ABSTRACT
This chapter opens up the relationship between the three societies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: the “World State” in which most of the action takes place, the New Mexico “Savage Reservation”, and the ever-present context of Huxley’s present day. Working with Theodor Adorno’s essay on “Huxley and Utopia” in Prisms (1967), the discussion looks at how Huxley uses formal experiments and narrative structure to engage with the work of scientists such as myrmecologist William Wheeler, social scientist Vilfredo Pareto and behaviourist psychologist John B. Watson. As a result Brave New World is an important intervention into political thought of the early 1930s, whose failures foreshadow some of the issues that other dystopias later in the decade would react against.
