Orwell and Williams: Language and Socialism

George Orwell and Raymond Williams were central figures in the twentieth-century British Left and their careers overlapped slightly (Orwell’s ‘Writer and Leviathan’ was published in the journal Politics and Letters, of which Williams was a co-editor). Williams’s critical stance towards Orwell’s work is mapped out in a set of increasingly hostile engagements in Culture and Society (1958), Orwell (1971), and Politics and Letters (1979). In this essay, however, I will not be concerned directly with the details of Williams’s critique of Orwell. I will aim rather to give an account of the ways in which both writers took language to be central to the understanding of social and political life and therefore important for socialists. Towards the end of the essay, I will present an evaluation of the ideological effects of Orwell’s representation of the relations between language and politics which will lead to a reflection on Williams’s ultimate rejection of his political predecessor.