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Title: Aldous Huxley
Author: Seamus Flaherty
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: Social Anarchism
Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569317.2021.1912880?journalCode=cjpi20

Seamus Flaherty

Aldous Huxley

ABSTRACT

This article shows that in the years between 1937 and 1962 Aldous Huxley

adopted a species of anarchism. It demonstrates, first, how in espousing

gradualism and pacifism, in stressing the significance of education and

meditation as agents of social change, in seeking to construct

intentional communities in the here and now, as well as build on

pre-existing examples of ‘anarchy in action’ such as consumer and

producer cooperatives, in taking a measured view of the state, not

rejecting the institution on principle, but only its coercive form, and

in making sex central to his vision of utopia as an essential ingredient

of a happy and sustainable life, Huxley anticipated the ‘new’ anarchism

of the postwar era. Second, it argues that, in rejecting notions of

‘normal’ subjectivity, in seeing the human subject as fundamentally

irrational, in viewing power as coextensive with society itself, as a

relationship that can only be managed as opposed to abolished, in

repudiating grand theory or metanarratives in favour of

‘micro-politics’, and in viewing science as both epistemologically

flawed and potentially oppressive, Huxley anticipated postanarchism.

Despite his reluctance to adopt a label, it is the contention of this

article that Huxley ought to be considered a social anarchist.

Introduction

In 2010, Saul Newman used the term postanarchism to describe the

political philosophy which emerged from his reformulation of classical

anarchism in the light of poststructuralist theory.1 What Newman’s

reformulation entailed was, in essence, the revision of classical

anarchism in three key areas. First, Newman repudiated the ambition of

classical anarchism to turn itself into a science. Instead, he argued

that contemporary anarchists ought to ‘extend the anarchist critique of

political authority to the epistemological authority of science.’2

Second, Newman claimed that the operation of power was poorly understood

in classical anarchism. Citing Michel Foucault, Newman argued that

classical anarchism failed to acknowledge that ‘power is everywhere

because it comes from everywhere’ and that power, furthermore, will – in

one form or another – ‘always be with us’.3 Third, then, Newman declared

that postanarchism involved relinquishing classical anarchism’s

‘ontological foundation in a certain humanist and Enlightenment

conception of the subject’–the subject, that is, ‘understood in terms of

an innate goodness and rationality’.4 According to Newman, after Freud

and psychoanalysis, it is clear that ‘revolution must go “all the way”

down to the psyche’.5

There can be no doubt that Newman’s critique of classical anarchism is

somewhat schematic. The very term ‘classical anarchism’ essentializes

what was a rich and pluralistic intellectual tradition; and many

‘classical anarchists’ simply do not conform to Newman’s ahistorical

collective portrait.6 A perhaps even more egregious error, however, is

the lacuna in Newman’s work of discussion of the ‘new’ anarchism of the

mid-to-late twentieth century, namely the anarchist political

philosophies advanced by Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort,

Colin Ward, and Paul Goodman, among others. For from the 1940s onwards

these thinkers theorized about some of postanarchism’s chief tenets.

Like Newman, they, too, were preoccupied with questions of power and

psychology, and, between them, they developed sophisticated answers to

previous social anarchisms’ perceived shortcomings in each of these

areas.7 The purpose of this article is not to criticize postanarchism;

nor is it to discuss the ways in which Read, Woodcock, Comfort, Ward,

and Goodman in some ways foreshadowed it, thus bringing into question

the label Newman and others have applied to their own insights.8 Rather,

what this article seeks to achieve is to establish Aldous Huxley as both

a forebear of the ‘new’ anarchism and in less pronounced, but not

insignificant, ways as a forerunner of postanarchism too. This article

will show how Huxley not only anticipated the ‘new’ anarchism, setting

out a pragmatic anarchist political philosophy in Ends and Means,

Huxley’s ‘practical cookery book of reform’ published in 1937, but how

Huxley also posited ideas about epistemology, power, and ontology that

map loosely onto Newman’s.9 The article argues that Huxley’s novel

Island (1962) can be legitimately read as a profound social anarchist

political tract, with affinities to both ‘new’ anarchism and

postanarchism. Huxley was ultimately a kind of ‘new’ anarchist. But, by

1962, he had encroached, idiosyncratically, on a number of postanarchist

themes. In its analysis of Huxley’s political thought the article adopts

a morphological approach to political ideologies derived from Michael

Freeden’s work on methodology. It identifies a set of core social

anarchist concepts as well as a set of adjacent concepts, which, in

their shifting relationship to one another, account for the existence of

diversity and change within social anarchist ideology.10 Section 1

charts Huxley’s political trajectory from the 1920s. Section 2 engages

with conceptual issues and establishes the criterion on which Huxley can

properly be referred to as an anarchist. Sections 3 and 4 reconstruct

Huxley’s anarchist views as they are set out in Ends and Means, while

sections 5 and 6 perform the same task for Island.

1. From ‘Amused, Pyrrhonic Aesthete’ to Philosophic Anarchist

Of the forty-nine books Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) wrote, there are two

in particular for which he is most widely known: The Doors of Perception

(1954), Huxley’s account of the effects of mescalin, and Brave New

World, Huxley’s somewhat slippery dystopia of 1932.11 In Brave New

World, Huxley envisioned a future where eugenics has been embraced and

the principle of mass production has been applied to biology; where the

human species has been divided between Alphas and Betas, a multi-layered

aristocracy who have an exclusive monopoly on ‘high grade work’, and

Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, worker castes which are conditioned to

like the work they have got to do; where Neo-Pavlovian conditioning has

likewise abolished the love of books and nature; where the family is a

defunct institution; where promiscuous sex is the norm; where citizens

of the world state are preserved from having emotions with the aid of a

pleasuredrug; where individuality is almost unknown; and where the

polity is governed by Ten World Controllers.12 The world state’s motto,

we learn in chapter one, is ‘Community, Identity, Stability’, and we are

brought to understand that comfort and happiness can only be realized at

the expense of beauty, democracy, liberty, and truth.13 During the 1920s

and early-1930s, Huxley was not an anarchist. On the contrary, a keen

devotee of the work of the American journalist and Nietzschean opponent

of mass democracy, H. L. Mencken, and the elite theory formulated by the

Italian economist and sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, Huxley’s politics

were of an aristocratic authoritarian kind.14 It was not that Huxley did

not sympathize with the working classes–as an undergraduate at Oxford,

Huxley had been a member of the Balliol Fabian Group; in 1919, he urged

a friend to ‘vote Labour, our only hope’; and in 1926, he described his

political views as ‘Fabian and mildly labourite’.15 It was merely that

Huxley believed that a more egalitarian kind of society could only be

delivered and maintained by ‘some strong and intelligent central

authority’.16 Although Huxley confessed that Brave New World started out

as a parody of H. G. Wells’ anti-utopian utopianism – specifically,

Wells’ utopia of 1923 Men Like Gods – Huxley’s relationship with Wells

was ambivalent, and he accepted Wells’ notion of the Samurai,

describing, in 1934, the formation of a non-hereditary aristocracy as ‘a

piece of strictly practical politics.’17 Yet, by 1937, Huxley’s

political views had decisively shifted. The transformation had been

gradual, but from that point on Huxley was – broadly speaking – an

anarchist.18 In the foreword to the 1946 reprint of Brave New World,

Huxley explained that the author of his ambiguous dystopia was an

‘amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete’.19 ‘Today’, he went on, ‘I feel no wish to

demonstrate that sanity is impossible.’20 In Brave New World, the

character of John is presented with two alternatives: ‘an insane life in

Utopia,’ as Huxley put it, ‘or the life of a primitive in an Indian

village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less

queer and abnormal.’21 ‘If I was to rewrite this book,’ wrote the new

Huxley – the post-personal crisis Huxley and confidante of Gerald Heard,

no longer the ‘amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete’ of 1932 – ‘I would offer the

Savage a third alternative ... In this community economics would be

decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and

cooperative.’22 This was not a throwaway remark. For Huxley had, in

fact, been collecting ‘relevant information’ to ‘find a satisfactory

technique for giving practical realization to the ideal of philosophic

anarchism’ since 1938, at the latest; and in Island, as we shall see,

Huxley finally executed the ambition.23 Huxley’s anarchism can be dated

to 1937. While there are indeed differences between the two texts,

Island is best understood as a fictionalized account of his non-fiction

work Ends and Means: more considered in some respects, certainly; but

ultimately the latter text, written in 1937, provides the foundation for

the former. Although he was a pacifist, during the Spanish Civil War –

along with Ethel Mannin and Herbert Read – Huxley praised the

anarchists. But it was surely not Huxley’s positive comments about the

anarchists in Spain alone that induced Emma Goldman, the anarchist

activist and philosopher, to write Huxley in 1938: ‘I was delighted to

see that you are so close to the ideas that I have fought for all my

life. It is so rarely that one finds in England men or women dedicated

to a truly libertarian ideal’.24 That Goldman should describe Huxley in

these terms suggests that she was familiar with Ends and Means, and it

is indicative that she, as a pillar of the international anarchist

movement, should approve so effusively of what she read. Yet Huxley did

not self-describe as an anarchist – unlike his friend Bertrand Russell –

which raises the question on what basis can we justifiably attribute the

label anarchist to him?25

2. Anarchist ideology: Apprehension and Ascription

Anarchism is a notoriously difficult ideology to identify and explain.26

The diversity among the thinkers to whom the label has been applied

makes it hard to isolate a coherent set of principles which unites them.

To circumvent this problem, some scholars have opted to settle for a

single common denominator, or ‘anarchist minimum’, usually identified as

either antagonism towards the state or the rejection of all coercion.27

Others, however, have sought to bypass the issue by arguing simply that

non-socialist anarchism is not, properly speaking, anarchism at all.28

This article is concerned only with social anarchism. Benjamin Franks

identifies social anarchists by ‘four key concepts that have remained

consistently core and stable since the nineteenth century’: first,

social anarchists reject the state and state-like bodies, which

distinguishes them from social democrats; second, social anarchists

reject ‘capitalism as a coercive set of norms and practices’; third,

social anarchists adopt ‘a fluid conception of the self in which one’s

identity is inherently linked to socio-historical context and

relationships with others,’ which distinguishes them from egoists; and

fourth, social anarchists recognize that ‘the means used have to

prefigure anarchist goals,’ which separates them from the

consequentialism of orthodox Marxists.29 By this criterion, Huxley, in

his maturity, was an anarchist. First, for example, Huxley proclaimed in

Ends and Means that the ‘political road to a better society is ...

decentralisation and responsible self-government’.30 If the state is

‘the instrument by which the ruling class preserves its privileges’ and

enables ‘paranoiacs to satisfy their lust for power and carry out their

dreams of glory’, he concurred with the anarchist ambition to abolish

it.31 Huxley argued, second, that the principle of ‘self-government for

all’ is ‘incompatible with capitalism and state Socialism’ where

authoritarian management prevails.32 Third, Huxley believed not only

that ‘economic status’ was responsible for ‘differences in outlook, in

ways of living, thinking, feeling, and judging’, but that the

transcendence of personality itself was desirable.33 Finally, Huxley

argued that the ‘end cannot justify the means’.34 He reproduced the

Dutch anarchist Bart de Ligt’s dictum, ‘The more violence, the less

revolution’, and recommended instead the construction ‘here and now’ of

‘small working models of the better society’.35 If, however, Huxley was

indeed a social anarchist, he was a social anarchist of a very definite

kind. Huxley’s anarchism did not look back to the social anarchisms of

Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Tolstoy, but looked forward rather to

the ‘new’ anarchism of Read, Woodcock, Comfort, Ward, and Goodman. What,

above all, distinguished the ‘new’ anarchism from antecedent social

anarchisms was its pragmatic, or practical, ethos.36 While it shared the

four key concepts of social anarchism, as adumbrated above, the ‘new’

anarchism, as Benjamin J. Pauli has shown, had five key emphases, which

serve to distinguish it as a distinct strand within the larger social

anarchist ideological family. First, ‘new’ anarchists endorsed

evolutionary means. They embraced the principle of ‘non-violence’ and

saw revolution not as an event, but as a process. Second, ‘new’

anarchists adopted a ‘defensive posture towards society no less than the

state’. They explored social hierarchies and relations of domination

beyond a one-dimensional Marxisant model based on the concept of

class.37 Third, ‘new’ anarchists stressed the significance of education

as an agent of social change. Fourth, ‘new’ anarchists held a more

complex view of the state than their predecessors. They sought to

‘strike a balance between spontaneity and planning’.38 And fifth, ‘new’

anarchists sought to ‘reclaim the concept of utopia from figures like

Karl Popper’ who equated ‘the term with totalitarianism and

authoritarian social engineering.’39 The ’new’ anarchism altered the

microstructure of the ideology of social anarchism in significant ways.

It readjusted the arrangement not of its core concepts but of its

adjacent ones, eschewing concepts such as class war, revolution, and

vertical relations of domination which often feature prominently in

other social anarchisms. As we shall see, Huxley was an anarchist in

this particular facet of the social anarchist tradition, condemned as

‘militant liberalism’ by its anarchist detractors and inherently

conservative, as Ward and Goodman acknowledged, in its strategy.40

Huxley’s version of it, though, was not imitative; rather, in advancing

his social anarchist programme in Ends and Means in 1937, Huxley was the

pioneer. However, much more so than other ‘new’ anarchists, Huxley also

anticipated aspects of postanarchism, another distinct hybrid within the

social anarchist ideological tradition.41

3. Changing the Individual

In Ends and Means, Huxley nonchalantly claimed that there is, and has

been for nearly thirty centuries, ‘a very general agreement’ about ‘the

goal of human effort’, namely that the Golden Age to which the prophets,

from Isaiah to Marx, have looked forward will be an age of ‘liberty,

peace, justice and brotherly love’.42 According to Huxley, however,

there was no such consensus about the roads which led to that goal. He

isolated two broad strategies for the realization of utopia. There were

those, first, who thought in terms of ‘social machinery and large-scale

organisation’, whether that entailed economic reform, military conquest,

or armed revolution.43 While secondly, there were those who believed

that ‘desirable social changes can be brought about most effectively by

changing the individuals who compose society’, whether that be by means

of education, psychoanalysis, applied behaviourism or religion.44 Huxley

rejected all dualisms, arguing in Island that ‘Wisdom never puts enmity

anywhere’.45 But Huxley strongly favoured the latter strategy, adopting,

in ‘new’ and postanarchist fashion, a view of politics which equated the

personal with the political.46 He established as his ideal individual

the ‘nonattached’ person.47 For Huxley, the non-attached person is

neither attached to their bodily sensations and lusts nor to their

cravings for power and possessions; they are neither attached to their

hatred and anger nor to their exclusive loves; they are neither attached

to their fame, wealth, or social position nor to science, art,

speculation or philanthropy. The non-attached person is, in short,

neither attached to the self nor the mere ‘things of this world’,

finding meaning, instead, in a ‘scientific-mystical conception of the

world’ which establishes ‘communion between the soul and the integrating

principle of the universe’. They are conscious of their own

insignificance and see beauty in their ‘oneness with ultimate reality’,

renouncing their apparent separateness from others and the universe at

large.48

Huxley opined that the ‘practice of non-attachment entails the practice

of all of the virtues’, imposing ‘upon those who would practice it the

adoption of an intensely positive attitude towards the world’.49

However, instead of advancing towards the ideal goal of the just society

of non-attached persons imbued with the virtues of love, compassion, and

understanding, Huxley believed that ‘most of the peoples of the world’

were, on the contrary, ‘rapidly moving away from it’.50 Progress, which

for Huxley meant progress in ‘charity’, or humanitarianism, had ceased.

Europe, in particular, had regressed to a state in which torture and

state-organized atrocity was responded to with equanimity, and truth was

treated with contempt. Huxley anticipated that technological progress

would accelerate charity’s demise, merely providing a ‘more efficient

means for going backward’.51 He reacted not by seeking to manipulate the

structure of society into such a form where the individual will practice

non-attachment simply because they will be preserved from temptation to

do otherwise; rather, pointing to the behaviour of the British in India

to demonstrate the fragility of a humanitarianism held together by

custom and circumstance alone – culminating, apparently, in the Amritsar

massacre of 1919 – Huxley argued that ‘there must be more than a mere

deflection of evil’, evil must be suppressed at its source, ‘in the

individual will.’52 To that end, Huxley advocated a form of formal

education ‘for freedom and responsibility’ – as opposed, that is, to the

extant type ‘for bullying and subordination’ – and self-education

through religious meditation.53 Huxley did not reject large-scale

political and economic reform. But he insisted on the importance of

recognizing its limitations. Huxley harboured no illusions about the

capacity of most human beings to attain a state of ‘enlightenment’, a

term he used to connote the realization of the limits of human

potential. But as a way of diminishing evil in the individual will, if

not extinguishing it completely, Huxley stressed the significance of

education. Unlike Read, ‘a convinced Freudian’, who then ‘transferred

his allegiance to Jung’, and perhaps the most enthusiastic advocate of

the transformative capacity of education among the ‘new’ anarchists,

Huxley was wary of attributing too much explanatory power to the

‘conditioning process which takes place in childhood’.54 Huxley argued,

however, that it was no fortuitous accident that the decline of

democracy in the inter-war years should coincide ‘exactly with the rise

to manhood and political power of the second generation of the

compulsorily educated proletariat’.55 For the ‘strict, authoritarian

discipline of state schools’ constituted, he claimed, a ‘training for

life in a hierarchical, militarised society, in which people are

abjectly obedient to their superiors and inhuman to their inferiors’.56

Huxley therefore proposed an experimental kind of education outside the

reach of the state, where the pedagogical ambition was not passive

obedience, but rather the production of intelligent men and women ready

to pass judgement on traditional notions of duty.57 For Huxley, in an

age of unbridled propaganda, to which the individual in dictatorial

countries was subject from infancy, and to which the individual in

democratic countries was also vulnerable (developing psychological

habits of political and cultural consumption akin to drug addiction), it

was necessary to build up resistance to ‘suggestion’. This could be

achieved in two ways: first, by teaching children ‘to rely on their own

internal resources and not to depend on incessant stimulation from

without’; and second, by training children ‘to subject the devices of

the propagandists to critical analysis’, creating, in effect,

communities of critical theorists, self-aware and eternally vigilant

about potential threats to their liberty.58

Huxley, in other words, mirrored the ‘new’ anarchists in viewing the

question of liberty as inseparable from that of education, and, like the

‘new’ anarchists, Huxley sought a holistic kind of education, which

catered not only for the mind but for the body and the emotions too.

Ever seeking examples of ‘anarchy in action’, Huxley drew attention to

the ‘hopeful attempt to enlarge the scope and humanise the character of

academic education’ undertaken by A. E. Morgan at Antioch College, where

periods of study were alternated with periods of ‘labour in the factory,

the office, the farm–even the prison and the asylum’, in an effort to

integrate the cognitive, conative, and the affective.59 The second

method, then, by which Huxley envisioned transforming the human subject,

bringing them to the ideal state of non-attachment, was religious.

Rejecting the claims of science to have a ‘complete picture of reality’,

by 1937 Huxley was effectively a mysticist.60 An arbitrary abstraction

from reality is not reality itself, he argued, and science, while useful

in its own given sphere, was not competent to ‘describe and explain the

non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality’, like ‘aesthetic

and moral values’ and ‘religious experiences and intuitions’.61 Huxley

regarded religion as, in part, a system of education, by means of which,

first, it was possible for individuals to ‘make desirable changes in

their own personalities and, at one remove, in society’; and, second, to

‘heighten consciousness and so establish more adequate relations between

themselves and the universe of which they are parts.’62

4. Practical Anarchism

Huxley’s account of the means of social change, as laid out above,

expected a lot from the individual, laying Huxley open to the charge of

having embraced a ‘militant’, or ‘naïve’, liberalism – or ‘liberalism

gone wild’ – rather than social anarchism.63 But in Ends and Means

Huxley did not neglect the phenomenon of class, remarking that, while in

theory, under the present dispensation, the workers ‘may be the subjects

of a democratic state’, ‘in practice they spend the whole of their

working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant’.64 Huxley may not have

seen the working class as a revolutionary agent, but he was not blind to

class oppression. He sought in Ends and Means to find practical ways to

end it. Beyond changing the individual, Huxley elaborated a series of

practical steps in Ends and Means to bring a form of social anarchism

into existence. Stressing the compatibility of collective ownership and

authoritarian management, Huxley reversed in Ends and Means his earlier

enthusiasm for economic planning.65 In its place, Huxley advocated,

first, extending to other industries ‘the principle of the limitation of

profit and of supervision by the state in the public interest’ as it

then applied to the Port of London Authority, the London Passenger

Transport Board, the Electricity Board, and the BBC. He called these

‘mixed concerns’, since management retained its autonomy.66 Second, and

more importantly, Huxley prescribed ‘extending the application of the

popularly approved principles’ of co-operation.67 Echoing Ward’s later

injunction for anarchists to make use of the forms of organization

‘rooted in the experience of everyday life’, which operate ‘side by side

with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society’

– friendly societies, self-help therapeutic groups, housing

co-operatives, squats and free schools – in building anarchism, rather

than abstractly positing the need for revolution, Huxley argued that

‘principles already accepted should be taken over and applied to a wider

field’.68 To increase the number of co-operatives which ‘already exist

and work very well’, he posited, ‘would not seem like a revolutionary

act’.69 But, in ‘its effects, it would be revolutionary; for it would

result in a profound modification of the existing system’.70 Like most

‘new’ anarchists, Huxley objected to the use of violent means for

revolutionary ends on the grounds that violence was immoral and

counter-productive; progress in charity could not be achieved by ‘means

that are essentially uncharitable’, he wrote.71 Huxley also sought to

account for human conservatism, which is ‘a fact’, he claimed, ‘in any

given historical situation’.72 This ontological position helps to

explain why Huxley refrained from going much further, faster; first,

anarchism had to be made respectable. Thus, taking a range of examples

which included Gandhi’s strategy of non-violent revolution in South

Africa and India, Huxley argued that ‘non-violence can prove its value

pragmatically – by working’, whereas violence only begets more violence;

while Huxley deployed the same kind of pragmatic analysis in his defence

of industrial democracy, commending it on the basis that it can be seen

to work.73 Drawing on the French trade unionist Hyacinthe Dubreuil’s

book, A Chance for Everybody: A Liberal Basis for the Organization of

Work, Huxley insisted that selfgovernment within factories was

demonstrably efficient. Adopting Dubreuil’s recommendations, Huxley

argued that even the largest industries could be organized ‘so as to

consist of a series of self-governing, yet co-ordinated groups of, at

the outside, thirty members. Within the industry’, he explained, ‘each

one of such groups’ could ‘act as a kind of sub-contractor, undertaking

to perform so much of such and such a kind of work for such and such a

sum’.74 It would be left to the group itself to determine how its

earnings should be divided, to preserve discipline within its ranks, and

to elect its representatives, or delegates. This kind of industrial

democracy was not only efficient, he averred, it also ‘educates those

who belong to it in the practice of co-operation and

mutual-responsibility’.75 For Huxley – echoing a typical anarchist

concern – the size of the units of selfgovernment was important.76

Distinguishing between the psychology of the group and the crowd, Huxley

argued that if the units of self-government are smaller than the optimum

size (of around ten to thirty), ‘they will fail to develop that

emotional field which gives to group activity its characteristic

quality’, namely, the sense of belonging, in an intelligent way, ‘while

the available quantity of pooled information and experience will be

inadequate’.77 If, meanwhile, they are larger than the optimum size

‘there will be a danger of their relapsing into the crowd’s sub-human

stupidity’ – the flight from self, downwards, into ‘the darkness of

sub-human emotionalism and panic animality’.78 Huxley deplored the

decline of community and the community sense engendered by capitalism,

technological progress, and centralized professionalism. Modernity,

Huxley argued, had ‘reduced the number of physical contacts’ between

members of a community and impoverished their ‘spiritual relations’,

making ‘manifestations of local charity and mutual aid’ increasingly

rare.79 The direct, industrial democracy he envisioned would compensate

for that lack. What was also important for Huxley was that this kind of

industrial self-government solved the problem of human heterogeneity in

its application to democracy. For while Huxley believed that ‘practice

in self-government’ was an ‘indispensable element in the curriculum of

man’s moral and psychological education’, he did not accept that people

were equally endowed with the capacity to sustain an interest in

‘long-range, large-scale political issues’.80 Following the work of the

American psychologist, William Sheldon, Huxley isolated a number of

human types – somatotonic, viscerotonic, and cerebrotonic – separated by

temperament and ‘differences of intellectual ability’.81 Huxley opined

that it is the responsibility of the large-scale social reformer to

arrange the structure of society in such a way that bridges are built

between ‘incommensurable psychological universes’.82 Industrial

democracy is therefore not only a good in itself, on this reading; it

also furnishes people with ‘short-range, small-scale interests’ with the

opportunity to ‘find scope for their kind of political abilities’.83 In

Ends and Means, Huxley’s main quibble with anarchism was semantic. To be

sure, Huxley did not seek to dispense with organization: he was not

anti-state, as such; the state still had useful functions to perform.

For example, while Huxley sought to decentralize – neutralizing

bureaucracy and making relations between people as direct as they

possibly could be – in any complex society, he argued, ‘there must be

some organisation responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the

various constituent groups’.84 There must also ‘be a body’, he

continued, ‘which is delegated the power of acting in the name of the

society as a whole’.85 For Huxley, however, like the ‘new’ anarchists,

the state in this form was not oppressive, hence his willingness to find

some name other than ‘state’ for it.86 This was administrative

representation rather than political representation. It involved a mere

delegation of power instead of a fundamental transfer of power. It is

therefore consistent with social anarchism. Yet Huxley’s other political

proposal did involve representation, which most anarchists view as

inherently oppressive. Motivated by the desire to ensure that a ruling

oligarchy did not gain control of the necessary social machinery during

the initial stages of a new regime of decentralization and

self-government, Huxley argued that administrative obstacles ought to be

put in the way of the ‘individual of consuming ambition’.87 Just as

Rousseau complained how philosophers had ‘transported into the state of

nature concepts formed in society’, namely need, greed, oppression,

desire and pride, Huxley explained the prevalence of ambitious

individuals by the value contemporary society assigned to individual

ambition, and, with the right kind of education, he expected to see

their numbers diminish.88 Yet, in the meantime, Huxley advocated forming

institutes of chartered business managers, chartered politicians, and

chartered administrators akin to the institution of Chartered

Accountants, with its self-government, rules and responsibilities, as a

way to exclude ambitious individuals from positions of leadership. Thus,

having seemingly discarded it, in Ends and Means Huxley let the Samurai

in through the back door. Evidence of Huxley’s residual elitism is also

apparent elsewhere. Clearly Huxley did not share the a priori trust in

the individual, characteristic of some strands of social anarchism.89 On

the contrary, he remained a sceptic. Through ignorance, fear, kinship,

or mere habit or inertia, ‘most men and women’, Huxley wrote, ‘are

prepared to tolerate the intolerable’.90 He saw human nature as plastic,

capable of being ‘made to assume the most bewilderingly diverse’ and

‘amazingly improbable forms’.91 Cooperation, accordingly, neither ran

with or against its grain. But, in the first instance, true ‘anarchy in

action’ would be enacted by enlightened elites. If the ‘material’ with

which anarchists must deal is ‘recalcitrant’, then prior to the changes

in personality wrought by education and politico-economic restructuring

social anarchism must be pioneered by the comparatively small number of

individuals who accept it in theory in advance. Huxley identified

associations of like-minded individuals organized as intentional

communities in which direct democracy is practised and property is held

in common as a decisive agent of social change. By ‘behaving

differently’, by establishing new relationships between human beings and

making a success of it, such intentional communities would not only

modify the existing social and economic order for the better, they had

the further merit of having propagandistic value.92 ‘The fact that a

theory has actually worked is a better recommendation for its

soundness’, Huxley wrote, ‘than any amount of ingenious dialectics’.93

Yet that did not prevent Huxley from engaging in dialectical ingenuity

in Island, his literary utopia of 1962, in which he outlined his

conception of a feasible social anarchist society.

5. Melancholic Anarchism

The first thing to say about Huxley’s Island is that Pala, the utopian

island community Huxley imagined, should not be interpreted as Huxley’s

unblemished ideal society. Pala, rather, is intentionally flawed, hence

the epigraph Huxley borrowed from Aristotle: ‘In framing an ideal we may

assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities’.94 Pala has a

history. It is convoluted and contingent, and artefacts from its past

remain. Contrary to Huxley’s actual political ambitions, Pala is

therefore a constitutional monarchy. The second thing one ought to note

about Island is that it is ultimately a melancholic, or pessimistic,

work.95 ‘Pala was completely viable’, Huxley has the insightful but

Machiavellian character Mr Bahu explain, ‘until about 1905’.96 By 1962,

however, it seemed to Huxley that no ideal society could resist the

inevitable cultural, economic, and military incursions of an

increasingly globalized, and increasingly psychologically unhinged,

external world. If a social anarchist society was still practically

conceivable in the 1930s or even in the immediate postwar years, for

Huxley, in 1962, it was now conceivable only on an abstract plane.

Island thus concludes with a coup d’état, that is, with the overthrow of

Pala’s experiment in social anarchism. Over the years Huxley became

‘less and less ‘literary”: he repudiated ‘art-for-art’s sake’, sought

forms that ‘were primarily vehicles for ideas’, and, by 1952, thought of

himself as ‘an essayist who sometimes writes novels’.97 The ideas

advanced in Island had been in gestation for thirty years. In Nicholas

Murray’s words, they were ‘the Summa of all his beliefs about the world,

about human potential, about the meaning and purpose of life’.98 Huxley

was right to regard Island as ‘a serious contribution to social

thought’.99 Huxley’s utopia dramatized the social anarchist principles

he first established in Ends and Means, it embodied new ‘new’ anarchist

themes, and it offered considered views on a number of postanarchist

topics. Beginning with the economic and political arrangements in

Huxley’s utopia, Pala is a society of co-operators. They are neither

capitalists nor state socialists. There is, however, private property.

It is not a community of goods. Pala has a monetary economy, and

inequality, up to a point, is permitted; it is possible for anyone to

become ‘four or five times as rich as the average’.100 What Pala has

abolished is ‘cut throat’ competition.101 In its place, it has

substituted ‘cooperative techniques for buying and selling and

profit-sharing and financing’.102 Its borrowing and lending system is

modelled on the credit unions established by Wilhelm Raiffeisen in

Germany in the nineteenth century. Efforts are pooled, friendly

agreements established, and bureaucracy is kept to a bare minimum.

Seeking to adapt their economy and technology to human beings, rather

than viceversa, Pala has only industrialized in spots. The Palanese

reject the consumerism of the outside world. They find meaning, instead,

in nature, personal relationships, and exercise of the body. They rotate

their jobs, sampling ‘all kinds of work’, and set no store by the

principle of maximum efficiency.103 The equation they use to represent

their social arrangements and aspirations is as follows: ‘Electricity

minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty’.104

True to Huxley’s conception of the good society as set out in Ends and

Means, Pala is ‘a federation of self-governing units, geographical

units, professional units, economic units – so,’ Huxley has the

character Dr Robert explain in the novel, ‘there’s plenty of scope for

small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind

of dictator at the head of a centralized government’.105 There is no

army since the Palanese are pacifists. Palanese society is composed of

‘voluntary associations’.106 Here, Huxley’s chief innovation was the

concept of the ‘Mutual Adoption Club’, or MAC.107 In Island, Huxley

disbanded the nuclear family, favouring instead ‘an inclusive,

unpredestined and voluntary family’ model.108 The MAC is composed of

twenty ‘pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and

ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages’.109 This

formed a direct, face-to-face community and the basic building block of

Palanese society. Just as the ‘new’ anarchists envisioned ‘a mass of

societies rather than a mass society’, Huxley has his imagined Palanese

sociologists speak of a ‘hybridisation of micro-cultures’ produced by

the system of autonomous MACs.110 Yet Pala still has a Cabinet, a House

of Representatives, and a Privy Council. ‘The state has to exist, of

course’, we learn from Pala’s Under-Secretary of Education.111 Pala is

not therefore without its judges and policeman. However, since so few

crimes are committed they are few in number, and crime is primarily

dealt with not through the state but through the criminal’s MAC. The

judge decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty.

Thereafter, group therapy, rather than punishment, is provided within

the MAC, which assumes ‘group responsibility for the delinquent’.112 The

reason why so few crimes are committed in Pala is because the Palanese

are a remarkably well-adjusted people. They are alert to the smallest of

details about what is required to make a psychologically healthy human

being and how to keep them that way, attending to items such as what

they eat, how they make love, what they see and hear, and how they feel

about being who they are. As children they are treated as individuals

with unique needs and experiences, and methods have been devised to

bring Palanese boys and girls of widely differing and conflictual

temperaments to ‘understand and tolerate one another’.113 The Palanese

practise meditation, which they supplement with the use of a

hallucinogenic drug which serves to liberate them from ‘bondage to the

ego’.114 The ordinary response to the so-called ‘moksha-medicine’ is

‘full-blown mystical experience’, a sense of the merging of the

individual with the whole, ‘limitless compassion, fathomless mystery and

meaning’, not to mention ‘inexpressible joy’.115 Palanese culture is, in

short, built on the principles of friendliness, trust, and compassion,

decency, reason, and liberty, and, for the most part, Palanese people

behave accordingly. The Palanese are keen to stress that ‘Pala isn’t

Eden or the Land of Cockayne’.116 But the Palanese are a happy,

freedom-loving people, richly endowed with insight about the human

condition. They are therefore tolerant and largely conflict-free, thus

the state as an instrument of physical coercion is almost entirely

inoperative. It is, for the most part, a state only in name.

6. Sex, Power, and Contingency

In the same way that Ward stressed that people consent to be ruled not

only because of fear but also because, more often than not, people

‘subscribe to the same values of their governors’, Huxley’s utopians

choose ‘to behave in a sensible and realistic way’.117 They are aided in

this not only by their ethical principles, politico-economic

arrangements, and by the Buddhist religion they cleave to, but also by

the sexual mores they have adopted. Huxley, like Orwell, recognized the

political utility of sex, and while the Palanese are not the promiscuous

citizens of Huxley’s earlier dystopia, where ‘everyone belongs to

everyone else’, their Buddhism ‘is shot through and through with

Tantra’.118 In Island Huxley takes up Freud’s notion that, instead of a

sexuality concentrated on the genitals, the sexuality of children is

‘diffused throughout the whole organism’.119 It is a sexuality which,

for cultural reasons, was ceded as children grew up. The Palanese

commitment to Tantric sex is ‘the organised attempt to regain that

paradise’ lost.120 Huxley has his utopians observe the age-old

injunction to make love not war. Huxley appreciated how sexual pleasure

and psychological well-being coincide and dramatized this phenomenon in

the novel. The satisfying and meaningful sex enjoyed by the Palanese

also serves to negate their appetite for possessions. Thus, ten years

prior to the publication of Comfort’s implicitly anarchist handbook on

sexual conduct, The Joy of Sex (1972), Huxley acknowledged ‘the central

importance of unanxious, responsible and happy sexuality in the lives of

normal people’.121 Where Huxley dissented from Comfort was in his

repudiation of the notion of ‘normal’ subjectivity. For Huxley,

‘everybody’s different from everybody else’.122 Essentialist categories

in psychology, Huxley has the character Dr MacPhail report, are

‘hopelessly inadequate’.123 Neither Freudism, Behaviourism, or any other

system of psychology, could account for ‘the roulette wheel of

heredity’, with its production of different constitutions, anatomies,

biochemistries, and temperaments’. Human beings, Dr MacPhail avers, ‘are

much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs’.124 Like Newman and

other postanarchists, Huxley thought of subjectivity as an

‘indeterminite field of possibilities, potentialities and often

conflicting desires and drives’.125 The view that Huxley attributes to

Western psychiatrists, that, ‘a normal human being is one who can have

an orgasm and is adjusted to his society’, is treated with derision by

the Palanese.126 ‘It’s unimaginable!’, the nurse attending to the

central protagonist, Will Farnaby, announces. ‘No question about what

you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings

and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you’re

supposed to be adjusted to?’127 ‘In the country of the insane’, Huxley

has Mr Bahu observe ‘the integrated man doesn’t become king’. On the

contrary, ‘he gets lynched’.128 Huxley was a humanist in the sense that

he believed in reason, virtue, and human agency.129 But, at the same

time, he considered the individuals who peopled the dysfunctional

societies – both Affluent and economically depressed – that he had known

in his life and reading as ‘less than human’.130 Huxley anticipated the

postanarchists in arguing that ‘We cannot reason ourselves out of our

basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being

irrational in a reasonable way’.131 Even for the Palanese ‘to become

fully human’ is only an ambition.132 Huxley, then, formulated ideas

which would not be out of place among the postmodern advocates of

anti-psychiatry. He also mirrored Foucault and Foucault’s postanarchist

admirers in his consideration of ‘the problems of power’.133 Huxley

believed, like Newman, that domination can be most effectively countered

‘by engaging with, rather than denying, power’.134 He, too, observed

that the operation of power is ‘far more complex and differentiated’

than anarchists have typically allowed for.135 In Island, Huxley uses Dr

Robert as a vehicle to argue that while Lord Acton ‘was altogether

admirable’ as a political theorist, as ‘a practical psychologist he was

altogether absent’.136 Huxley has Dr Robert claim, in assent with Acton

that it is obvious that due to its propensity to corrupt, power ‘has to

be curbed on the legal and political levels’.137 But ‘it’s also

obvious’, he goes on, ‘that there must be prevention on the individual

level. On the level of instinct and emotion, the muscles and the

blood’.138 For Huxley, the problems of power confront us on every level

of organization, ‘from national governments to nurseries and

honeymooning couples’.139 That is to say, power takes both vertical and

horizontal forms; it is coextensive with society itself. In addition to

the ‘Great Leaders’, there are ‘the millions of small-scale tyrants and

persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the

Calvins and Torquemadas of the family’.140 Like Newman, Huxley argued

that power cannot be abolished. Power, and the ambition to acquire it,

is, on the contrary, perennial. Yet, while there is no ‘final liberation

from power’, Huxley concurred with Newman, what is possible is ‘an

ongoing modification’ of power relations.141 The Palanese have thus not

only adopted the principle of non-attachment as a mode of ethical

living, they also seek to harness the power generated by the

power-hungry, setting it ‘to work in some useful way’, or else

preventing it from doing harm to others.142 They are ‘only half

convinced’ by psychoanalytic approaches to questions of power that

explain it as a ‘matter of mother and toilet-training, of early

conditioning and traumatic environments’.143 According to Huxley, there

was also innate predisposition, or biochemistry, to consider. The

Palanese identify two species of power-loving individual: Peter Pans and

Muscle People. Peter Pans are children, primarily boys, who grow up too

late. Envious and hateful, they are incapable of either competing or

cooperating. ‘The most recent, as well as the best and biggest’, Dr

Robert explains, ‘was Adolf Hitler’.144 Muscle Men, by contrast, are

predestined by shape to extraversion, always feeling impelled ‘to Do

Something’, and ‘never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or

sensibility’.145 The ‘supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man’,

Huxley has Dr Robert note, is Stalin.146 In Pala, Peter Pans are ‘never

given a chance to work up an appetite for power’.147 Reaching for a

remarkably illiberal solution for Peter Panic delinquency, which does

not easily square with his other liberal, anti-essentialist and

anti-determinist, pronouncements about the human subject, Huxley has his

utopians test for the condition between the ages of four-and -a-half and

five. Those who test positive are treated biomedically. Muscle Men, on

the other hand, are ‘cured’ in less starkly sinister ways. First, Pala’s

social and political arrangements offer them few opportunities for

bullying their families or domineering on a larger scale. Second, Muscle

Men are trained to be ‘aware and sensitive’.148 They are taught to

‘enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence’.149 And third, the

Palanese ‘canalise’ their love of power, as Huxley put it, deflecting it

‘away from people and on to things’.150 Muscle Men are ‘given all kinds

of difficult tasks to perform–strenuous and violent tasks that exercise

their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination’.151 By embracing

essentialism and determinism in constructing categories of power-loving

individual and, in the case of Peter Pans in particular, positing a

coercive solution to the problem, Huxley may have erred in his

anticipation of postanarchism. However, that anticipation revealed

itself again in his strident rejection of grand theory, or

metanarratives.

In Ends and Means, Huxley poured scorn on the notion of the

‘historical’, or ‘historical necessity’, deployed by grand theorists

such as Hegel and exploited by every modern tyranny, ‘Fascist, Nazi, and

Communist alike’.152 He argued that ‘to work for it is to co-operate

with the powers of darkness against the light’.153 ‘The real is not the

rational’, Huxley averred, and “historicalness” is not a value’.154 Just

as postanarchists are ‘suspicious of ideals that function to coerce

individuals into subordinating themselves to a larger cause’, Huxley

denounced the ‘historical’ as liberty-denying, as almost, in fact,

‘unmitigatedly evil’.155 Huxley exhibited the same kind of resistance to

abstraction found among postanarchists. He was a nominalist, who

deplored ‘the invincible tendency to reduce the diverse to the

identical’.156 Like postanarchists, Huxley, accordingly, did not seek to

make a science of his anarchism.157 Rather, Huxley was a moralist and

the social anarchism he envisioned was contingent; it could only be

accomplished by rational – or ‘reasonably irrational’ – human agents.

Thus, instead of a historically determined product of a clash between

forces and relations of production and the class struggle to which that

clash gives rise, the social anarchist society created in Pala is the

result of chance and intelligent human activity – the gradual

implementation of a pragmatic social policy devised by one highly

intelligent and adventurous, non-conforming Scottish surgeon, Dr Andrew,

and a Palanese monarch of intellect and refinement, ‘a man not only of

deep religious convictions ... but also of deep religious experience and

spiritual insight’.158 Needless to say, this form of transition to a

social anarchist society was not a model that Huxley expected others to

follow. Rather, it was a unique thought-experiment, appropriate to

Island’s literary form. Huxley was a proponent of ‘micro-politics’, a

type of political thinking centred on the specific.159 He may have

reserved a special place for the role of the individual in history, but

only local circumstances and local knowledge could determine its

particular efficacy and dictate an appropriate course of action. Huxley

was not entirely averse to the ‘sociologist’s eye-view’ of the world,

the view, namely, of the pattern-discerner and conceptmaker. But it

must, he insisted, be complemented by training in receptivity, that is,

it must be combined with the epistemological habits of ‘the alertly

passive insight-receiver’.160 Science, Huxley averred, is handicapped by

the tradition-bound concepts and classificatory schemes adopted by its

practitioners.161 In conformity with postanarchists, he was sensitive to

‘science’s power effects’.162 Science was never politically neutral. It

was both suffused with unconscious bias and tied up with power claims.

In anticipation of Newman’s proposal, Huxley formulated an anarchism

without ‘deep foundations in science and rationality; an anarchism’ –

distinct from many earlier iterations – that, as we have seen, ‘did not

make universal claims about human nature, natural laws or an unfolding

rationality immanent in social progress’.163 While Huxley may have been

inconsistent in his anti-essentialism, rejecting the idea of ‘normal’

subjectivity while recycling biomedical essentialist ideas derived from

William Sheldon’s determinist psychological schema, Huxley was still

closer to postanarchism than most other ‘new’ anarchists, maintaining a

heightened sensitivity to the omnipresence of power and expressly

rejecting scientism and metanarratives.

7. Conclusion

Although Huxley did not self-describe as an anarchist, in 1938 he

replied to Emma Goldman that the libertarian ideal she propounded was

‘the only satisfactory and even the only practical political creed for

anyone who is not a conservative reactionary’.164 But by 1962, Huxley

was more pessimistic. It seemed to him that the prospects for such a

libertarian ideal were not promising. Yet if Island is essentially a

melancholic utopia, ending with the overthrow of Huxley’s imagined

society, it is nonetheless a social anarchist work of political

philosophy, with affinities to both ‘new’ anarchism and postanarchism.

This article has shown how, between 1937 and 1962, Huxley embraced

pragmatic anarchism. It has demonstrated how in espousing gradualism and

pacifism, in stressing the significance of education and self-care, or

meditation, as agents of social change, in seeking to construct

intentional communities in the here and now, as well as build on

pre-existing examples of ‘anarchy in action’ such as consumer and

producer cooperatives, in taking a measured view of the state, not

rejecting the institution on principle, but only its coercive form, and

in making sex central to his vision of utopia as an essential ingredient

of a happy and sustainable life, Huxley anticipated the ‘new’ anarchism

of Read, Woodcock, Comfort, Ward, and Goodman. In rejecting notions of

‘normal’ subjectivity, in seeing the human subject as fundamentally

irrational rather than rational, in viewing power as coextensive with

society itself, as a relationship that can only be managed as opposed to

abolished, in repudiating grand theory or metanarratives in favour of

‘micro-politics’, and in viewing science as both epistemologically

flawed and potentially oppressive, Huxley anticipated the postanarchism

of Newman and others. It is the contention of this article that, despite

his reluctance to adopt a label, Huxley should be considered a social

anarchist, suspended somewhere between these two sub-ideological

hybrids. If Huxley started out as a ‘new’ anarchist in 1937, by 1962 he

had begun to encroach – loosely and idiosyncratically – on postanarchist

themes. This article also demonstrates the malleability of political

ideologies. It has shown how social anarchism is a broad tradition. It

comprises a number of sub-ideological hybrids including ‘new’ anarchism

and postanarchism which, while maintaining the ideology’s conceptual

core have, over time, reordered and reprioritized its adjacent concepts.

It is precisely this, moreover – the process of rearranging an

ideology’s micro-structure – that, as Freeden explains, ‘provides the

basis for im

7. See C. Honeywell, A British Anarchist Tradition: Herbert Read, Alex

Comfort and Colin Ward (New York: Continuum, 2011); C. Honeywell,

‘Bridging the Gaps: Twentieth-Century Anglo–American Anarchist Thought’,

in R. Kinna (Ed.) The Continuum Companion to Anarchism (London:

Continuum, 2012), pp. 111–139; and B. J. Pauli, ‘The New Anarchism in

Britain and the US: towards a richer understanding of post-war anarchist

thought’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 20, No. 2 (2015), pp.

133–155. 8. Drawing on distinctly different sources postanarchism’s

originality has been questioned before. See, for example, G. Kuhn,

‘Anarchism, Postmodernity, and Poststructuralism’, in R. Amster, A.

DeLeon, L. A. Fernandez, A. J. Nocella, II., and D. Shannon (Eds)

Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in

the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 21. 9. A. Huxley, Ends and

Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods

employed for their Realization (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), p. 8.

10. See M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual

Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), above all, pp. 13–136; and for

a précis, M. Freeden, ‘The Morphological Analysis of Ideology’, in M.

Freeden, L. Tower Sargent, and M. Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of

Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.

115–137. 11. See N. Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual

(London: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 401. For analysis of Brave New World

see R. S. Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, Dystopia (Boston:

Twayne, 1990); G. Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2016), Ch. 6; P. Edgerly Firchow, The End of Utopia: A

Study of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Cranbury, NJ: Associated

University Press, 1984); D. G. Izzo and K. Kirkpatrick (Eds), Huxley’s

Brave New World: Essays (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and

Company, 2008); and Jonathan Greenberg and Nathan Waddell (Eds), Brave

New World: Contexts and Legacies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2016). 12. Huxley, Brave New World (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 175. 13.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 15. 14. See D. Bradshaw, ‘Introduction’ and

‘Chroniclers of Folly: Huxley and H. L. Mencken’, in D. Bradshaw (Ed.)

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

(London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. vii–30. 15. Bradshaw, ibid, pp.

viii–ix; Murray, Huxley, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 110, 181. 16. A. Huxley,

‘The Victory of Art over Humanity’, in Bradshaw (Ed.), op. cit., Ref.

14, p. 83. 17. Quoted in D. Bradshaw, ‘Open Conspirators: Huxley and H.

G. Wells’, in Bradshaw (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 41. 18. Huxley is

not widely regarded as such. But David Goodway, from whom this article

borrows, did see Huxley as an anarchist, in particular, as a

‘forerunner’ of the ‘new anarchism’, as I have also posited here.

Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left Libertarian Thought and British

Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2006), p. 232. George Woodcock, too, regarded Huxley

as an anarchist. Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley

(London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 211–212; and G. Woodcock (Ed.), The

Anarchist Reader (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), p. 52; and Murray claimed,

somewhat less precisely, that Huxley’s ‘later vision was a world

organised around the principles of classical anarchism’, Huxley, p. 258.

By contrast, Alessandro Maurini fails to make this connection in his

monograph, Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters

(Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2017). That said, Maurini’s study, which

claims Huxley’s mature political thought is best understood as ‘a

pacifist and ecological communitarianism’, is instructive. Maurini,

ibid., p. ix, as is Ronald Lee Zigler’s, The Educational Prophecies of

Aldous Huxley: The Visionary Legacy of Brave New World, Ape and Essence,

and Island (New York: Routledge, 2015). 19. Huxley, Brave New World, op.

cit., Ref. 12, p. 8. 20. Huxley, Ibid. 21. Huxley, Ibid., p. 7. 22.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 8. 23. Quoted in Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, op. cit.,

Ref. 18, p. 229. 24. Quoted in Goodway, Ibid.aginative inventiveness in

political thinking’.165 And Huxley was nothing if not imaginatively

inventive.

Notes 1. S. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010). For a helpful survey of postanarchism see B.

Franks, ‘Postanarchism: a critical assessment’, Journal of Political

Ideologies, 12, No. 2 (2007), pp. 127–145. 2. S. Newman, ‘Postanarchism:

a politics of anti–politics’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 16, No. 3

(2011), p. 318. 3. Newman, Ibid., pp. 320, 321. 4. Newman, Ibid., p.

321. 5. Newman, Ibid., p. 322. Classical anarchism, for instance, did

not account for the phenomenon of voluntary servitude, Newman objected.

6. This is of course somewhat ironic, given postanarchism’s

postmodernist and poststructuralist origins. For historicist criticism

of postanarchism see M. S. Adams and N. J. Jun, ‘Political theory and

history: the case of anarchism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 20,

no. 3 (2015), pp. 244–262. It should, however, be added here that in

Newman’s most recent book he no longer uses the term classical

anarchism. Postanarchism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). I use it here only

for the purpose of exposition of Newman’s original theory. ‘Traditional’

is also often used synonymously. That, too, is rejected here as lacking

analytic and historical precision.

25. Russell did not consistently self–describe as such, but he was known

to use the hybrid, ‘aristocratic anarchism’. Goodway, ibid., p. 31. For

Russell’s ‘anarchist tendencies’ see P. Ironside, The Social and

Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an

Aristocratic Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

Ch. 6. 26. B. Franks, ‘Anarchism’, in Freeden, Tower Sargent, and Stears

(Eds) Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, op. cit., Ref. 10, p.

385. 27. See B. Franks, ‘Ideological hybrids: the contrary case of Tory

anarchism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 21, no. 2 (2016), p. 162.

28. Franks, Ibid., p. 163. Others still have argued that, ‘anarchism is

not really an ideology, but rather a point of intersection of several

ideologies’, or, put slightly differently, that the ‘thinness’ of its

core ‘begs the question whether the allegiance of the two modes’ –

individualist and socialist–‘is not primarily to libertarianism and to

the socialist family respectively.’ D. Miller, Anarchism (London: J. M.

Dent, 1984), p. 3; Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, op. cit.,

Ref. 10., p. 312. 29. Franks, ‘Anarchism’, in Freeden, Sargent, and

Steers (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 390. 30. Huxley, Ends and Means, op.

cit., Ref. 9, p. 63. 31. Huxley, Ibid., p. 70. 32. Huxley, Ibid., p. 85.

33. A. Huxley, ‘Abroad in England’, in Bradshaw (Ed.), op. cit., Ref.

14, p. 51; Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 255, 326–327.

34. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 8. 35. Huxley, Ibid.,

pp. 25, 128. 36. See R. Kinna’s analysis in Anarchism: A Beginner’s

Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), pp. 142–147. Kinna uses the epithet

‘practical anarchists’. 37. Pauli, ‘New Anarchism’, op. cit., Ref. 7, p.

140. 38. Pauli, Ibid., p. 146. 39. Pauli, Ibid., p. 145. 40. Pauli,

Ibid., p. 138. Postanarchism, it is worth remarking here, has also been

censured as ‘naïve liberalism’ for its rejection of economic

reductivism, attention to the individual, and consequent downgrading of

class. Franks, ‘Postanarchism’, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 136. 41. What,

above all, distinguishes postanarchism from ‘new’ anarchism is

postanarchism’s explicit rejection of scientism and meta-narratives and

its sustained preoccupation with horizontal relations of power.

Postanarchism is also internally diverse. See T. May, The Political

Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania

University Press, 1994); D. Rouselle, and S. Evren (Eds), Postanarchism:

A Reader (London: Pluto Books, 2011); and L. Call, Postmodern Anarchism

(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002). 42. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit.,

Ref. 9, p. 1. 43. Huxley, Ibid. 44. Huxley, Ibid. 45. A. Huxley, Island

(London: Vintage, 2005), p. 193. 46. Murray, Huxley, op. cit., Ref. 11,

p. 305. 47. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 3. 48. Huxley,

Ibid., pp. 4, 286, 300. 49. Huxley, Ibid., p. 4. 50. Huxley, Ibid., p.

6. 51. Huxley, Ibid., p. 8. Ends and Means ‘displays an astonishing

awareness ... of what was really happening in the Germany and Russia of

that time’, wrote R. B. Schmerl. ‘Aldous Huxley’s social criticism’,

Chicago Review, 13, no. 1 (1959), p. 46. Living in Italy in the 1920s,

Huxley experienced the rise of fascism first-hand. For Huxley’s

knowledge of the Bolshevik regime see Claeys, Dystopia, op. cit., Ref.

11, p. 371. 52. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 24. 53.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 185. 54. Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, op. cit., Ref. 18,

p. 197. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 177. For the

broader literature on Read see, M. Adams, Kropotkin, Read, and the

Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and

Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); J. King, The Last Modern: A

Life of Herbert Read (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); D. Goodway

(Ed.), Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,

1998); M. Paraskos, Rereading Read: New Views on Herbert Read (London:

Freedom Press, 2008); and G. Woodcock, Herbert Read: The Stream and the

Source (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2008). 55. Huxley, Ends and Means,

op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 184. 56. Huxley, Ibid., p. 182. 57. Although Huxley

is not mentioned, the broad topic is covered in J. Suissa, Anarchism and

Education: A Philosophical Perspective (London: PM Press, 2010). 58.

Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 212, 214. See also, G.

Pritchard, ‘Modelling Power in Anarchist Perspective’, Anarchist

Studies, 28, No. 1 (2020), p. 18. Pritchard describes critical thinking

as the ‘highest and most important form of power-from–within’. 59.

‘Anarchy in action’ is Colin Ward’s phrase for instances of anarchism

already present in society. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9,

pp. 202, 203. 60. See J. Deery, Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of

Science (London: Macmillan, 1996); and M. Birnbaum, ‘Aldous Huxley’s

Quest for Values: A Study in Religious Syncretism’, in R. E. Kuehn (Ed.)

Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 46–63. 61. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit.,

Ref. 9, pp. 268–269. 62. Huxley, Ibid., p. 225. 63. Todd May, ‘Is

post-structuralist political theory anarchist?’, Philosophy and Social

Criticism, 15, no. 2 (1989), p. 171. 64. Huxley, Ends and Means, op.

cit., Ref. 9, p. 75. 65. Huxley, ‘Abroad in England’, in Bradshaw (Ed.),

op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 62–63. 66. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref.

9, pp. 48–49, 85. 67. Huxley, Ibid., p. 49. 68. Quoted in S. White,

‘Making anarchism respectable? The social philosophy of Colin Ward’,

Journal of Political Ideologies, 12, No. 1 (2007), p. 15; Huxley, Ends

and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 30. For Ward, see also C. Levy (Ed.),

Colin Ward: Life, Times, and Thought (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2013).

69. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 85. 70. Huxley, Ibid.

71. Huxley, Ibid., p. 25. 72. Huxley, Ibid., p. 30. 73. Huxley, Ibid.,

p. 140. 74. Huxley, Ibid., p. 74. 75. Huxley, Ibid., p. 75. 76.

Honeywell, ‘Bridging the Gaps’, in Kinna (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 7, p.

127. 77. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 74. 78. Huxley,

Ibid., p. 72. 79. Huxley, Ibid., p. 78. 80. Huxley, Ibid., p. 76. 81.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 168. 82. Huxley, Ibid. 83. Huxley, Ibid., p. 77. 84.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 70. 85. Huxley, Ibid. 86. Huxley, Ibid. 87. Huxley,

Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 175. 88. J. J. Rousseau, A

Discourse on Inequality (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 78. 89. May, ‘Is

Poststructuralist Political Theory Anarchist?’, op. cit., Ref. 63, p.

171. 90. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 56. 91. Huxley,

Ibid., p. 20. 92. White, ‘Making anarchism respectable?’, op. cit., Ref.

68, p. 12.

93. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 129. 94. Huxley,

Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 6. 95. Claeys, Dystopia, op. cit., Ref.

11. p. 387. 96. Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 58. 97. Huxley,

Ibid., pp. 153, 161. 98. Murray, Huxley, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 444. 99.

Quoted in Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 235. It is

markedly undervalued as a novel, however. Frank Kermode, for example,

described Island as ‘one of the worst novels ever written’. Yet,

regardless of its literary credentials, Goodway correctly notes that

‘Island has attracted astonishingly little attention’. Quoted in

Goodway, Ibid., pp. 234, 236. 100. Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p.

146. 101. Huxley, Ibid., p. 145. 102. Huxley, Ibid. 103. Huxley, Ibid.,

p. 148. 104. Huxley, Ibid., p. 144. 105. Huxley, Ibid., p. 146. 106.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 171. 107. Huxley, Ibid., p. 90. 108. Huxley, Ibid.

109. Huxley, Ibid. 110. Quoted in May, ‘Is Poststructuralist Political

Theory Anarchist?’, op. cit., Ref. 63, p. 170; Huxley, Island, op. cit.,

Ref. 45, p. 91. 111. Huxley, ibid., p. 202. 112. Huxley, Ibid., p. 155.

113. Huxley, Ibid., p. 206. 114. Huxley, Ibid., p. 137. 115. Huxley,

Ibid., p. 138. 116. Huxley, Ibid., p. 191. 117. C. Ward, Anarchy in

Action (London: Freedom Press, 1982), p. 15; Huxley, Island, op. cit.,

Ref. 45, p. 82. 118. For Orwell, sexual abstinence and the propensity

for fanaticism are intimately connected, hence in Nineteen Eighty-Four

sex is instrumentalized by the state. Sexual desire is sublimated into

loyalty to the party. G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty–Four (London: Penguin,

1989), pp. 68–71; Huxley, Brave New World, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 42;

Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 75. 119. Huxley, ibid., p. 77.

120. Huxley, Ibid., p. 77. 121. A. Comfort, The Joy of Sex (London:

Mitchell Beazley, 2002), p. 7. For Comfort see A. E. Salmon, Alex

Comfort (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978). And for the parallels between Huxley

and Comfort see D. Goodway, ‘Aldous Huxley and Alex Comfort: A

Comparison’, in H. G. Klaus and S. Knight (Eds) ‘To Hell with Culture’:

Anarchism and Twentieth–Century English Literature (Cardiff: University

of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 111–125. 122. Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref.

45, p. 202. 123. Huxley, Ibid., p. 119. 124. Huxley, Ibid., pp. 119,

117. 125. Newman, ‘Postanarchism’, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 321. 126.

Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, pp. 69–70. 127. Huxley, Ibid., p. 70.

128. Huxley, Ibid., p. 68. 129. ‘Humanism’, as Thomas Swann correctly

argues, ‘is an incredibly vague term and commonly subject to imprecise

and improper use’. The way in which Newman and other postanarchists

define it is as a theory that attributes both rationality to all human

beings as well as teleology; the notion, that is, of ‘living up to’

something essential. In this sense of the term Huxley is not a humanist.

For Huxley, if there is something essential in human nature it is only a

set of animal drives and instincts. To be ‘human’ is simply to learn as

best we can how to manage them. T. Swann, ‘Are Postanarchists Right to

Call Classical Anarchisms “Humanist”?’, in B. Franks and M. Wilson (Eds)

Anarchism and Moral Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 227, 232.

130. Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 98. 131. Huxley, Ibid., p.

171. 132. Huxley, Ibid., p. 141. 133. Huxley, Ibid., p. 149. 134. S.

Newman, ‘Anarchism and the politics of ressentiment’, Theory and Event,

4, no. 3 (2000).

www.muse.jhu.edu

. For a discussion of anarchism and power from an analytical philosophy

perspective see M. Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982). 135. Newman, ‘Postanarchism’, op.

cit., Ref. 2, p. 319. 136. Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 155.

137. Huxley, Ibid. 138. Huxley, Ibid. Here, too, Huxley paralleled

Comfort. In 1950, Comfort wrote Authority and Delinquency in the Modern

State: A Study in the Psychology of Power. Goodway referred to it as

Comfort’s ‘treatise on Acton’s dictum ... for the conditions of the

mid–twentieth century’. Anarchist Seeds, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 251. 139.

Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 149. 140. Huxley, Ibid., pp.

149–150. 141. Newman, ‘Postanarchism’, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 321. 142.

Huxley, Island, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 150. 143. Huxley, Ibid. 144.

Huxley, Ibid., p. 151. 145. Huxley, Ibid., p. 152. 146. Huxley, Ibid.,

p. 154. 147. Huxley, Ibid. 148. Huxley, Ibid. 149. Huxley, Ibid. 150.

Huxley, Ibid. 151. Huxley, Ibid. 152. Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit.,

Ref. 9, p. 67. 153. Huxley, Ibid., p. 69. 154. Huxley, Ibid., pp. 29,

69. 155. May, ‘Is Post-Structuralist Political Theory Anarchist?’, op.

cit., Ref. 63, p. 170; Huxley, Ends and Means, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 69.

156. Huxley, Ends and Means, ibid., p. 12. 157. This also true of many

‘new’ anarchists, but ‘new’ anarchists are typically less sceptical

about the epistemological validity of science. 158. Huxley, Island, op.

cit., Ref. 45, p. 123. 159. May, ‘Is Poststructuralist Political Theory

Anarchist?’, op. cit., Ref. 63, p. 176. 160. Huxley, Island, op. cit.,

Ref. 45, pp. 218, 219. 161. Huxley’s views on science are elaborated in

A. Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950);

and A. Huxley, Literature and Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

162. Newman, ‘Postanarchism’, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 318. 163. Newman,

Ibid. 164. Quoted in Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, op. cit., Ref. 18, p.

229. 165. Freeden, ‘Morphological Analysis of Ideology’, op. cit., Ref.

10, p. 117.

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the author(s).