Every mechanism in the novel presupposes an authority able to apply it to a whole society

The argument

Readers who take this view argue that the rival interpretations all describe instruments, and that an instrument raises the question of who wields it. Technology that shapes what people want has to be directed at a population by someone with the standing to do so. An economy of managed appetite has to be arranged, and its appetites kept within the bounds that keep it stable. Contentment purchased at the cost of truth has to be purchased by a party in a position to decide which truths are dispensable. Each of these, on this reading, names a method and leaves the agent out. Proponents argue that this makes the concentration of power the novel's foundational concern rather than one theme among four. The novel's distinctive feature is not that such techniques exist but that they are applied uniformly, to everybody, with no competing authority able to refuse them and nowhere outside their reach. That condition is political. It requires a power that has absorbed the functions ordinarily distributed among families, employers, churches, local institutions and rival states, and the novel's horror on this reading lies in the completeness of that absorption rather than in the sophistication of the methods it enables. They add that the reading explains what is genuinely novel in the book's pessimism. Earlier fears about overbearing authority imagined it suppressing people; this novel imagines it forming them, which is possible only for an authority with no rival and no outside. Proponents conclude that technology, consumption and managed happiness are what such a power does, and that the power itself is what the novel is warning about.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Other readers object that the argument wins by definition: anything happening across a whole society can be described as requiring an authority, which makes the state the answer to every question and so to none. A second objection is that the novel's power is strikingly unlike the states its readers fear, since it does not need to coerce and barely needs to appear, which suggests the book's interest lies in the methods that make authority unnecessary to display rather than in the authority itself. Others argue that treating the state as foundational reduces the novel to a political tract of a familiar kind and loses what distinguishes it, which is its account of how willingly such an order would be accepted.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Instruments can be diffuse: an economy of appetite can be sustained by markets, habits and firms with no single directing agent, so the move from instrument to authority does not hold. [Rejecting P2] Uniform application is a feature of the novel's setting rather than an argument about politics, and a book can show a condition without making it its subject. [Rejecting C] If any society-wide phenomenon counts as evidence of concentrated power, the reading becomes unfalsifiable and explains the novel no better than its rivals.