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 first British edition followed the American edition by one year and is slightly less common.

Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue paper covered boards with titles in gilt on spine. New York: Chatto & Windus, 1959. #11212.
Crown and two corners gently bumped, with mild offsetting to the endpapers; else near fine in a very good or better dust jacket, showing slight darkening to the spine and flaps, with mild edgewear and a few tiny tears. A pleasing copy.