LIBIDO DOMINANDI SEXUAL LIBERATION AND POLITICAL CONTROL

"Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king,is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, asmany masters as he has vices." - St. Augustine, City of God Writing atthe time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine bothrevolutionized and brought to a close antiquity's idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedomwas a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he hadvices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticatedform of social control known to man.Fourteen hundred years later, adecadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when hewrote that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly tomurder." Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree thatfreedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed arevolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution thentaking place in France. Libido Dominandi - the term is taken from Book I of Augustine's City of God - is the definitive history of that sexualrevolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version ofthe sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation wasfrom its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate manfrom the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as theysucceeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. AldousHuxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that"as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tendscompensatingly to increase." This book is about the converse of thatstatement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used toengineer a system of covert political and social control. Over thecourse of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, thedevelopment of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychiccontrol - including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail - allowed theEnlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine's insight on its head andcreate masters out of men's vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of howthat happened.