A New Brave Old World: What Zygmunt Bauman, Thomas Eriksen and Aldous Huxley (May) Have in Common.

The paper examines the relevance of Aldous Huxley’s widely known comfortable dystopia, depicted in the novel Brave New World – along with some additional material drawn from his other, earlier writings – by comparing it to two relatively recent books from the social sciences: Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s Tyranny of the Moment (2001). It then analyzes the differences and similarities between the ideas espoused in the three books and enquires what they might bring to the general debate about our condition, focusing specifically on the problems of our (in)ability to correctly describe and predict the relationships between the present, the past and the future, and on the function and relevance of meta-narratives.