Liberty

Freedom was Orwell’s great ‘hurrah-concept’. It is a key refrain of his journalism and the ultimate goal of much of his fiction. Yet all of his fictional bids for freedom end in failure and this raises questions about the tenability of the general concept. Orwell’s account of Swift—a man dedicated to ‘despising authority, while disbelieving in liberty’—easily rebounded on himself. This chapter sets out to explore what Orwell might have meant by freedom and why it remains such an elusive ideal in his work. It outlines his deep attraction to a negative ideal of liberty—involving a perfect absence of impediments or constraints—and the problems this produces in his politics. The pursuit of unfettered freedom would seem to clash with a range of goods and even connives against freedom itself.