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The hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defends a seemingly modest claim: "There was truth and there was untruth."1 It may be incoherent to deny this, but, as the novel shows, those who set no store in truth will not be browbeaten by contradictions. Orwell's last novel reflects his conviction that a commitment to "objective truth" was fast disappearing from the world-a prospect that troubled him more than bombs.2 Truth meant little in this "age of lies" and was neither the aim nor horizon of intellectual debate (CW, 17, p. 11). Standards of rationality were opportunistically enlisted and jettisoned in the service of particular ends. Politics, he concluded, was "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia" (p. 428). This essay studies the case Orwell makes for truth-a case that remains underexplored, partly because its worth may appear self-evident while its execution can seem rather naïve.3 Yet in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell put his epistemological commitments under critical pressure and it produced interestingly mixed results. All attempts to demonstrate what truth is in the novel fail; yet truth remains the ground and even the goal of freedom nonetheless.
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The political importance of truth was not self-evident for Orwell's contemporaries. By the 1920s, Hobbes's "sed Authoritas, non Veritas facit Legem" had been shorn of its context and championed as the final word on the relationship between authority and truth.4 Carl Schmitt invoked Hobbes to justify his own authoritarian views: moral truths were the product, not the legitimising condition of power.5 But liberals-as Schmitt recognized-could also find succour in Hobbes. The "first and Fundamentall Law of Nature," according to Hobbes, was "to seek Peace and follow it" and this remained a key principle for his liberal successors.6 But here truth remained a contingent good and in certain conditions it was a positive harm. Hobbes, for one, was well placed to appreciate that fundamentalist seekers of truth had no necessary commitment to peace.
Peace was not the ultimate goal of politics for Orwell, but nor, perhaps, was truth. Advocates of peace often undermined their own principles ("Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi") and failed to see that it was trumped by other virtues such as justice (CW, 13, p. 40). Orwell believed in the fundamental justice of war-or...