Alessandro Maurini - Böcker

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters argues that Huxley is not a man of letters engaged in politics, but a political thinker who chooses literature to spread his ideas. His preference for the dystopian genre is due to his belief in the tremendous impact of dystopia on twentieth-century political thought. His political thinking is not systematic, but this does not stop his analysis from supplying elements that are original and up-to-date, and that represent fascinating contributions of political theory in all the spheres that he examines from anti-Marxism to anti-positivism, from political realism to elitism, from criticism of mass society to criticism of totalitarianism, from criticism of ideologies to the future of liberal democracy, from pacifism to ecological communitarianism.Huxley clearly grasped the unsolved issues of contemporary liberalism, and the importance of his influence on many twentieth-century and present-day political thinkers ensures that his ideas remain indispensable in the current liberal-democratic debate. Brave New World is without doubt Huxley’s most successful political manifesto. While examining the impassioned struggle for the development of all human potentialities, it yet manages not to close the doors definitively on the rebirth of utopia in the age of dystopia.

The Declaration of Independence was not only its first paragraph, that is the political manifesto of the right of revolution – the right of independence. The Declaration was also its second paragraph, that is the political manifesto of the Enlightenment constitutional project of the natural rights of man – the project which unified American and European Enlightenment in the Atlantic space with an Enlightenment Natural Rights of Man Talk. What happened to that project in the American constitutional process?To rewrite the history of the origins of the United States tracking down in the institutional and public debate that Enlightenment language, that constitutional project and that cultural heritage means to tell a passionate and glorious struggle that was lost. It means to talk – together with about the true and republican revolution, that of the right of independence – about a missed revolution – that of the natural rights of man. From a historiographical point of view, it means, in the American revolution, to break the continuity between the Declaration and the Constitution. Therefore, now those rights become fundamental in the current debate on the contemporary human rights – a debate in which their historical foundation is brought into question.