Description
Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure.
A brilliant and original history of the chemical dreamscape of American democracy...Tripping on Utopia resurrects the promise, dangers, and sheer weirdness of one of the twentieth century's unsung frontiers of discovery: the quest to change the world by altering humans' perception of it.
A marvel of scholarship and impossible to put down.
In this strikingly original new history of psychedelic science, Benjamin Breen focuses on its origins in the interwar years alongside the expansive utopian projects of that era: anthropologists studying how cultures change, cybernetic dreams of reprogramming the brain, and the fascination with other wonder drugs such as hormones, truth serums and tranquillisers. The result is a thrilling history of ideas...narrated with infectious energy and enthusiasm.
Breen is an engaging writer invigorated by his topic, and to synthesize so much information is an accomplishment
Benjamin Breen is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.