‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,’ wrote George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm.
It is a line that has gone down as one of the great capsule defences of dissent, made all the more prescient by the fact that the preface, an attack on the self-censorship of the British media during the second world war, wasn’t published until the 1970s.
But the lines that follow it are too often overlooked. ‘The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it,’ Orwell goes on, ‘it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect’.
When we think of dissent today, we think of the intellectuals, the liberals, the learned revolutionaries, the cultivated minds willing to ‘speak truth to power’ against state tyranny or the tyranny of the mob.
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