Content and Controlled: Pleasure, Consent and Rebellion in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

This thesis explores Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World through the lens of modern forms of power, arguing that the novel anticipates many of the mechanisms through which contemporary societies cultivate obedience not through repression, but through pleasure, distraction, and the subtle shaping of desire. By combining literary analysis with sociological and philosophical perspectives, the thesis examines how Huxley’s fiction reveals the risks of a civilization where happiness becomes engineered and consent is manufactured. The first chapter reconstructs the historical shift from repressive to seductive forms of power through the works of Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Byung-Chul Han, whose analyses of desire, pleasure, and conformity resonate strikingly with Huxley’s vision. The second chapter situates Brave New World in the scientific and cultural climate of the early twentieth century, showing how debates on progress, eugenics, and biopolitical control shaped the emergence of scientific dystopias. The third chapter offers a close reading of the novel, focusing on how pleasure, conditioning, and consumerism sustain the engineered stability of the World State. The final chapter turns to John the Savage, the outsider whose ethical refusal exposes the cost of living in a world without suffering, conflict, or authentic freedom. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Brave New World remains a prophetic text, one that continues to illuminate the vulnerabilities of societies where pleasure becomes a political tool and where individuals risk losing not only their freedom, but their inner life and sense of authenticity.