The Great Political Fictions: Brave New World

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

History, Politics, News, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.7 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the first in a new set of episodes about some of the great political fictions of the past hundred years David explores Aldous Huxley’s much misunderstood dystopian masterpiece Brave New World (1932). How did Huxley imagine that a future society could be both horribly regimented and crazily libertarian? Why is it Pavlovian conditioning and not genetic engineering that builds the humans of the future? What makes the book eerily prophetic of 21st-century consumer culture? And where does Shakespeare fit in? Do scroll back in your feed for many more earlier episodes of The Great Political Fictions! Out tomorrow on PPF+: a bonus episode about the other great English-language dystopia of the last century – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Why does a book that is out of date and out of time still haunt everyone who reads it today? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up to PPF+ now https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus You can find out everything you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus merch, events and full lists of all episodes including PPF+ bonus episodes on our website https://www.ppfideas.com Next time in Great Political Fictions: The Golden Notebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Some follow the noise.
0:03.3	Bloomberg follows the money.
0:05.4	Because behind every headline is a bottom line.
0:09.3	Whether it's the funds-fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings,
0:13.8	there's a money-side to every story.
0:16.5	And when you see the money-side, you understand what others miss.
0:20.9	Get the money-side of the story., you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story.
0:22.9	Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.
0:37.1	Hello, my name's David Rundsenman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas
0:42.3	podcast.
0:43.5	Today, it's the first in a new set of episodes as part of our series on great political fictions.
0:49.9	I'm going to be talking about a set of novels from the last hundred years, some of them
0:56.0	suggested by listeners. All of them, I hope, revelatory in their different ways. And I'm starting
1:03.7	with one of the two great dystopian fictions of the 20th century, the two defining dystopian fictions of the 20th century.
1:14.3	This one is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
1:21.2	In Germany, after the Second World War, when the country was divided in two between West Germany and East Germany,
1:29.4	one result was a whole set of inadvertent natural social experiments. Take a society,
1:35.0	divide it in half, give each half a completely different social, political, economic set up,
1:42.4	and see what happens. Korea is the other one, North Korea,
1:46.1	South Korea. So this happened across all sorts of dimensions, economic life, political life,
1:51.4	also family life. And one of these experiments, if one can call it that, related to child
1:58.6	rearing and specifically to potty training, toilet training.
	...

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