Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited (1958) is Huxley's extended reckoning with his own novel, written twenty-six years after Brave New World and considerably more alarmed in tone. Where the novel imagined a future of engineered contentment arriving centuries hence, the essays argue that it was already arriving. Organized around twelve interconnected topics, including overpopulation, propaganda, brainwashing, chemical persuasion, and hypnopaedia, the book examines the real mechanisms by which freedom was being eroded in mid-century democratic and authoritarian societies alike. Huxley draws on Pavlov, contemporary pharmacology, advertising psychology, and the techniques of Nazi and Communist indoctrination to show that the World State was less a fantasy than an extrapolation. The book began as a series of essays published in Newsday under the title "Tyranny Over the Mind." This American first edition precedes the British edition.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth and boards. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. #10207.
Fine in fine dust jacket with light wear to extremities.