The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920-36

by Aldous Huxley, David Bradshaw (Editor)

Reveals the full range of Aldous Huxley's involvement in the social and political crises of the period between the wars which, as the unpublished letters and undocumented essays in this book show, fascinated him.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE HIDDEN HUXLEY: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses
Edited by David Bradshaw

Huxley covers a wide and diverse range of subjects in this collection of essays and articles.
All twenty eight are interesting.
There are three that stood out,
'Is Cruelty out of Date?', A Discussion between Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley
'Casino and Bourse', in which Huxley takes an anthropological look at gambling.
'How to Improve the World.'

The Victory of Art over Humanity
July 1931
Page 79. "Why are there armies of unemployed in every industrial country in the world? Because there is over-production. (Not under-consumption, as Mr. [J.M.] Keynes and other economists would have us believe. During the boom, the Americans consumed more per head of population than any human beings have ever done before in the whole history of the world. This did not prevent the arrival of the slump.) Why is there over-production? Because those arts of invention, by means of which we have conquered nature, are now, in their turn, conquering us. The rate at which the machinery of production is being improved is far more rapid than the rate at which the consuming population grows, or even than the rate at which appetites can be created and stimulated by advertising and salesmanship. Result: too many goods, consequently too low a price, consequently a panic restriction of production, consequently unemployment. And at the same time and all the time, machines are being steadily made more and more efficient. ( For once called into existence, the children of man's inventive mind develop on their own account, as though they were separate organisms, existing apart from their creators - apart and often, as we are now discovering, at war with them.) What is the result of these advances in efficiency? Higher production by fewer producers. More unemployed with less money to buy more goods."

Open Conspirators: Huxley and H.G. Wells 1927-35
'On the face of it, Brave New World appears to be a straightforward send-up of the futuristic dispensation sketched out in 'The Open Conspiracy' and Wells's other utopian books. But if this is how we wish to read the novel, then we should also acknowledge that the crisis of 1931 led Huxley to call in earnest for the kind of global government with which Wells had become synonymous.'

Introduction
Chronicles of Folly:
  Huxley and H.L. Mencken 1920 - 26
Open Conspirators:
  Huxley and H.G. Wells 1927 - 35

ABROAD IN ENGLAND 1930 - 36

1     Babies - State Property
2     Abroad in England
3     Sight-Seeing in Alien Englands
4     The Victory of Art over Humanity
5     Greater and Lesser London
6     Is Cruelty out of Date?
7     Science and Civilization
8     Dispatches from the Riviera
9     Industrial Progress and Social Stability
10  Sex, the Slump and Salvation
11  Education
12  The Prospect of Fascism in England
13  Pareto and Society
14  What is Happiness to Our Population?
15  The Worth of a Gift
16  Casino and Bourse
17  The Next 25 Years
18  Ballyhoo for Nations
19  Emporor-Worship Up to Date
20  General Election
21  Artists Against Fascism and War
22  Total War and Pacifism
23  A Horrible Dilemma
24  If We Survive
25  People's Front
26  How to Improve the World
27  The Man without a Job
28  Pioneers of Britain's 'New Deal'

Acknowledgments
Index

[Elvis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huxley as always makes very astute observations about society and habits of people as groups and as individuals. The only thing that I did not like were the introductions to the book by people unrelated to Huxley. I dont want "disclaimers" and opinions from random people. The whole "Hidden Huxley" and "Huxley's opinions from the past" irritates me. The views expressed in this book (essays from 1930's) are the same views expressed by him at the lectures given at Santa Barbara much later in his life. Dont try to sugar coat and give "context" to his views on population control.