George Orwell on Free Speech

Abstract This paper draws two themes from Orwell’s writing on free speech. The first is that free speech is valuable because speech has the power to motivate political action. I develop an argument, building on resources drawn from Orwell, that allowing free speech is likely to produce good political action. The second (which I develop by connecting Orwell’s view with contemporary writing on hermeneutical injustice) is that free speech requires adequate conceptual and linguistic resources, and hence that free speech can be significantly limited by depriving people of conceptual and linguistic resources.