As you’ve probably heard by now, Christopher Hitchens passed away last Thursday, December 15, at the age of 62. Hitchens was born and raised in England, educated at Oxford, and died in Texas. After his time at the university where he was a leftist activist, Hitchens began a journalistic career which would eventually lead to his relocation from England to America. He was a prolific writer and a good one too. His work covered a range of subjects, from essays on Kipling and Byron to his many jeremiads against religion, but most of his books covered provocative subjects (Mother Theresa in The Missionary Position, Kissinger in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, God in God is Not Great, etc). Indeed, his taste for controversy is one of his defining characteristics, but his combativeness was undergirded by impressive erudition. He read widely, and his work is peppered with tidbits of other authors. In particular, two authors appear again and again in his work: Thomas Paine and George Orwell. These men were favorites of Hitchens, not just for what they said, but for what they were—truth-speakers and defenders of human dignity.

It’s hard not to imagine that Hitchens hoped to be as well-regarded as his idols, and in some ways, his career does resemble theirs. All three were excellent writers with strong political convictions. They all took independent stances which alienated them from friends and colleagues. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense famously shook the political establishment, but it was his Enlightenment masterpiece, The Age of Reason, which excoriated religion and the religious mind, that would cost him. When he died, he was poor and obscure, having seen the revolution in France betrayed and having been betrayed himself. And while only a few people mourned Paine at his funeral in 1809, his life and work are celebrated by millions today.

Orwell’s story was not quite as striking as Paine’s. He too saw the ideals he had fought for with pen and rifle throughout his career abandoned or suppressed by his one-time comrades, who were all too willing to accept Soviet totalitarianism. For the sin of criticizing Stalin, he was ostracized by much of the left, and even today is denigrated in radical leftist circles. Like Paine, Orwell died poor and obscure, but was vindicated by history.

Hitchens broke with the left on the Clintons and the Iraq War. He hated the Clintons and despised those “liberals” who rallied ‘round the First Family. In 2001, convinced that war was necessary and justified, Hitchens fully supported the invasion of Iraq, and he never backed away from that position. Hitchens left his post at The Nation in the aftermath, and continues to be condemned for his stance on that war. I myself have the honor and distinct pleasure of knowing a leftist heckler who once accused Hitchens of being “Satan” and “a traitor to the left,” to which Hitchens laconically responded, “You’ve just raised the cultural level of the society you joined.”

Despite his critics, Christopher Hitchens, judging by the number and tone of obituaries and pieces written in memoriam, did not die friendless or impoverished. Already he is celebrated, but his legacy has not yet been determined. As the mourning subsides, it will become apparent. While some may think his hawkishness will define him, I doubt his promotion of the Iraq War will long outlive him. His work on the war is more memorable for the controversy surrounding it than for anything in itself, and that’s not just the libertarian in me speaking. His true legacy will be broader and more fundamental. It will be, I think, very similar to that of Paine and Orwell. He will share Paine’s reputation for his commitment to human reason and the basic dignity of man. Like Orwell, his uncompromising hatred of totalitarianism will be remembered. More outright about his individualism than Orwell, Hitchens will stand as an eloquent and learned polemicist against collectivism in both its flagrant totalitarian form and its subtler cultural guises.