Open and Closed Society in Herbert George Wells’s The Open Conspiracy: What Are We To Do With Our Lives ?(1928) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
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Date
2017
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Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This research paper focuses on H.G Wells’s The Open Conspiracy : What Are We To Do with our lives ? (1928) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in terms of the type of society the two authors describe in their works. It sheds light on the authors’ concern about the underlying principles of the societies they describe and how Brave New World echoes satirically The Open Conspiracy.Throughout our analysis, we have relied on the dichotomous concepts of the ‘’Closed’’ and ‘’Open society’’ criteria developed in the first volume of Karl Raimond Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies1 : The Spell Of Plato (1945) with reference to Plato as the first advocator of a return to a closed society. Popper distinguished between an open and closed society which helped us to depict the type of society sought for in Wells’s and Huxley’s works. Hence, after the examination of the two works we have reached the conclusion that the utopian society of the World State in Brave New World is a satirical attack to Herbert Geoge Wells’s utopian thoughts. In the Open Conspiracy Wells hold optimistic expectations towards science and technology and calls for the creation of a utopian World State with an ideal society that would end conflict that is sparked off by exacerbated nationalism, where all populations are unified into one,and every individual finds his happiness and his place. Unlike Wells’s utopian ideas, Aldous Huxley was clearly mocking by describing how people are engineered to become subservient to the World State. Huxley advocates the right for critical thought and a society that is conduicive to progress and change
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30Cm : 68p.
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Langue, Cultures des Pays Anglophones et Médias