Aldous Huxley and evolving borders of social space: The changing 20th century society in his essays from the 1920s

Abstract

The paper intends to analyse Aldous Huxley’s collected essays from the years 1920–1929 as regards mentions of the way the society was, in his opinion, being reshaped in its activities, customs and concepts. In other words, the paper’s aim is to analyse some of the reflections that had, in a sense, preceded the writing his famous dystopia, Brave New World. The aforementioned activities, customs and concepts form the borders of society—within them is enclosed its identity. A change in them, therefore, means moving the borders and instituting a new social space. It is this evolution of social space as observed and charted by Huxley that is of chief interest to this paper. However, the paper shall also link Huxley’s comments on the 1920s with our society as it now is and the world Huxley had grown to warn against in Brave New World. The 1920s phase will be the one most strongly represented by the analysed source texts, but Brave New World shall figure in the analysis as a text displaying the later development of the essayistic observations in Huxley’s mental landscape. The current times, on the other hand, will not be explicitly present in the paper, but since their positioning between the past of the actual 1920s and the hypothetical future of Huxley’s dystopia seems natural, it is hoped that the audience will be inclined to reflect on them. Issues mentioned will include: the general atmosphere of the post-War West; the leisure culture often described by Huxley as “the Good Time” the mechanisation of leisure and life in general with the attendant specialisation; economy; advertisement, persuasion and propaganda; aristocracy versus democracy and social engineering.