theology, absence need not mean weakness. The Hidden Imam is absent yet sovereign. His invisibility, like that of Hartley’s Darling Dictator, can deepen his mystique. The DD is heard everywhere, seen rarely, and therefore enlarged by imagination. Visibility can diminish rulers. Distance can magnify them.

Donald Trump is the opposite temperamentally. He craves visibility, camera angles, crowds, instant reaction. Yet Trumpism too depends on symbolic mediation: the staged gesture, the social-media blast, the prop on the desk. His approach is exemplified by the notorious red button joke: according to various accounts, Trump likes to toy with visitors using a red button on his desk. He presses it with theatrical gravity, lets alarm spread around the room, then a butler appears with a Diet Coke on a silver tray. According to Miles Taylor, a former senior official in Trump’s first administration, the joke is meant to display presidential power while making light of it. Whether apocryphal or not, such stories capture something psychologically plausible about Trumpism: immense authority staged as entertainment. 

The deeper danger, as journalist Simon Tisdall has argued recently, is that when nuclear-armed states behave impulsively, theatrically and without visible strategic discipline, they encourage precisely the proliferation they claim to prevent. If countries conclude that only atomic weapons guarantee survival, then brinkmanship becomes advertisement. Iran did not possess a bomb before the present war. After the US-Israeli bombardment, threats of stone-age annihilation and the endless deferment of diplomacy, Iranians may now conclude they really need one. Nobody goes after North Korea.

The red button joke is an emblem of personalized sovereignty reduced to theater. This is why I believe Hartley explains aspects of the present better than many fashionable theorists such as Michel Foucault. He saw politics moving beyond the old opposition between dictatorship and democracy into a stranger zone where democratic forms survive while behavior is increasingly managed; where equality becomes moral theater; where rulers may be hidden priest-kings or hyper-visible celebrities, yet both depend on symbolism more than statesmanship.

The deepest insight of the novel, however, is that catastrophe strengthens the appetite for control. Hartley’s New State is born from atomic devastation. Scarcity, trauma and fear make citizens accept rules they might once have mocked. Safety becomes sacred. After disaster, masks feel reasonable (remember Covid?). Hartley imagined what follows when catastrophe and triviality meet: a civilization rebuilt not on wisdom but on managed grievance. 

Orwell warned that power might one day stamp on a human face forever. Hartley suggested a colder, more plausible paradigm. Power would first improve the face, standardize it, veil it, correct it, cover it with something hygienic and approved — then ask us to smile behind the mask.

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