Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control (Paperback)

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"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, as many masters as he has vices." – St. Augustine, City of God Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized 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 freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.

Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder." Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley 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 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.

About the Author

E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars Magazine, and author of many books, including The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.

Product Details

• Paperback: 662 pages
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press; 1 edition (April 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587314657
• ISBN-13: 978-1587314650
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #196,174 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Casualties of the sexual revolution, February 17, 2003

By	Michael S. Swisher (Stillwater, Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Libido Dominandi (Hardcover)

The thesis of E. Michael Jones's "Libido Dominandi" is that, far from really liberating anyone, "sexual liberation" has served to deliver powerful means of social and political manipulation and control into the hands of our ruling élite. He marshals some impressive evidence. Here we read about Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the founding father of the public relations industry, who was among the first to realize how sexual imagery could be employed in advertising. Long before the infamous "Virginia Slims" ad campaign, Bernays used the suggestion that cigarette smoking was an act of feminist independence to sell Lucky Strikes to women. Here we see the origins of the Planned Parenthood organization in the hope that birth control and abortion would reduce the numbers of the poor (especially ethnic Catholics and blacks), and resolve the dilemma of the welfare state. Here we learn of the fraudulent methodology of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the sordid character of much of his "research," and the way in which Kinsey manipulated his academic superiors and his chief sources of funding through an implicit threat of blackmail, because these people had been foolish enough to give him their "sexual histories." The rôle of the Rockefeller Foundation in both the Planned Parenthood and Kinsey enterprises was motivated by the obsaession of John D. Rockefeller III with eugenics, the pseudo-science of "race improvement." We learn also of the profound antipathy of the eugenicists and sex researchers towards Roman Catholicism, which they viewed as their principal adversary. Jones exposes the origins of "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State" in the anti-Catholic bigotry of Paul Blanshard. The organizations described here present a façade of respectability to the public that would not be so easy for them to maintain if their backgrounds were better publicized.

Jones's case would be more persuasive had this book come under a firmer editorial hand. It is lengthy, but also repetitive. Some material is duplicated almost verbatim in several parts of the book; also, Jones repeats, again almost verbatim, material from his other books, "Dionysos Rising," "Decadent Moderns," and "Monsters from the Id." This book might have been cut to half its length with as good or better effect than it now has. The work also fails in its efforts to tie the all-too-genuine mischief wrought by the sexual revolution together as the result of some sort of "Illuminist" conspiracy. Jones is a Roman Catholic polemicist of the old-fashioned type, for whom no Roman prelate (at least before Vatican II) ever did wrong, and no Protestant ever did right. He writes with the vehemence of a pamphleteer in the time of the sixteenth-century French wars of religion, and would probably have been perfectly happy under the patronage of the third duke of Guise. While many conservative Catholics, his intended audience, will be undisturbed by this tone, it is likely to put off many others who might otherwise be interested in Jones's factual reportage and sympathetic to his conclusions. This is unfortunate, since both deserve to be more widely known.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amerika the City of unbridled Lust, August 3, 2003

By	Manuel Alvarez (Miami Lakes, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Libido Dominandi (Hardcover)

Although this book is ostensibly about the history and ideology of "sexual liberation" as a tool for social control, its deeper thesis is that the de-Christianization of the West was brought about by the efforts of occult groups and powerful individuals who used sex and social psychological techniques to implement their agendas. Beginning with the Marquis de Sade (a degenerate who codified his fantasies in fat pornographic books and later devised a second rate philosophy to rationalize his incessant onanism) Jones traces the history of an obsession, viz. sexual lust, and the cerebral exertion of intellectuals to assuage their guilt in the absence of religious commitments.

The rejection of God and the moral order in post-revolutionary Europe left the elite classes and intellectuals adrift. Marx and Freud promised solutions to the human condition which both utopians and libertines soon found attractive. Hiding behind a facade of medical sagacity, Freud, for example, used the confessional method of the Illuminati to manipulate his patients. In exchange for granting them absolution for their immorality, the master would then coerce his rich patients into parting with their marriages and their money in order to fund the spread of the Freudian gospel.

Jones demonstrates how the revolutionary fervor of the last 200 years involved a profounder form of bondage than the economic servitude of the industrial era. The apotheosis of the will led to the subjugation of reason to passion. The revolutionary, having rejected an ontologically grounded morality, was blind to the fact that he was controlled by base desires. For folks like the Greenwich Village bohemians, who swallowed Freud whole and uncooked, the subjection of reason to dark, unconscious forces gave rise to a world view that ratified their own selfishness and untempered sexuality.

Despite the liberationist rhetoric of the Left, the goal of unleashing Eros and razing the walls that which restrained desire was to control the human herd. For once the moral and rational attachment to tradition was eliminated, technocrats could reshape human attitudes and behavior in accordance with the interests of either the commercial or governmental elite by manipulating sexual desire. Hence the rise of Amerika the advertising empire and consumer Garden of Eden.

This is an eccentric book that is filled with insight. I highly recommend it to those who are either fully awake, or in the process of coming out of a deep, deep sleep. My only criticism is that the text is littered with typographical errors and is in dire need of a corrected and re-edited reprinting.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Documenting the Sexual Revolution, September 30, 2000

By	William P. Cunningham "wmpat" (San Antonio, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Libido Dominandi (Hardcover)

This is the long version of Jones' mature thesis about the sexual revolution. Liberally notated with references to original works, some in the original languages, Jones' magnum opus is hard, perhaps even impossible, to refute on its own terms. Only a hardcore fan of the sexual revolution or Enlightenment will take issue with Jones' argument.

The idea that disordered sex issues in violence is not new, nor is it restricted to the musings of counter-revolutionary academics like Jones. One can find it in the 10 p.m. newscast of any large city: Miranda, Scott's live-in, dumps Scott and Scott kills Miranda.

Still, few authors have had the tenacity of Jones, who traces the sexual revolution back to its Enlightenment roots, and as carefully as anyone can desire shows the dependency of Sade and Shelley on Weishaupt's infamous Illuminati techniques. Not content with that coup, Jones pulls in Freud and Jung, damning them with their own words. Advertising and other forms of social control get their own skewers as well.

In short, Libido Dominandi (note the serious pun in the title) is what everyone needs to know about how the power elite keeps the little guy under control, materially impoverished, and spiritually destitute.

If you can't find the time to read 600 pages, get the short version, Monsters of the Id, which is less well documented, but somewhat more entertaining.