Libido Dominandi

"Libido Dominandi is the definitive history of a sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.". "Unlike the standard version of a sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. The logic is clear enough: Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido inevitably led to anarchy. Over the course of two hundred years, those techniques became more and more refined, eventuating in a world where people were controlled, not by military force, but by the skillful management of their passions. It was Aldous Huxley who wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that "as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control - including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and, when push came to shove, plain old blackmail - allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine's insight on its head and create masters out of men's vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened."--BOOK JACKET.