I gave a link to the wrong Curtis series! I meant this one - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self . The Power of Nightmares is also well worth watching, though.

I guess there might well be more than one, as it's a fairly well-established dystopian nightmare ;-)   One which very strongly meets your requirements is Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1921).  In a large part it was Zamyatin's personal protests against the Russian Revolution.  His novel projects a society in which people no longer have names but numbers (this idea was widely filched later by other authors!), and anyone who has doubts about the wisdom with which the "One Society" operates is encouraged to enlist at the hospital to have their brain simplified.

Another which fits your prototype is the Third Reich in Germany, of course - particularly as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, based on an original idea by Adolf Hitler.

I did not know that Zamyatin knew music so well. I googled and found out that he thought music as more mathematical of arts is protected against amaturisms that literature and theater more volnarable. This is contravertial statement, but the knowledge of different composers is impressive. He seems to like Scriabin very much (he does say good things about Schostakovich).

I'd never thought of investigating that, Richard!  I wonder where the idea came from - maybe Zamyatin said something about it in an interview etc?   He wasn't much interviewed in the USSR, which he finally left in the early 30's - perhaps a later remark made in Paris?  I think he became quite a bitter man, and never again enjoyed the success he'd had in "We" - whilst having to watch more feeble talents like "Ayn Rand" (aka Alisa Rosenbaum - she aimed to conceal her jewish background, given the company she kept..) cherry-pick his ideas and rehash them (most notably in "Anthem", her least-successful work... but by then the John Birch Society was underwriting the publication costs anyhow).

Much of the plotline of "We" was reworked into Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" - most notably the final scene, although it draws on a wide range of other dystopian-nightmare material too (not least Jerome K Jerome's very early short story "New Utopia", which had appeared in the last decade of the preceding century - entirely unlike "Three Men In a Boat" in every way