Brave New World Revisited

This term refers to the quality of modern society of being overly regulated and controlled, as at a factory, where power is concentrated and centralized. Huxley speaks of over-organization as the “price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress” (18). As machinery gets more complicated and expensive, it becomes less available to entrepreneurs and thus concentrated in an elite at the top of society (See Power Elite). In an over-organized society, humans are reduced to automatons performing a social function (i.e., job), unable to live a fully human life.

A force consisting of Big Business and Big Government which, according to Huxley, controls a capitalist democracy. This conglomerate owns the means of production like factories and stores, the banks and financial institutions, and the media; in this position, the Power Elite is thus able to influence everybody’s thoughts, feelings, and actions (18). Huxley sees this concentration of power as the antithesis of the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of a “gradation of authorities” (19) leading from small self-governing communities to the federal government.