This chapter lays the intellectual foundation for all following chapters. It looks at the roots of Aldous Huxley’s political thought, from his agenda-setting family background through his early political influences during his undergraduate years and his professional beginnings at the start of the twentieth century, to his first serious engagements with political criticism and analysis during the late 1920s. Huxley’s politically formative years coincided with the formative years of the twentieth century, during which science and technology became leading narratives, modernism tried to emancipate itself from nineteenth-century belief systems and social mores, and the political scenes, particularly in Europe, went through a battle of political ideologies never seen before or since. The First World War severed Victorian optimism completely from the shell-shocked youths entering the 1920s. His plans for a scientific career thwarted, Huxley becomes a literary man, a critic, and a generalist and academic allrounder. Equipped with a scientific outlook, the moralist and social critic turns satirist, and the intellectual writes essays and teams up with the psychologist to write novels in which the protagonists are the social types that define the age and the ideas that they hold.