ABSTRACT
Pacifism is a pivotal issue for Huxley in the late 1930s, no less than it was for Max Weber in the post-WWI period. While Huxley was famously in favor of pacifism, Weber was resolutely against it, and made pacifism a key to understanding why politics needed to follow an ethics of responsibility, sometimes employing violent means to achieve desirable ends. Huxley was aware of what sociology, or at least what some sociologists, had to say about these things that pacifism was or was not. In the world of arts and letters, Huxley faced powerful, and seemingly an almost Weberian-type opposition to his pacifist values. Indeed, Huxley's advocacy of pacifism shows the 'utopian mentality' at work. The utopian mentality, of course, is one of the most important concepts in Karl Mannheim's classic study, Ideology and Utopia, published in English translation in 1936, through the cooperative efforts of Mannheim, Louis Wirth, and Edward Shils.
