Modern Era
George Orwell
1903–1950 · Anti-authoritarianism
He wrote the century's owner's manual for recognizing tyranny.
In their words
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell showed how a revolution against masters reproduces mastery, and how language, records and fear are used to make people doubt their own experience. Homage to Catalonia recorded his own side's suppression of dissent. He insisted that freedom means telling people what they do not want to hear, which is why his books outlived the states they anatomized.
Why it matters for freedom
He described how power rewrites language first, and the citizen later, so that no one notices the change.
Who they stood against
totalitarianism and the intellectuals who excused it