Modern democracy succeeded in destroying the old European aristocracy, but it did not offer a suitable replacement. He kept a correspondence with Humphry Osmond who, in one of his letters to Huxley, wrote, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, Just take a pinch of psychedelic.”Psychedelic quickly became the adopted word for the experience induced by mescaline and LSD, and would become a popular term among San Franciscans during the 1967 Summer of Love.In 1960, Dr. Timothy Leary befriended Huxley after reading To be sure, Huxley would have disagreed with Leary’s attitude toward LSD. Surprisingly, at least to this reader, Huxley is shown not to be unqualifiedly opposed to using the tools of modern advertising to condition the public towards beneficial goals. Ideas of meditation, enlightenment, self-realization, and other transcendental tenets of Eastern thought permeated the rest of his life’s work.Huxley was simultaneously introduced to hallucinogenic substances like mescaline and, later, lysergic acid diethylamide (better known as LSD).Huxley was introduced to mescaline in 1953 by Dr. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who was researching it. He particularly focuses on Huxley’s influence on Isaiah Berlin and Francis Fukuyama. This excerpt is from Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Lett ers (Lexington Books, 2017). Few books bridge the divide between serious literature and popular entertainment as successfully as Aldous Huxley’s Maurini begins with a depiction of the intellectual culture into which Huxley was born and raised. Huxley’s novel remains essential reading for all students of political philosophy. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call ‘a gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. A Personal view of Aldous Huxley (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968).
Huxley’s childhood was marked by a surge in technological development, and the corresponding acceptance by many that technology would solve all of society’s political ills. This aspect of Huxley’s thought marks him as the first truly “anti-utopian” thinker of the twentieth-century.Maurini’s final chapter situates Huxley’s thought within the larger scope of contemporary political theory. His musings on Eastern thought, ecology, non-hierarchical societies, and psychedelic drugs made him a one-man vanguard of the counterculture, the political impact of which defines much of today’s political landscape.Today’s ideas of sustainable living and production, environmentalism, and cooperative living are progenies of Huxley’s thinking. The book, more importantly, kicked off a series of events that would help lay the foundation of the counterculture of the 1960s.
She is author of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in the Foundation of Modern Political Thought (Lexington Books, 2013); The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film (Lexington Books, 2016); and co-editor with Bruce Peabody and Erin D. Dolgoy of Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion (Lexington, 2018).
Of course, a detailed comparison of the two thinkers would be beyond the scope of Maurini’s project; however, it is curious that Huxley would readily embrace using the very tools (propaganda, mass culture, etc.) Nietzsche’s response to the dangers of modernity, i.e.
Sein bekanntestes Werk ist der 1932 erschienene dystopische Roman Schöne neue Welt. He himself suffered terribly after the death of his adored mother. Maurini notes that Huxley condemns violence from both “the pseudo-democratic governments and the totalitarian regimes in the Europe of the thirties.”For Huxley, that better society will be decentralized, and communitarian. He wrote nearly fifty books —both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Huxley’s influence is clear in Fukuyama’s idea of the “end of history” and his concern with the rising danger of neuropharmacology.Kimberly Hurd Hale is an Associate Editor of VoegelinView and Assistant Professor of Politics at Coastal Carolina University. It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously. Alessandro Maurini’s new book, Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017) successfully draws out Huxley’s own views, and places him in the context of early twentieth-century political philosophy. Rather than advocating simply for individualized civic education, Huxley is intrigued by the promise of “mass psychology”, believing that it, like any new advancement, can be used for good or ill.Huxley, Maurini argues, believed himself to be fighting against a second heroic age of the economy. Alessandro Maurini is in the Department of Law at Turin University, Italy. Huxley envisioned the use of psychedelics as supplemental support for a learned individual's journey to enlightenment and accessing “the Mind at Large,” not as a means for dropping out of consciousness.
UTheologians, both Christian and Eastern, criticized Huxley's endorsement, but others, including scientists and psychiatrists, supported his conclusions. Though Huxley would inspire them, he was no hippie.Huxley continued to write on Eastern thought and psychedelics, refining and clarifying his views along the way. Aldous Huxley was a deeply humane person as well as a brilliant polymath. However, Maurini misses an opportunity to compare Huxley’s approach to opposing the moral vacuum recreated by the loss of the old ways to that of Nietzsche. Maurini’s exploration of the connection between Huxley and Fukuyama is particularly interesting. Due to the events in Dallas, Huxley did not receive the obituary or remembrance he deserved. The absence is notable.Despite Huxley’s belief that a rule by elites may be necessary, he roundly opposes the use of violence to achieve his goal, arguing that the ends will follow from the means.
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. In all, many of the ideas and even terminology of the American counterculture originate in Aldous Huxley’s writings.