Major’s speech seems to initially echo the thoughts of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher who wrote (in his work Leviathan) that men in an unchecked state of nature will live lives that are “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Unlike Hobbes, however, who felt that a strong, authoritative government was required to keep everyone’s innate self-interest from destroying society, Major argues that the earth could be a paradise if the tyranny of Man was overthrown; he presents his fellow animals as victims of oppression and incapable of any wrongdoing. The flaw in Major’s thinking, therefore, is the assumption that only humans are capable of evil — an assumption that will be overturned as the novel progresses. Although he tells his listeners, “Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever,” this will not prove to be the case.
As previously mentioned, Major possesses great rhetorical skill. His barrage of rhetorical questions makes his argument more forceful, as does his imagery of the “cruel knife” and the animals screaming their “lives out at the block within a year.” Major also specifically addresses Man’s tyranny in terms of how he destroys families, consumes without producing, withholds food, kills the weak, and prevents them from owning even their own bodies. Major uses slogans as well (“All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.”) because he knows that they are easily grasped by listeners as simpleminded as Boxer. The speech is a masterful example of persuasion, and his argument that a rebellion must take place is reminiscent of the one made by Patrick Henry to the House of Burgesses in Virginia, where he argued that a potential war with England was both inevitable and desirable.
