One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd Edition

No one can accuse Herbert Marcuse of under-thinking.

I bought this book based on assertions that it was a still-relevant critique of advanced capitalist US society. What I got was a brilliant (if erratic) explicitly Marxist critique of advanced society, both East and West, from the vantage point of the early 1960s. I have to give credit to Marcuse for the accuracy of his prophesies. Certainly his batting average is above .500. But, cultural criticism is not baseball.

I feel like too much of his critique rests on an unrealistic idea: that physical labor can, and should, be done away with. This assumption seems to have been fueled by the Marxist belief in the inevitability of the collapse of advanced Western Capitalism, following which capitalism would be replaced by a worker's paradise of unspecified administration. Some 300 years on, this repeal and replace is nowhere in sight. Indeed, Eastern nations are getting more capitalist all the time, de facto if not de jure.

Despite that, I really enjoyed how he burrowed into the differences between Greek ideas of dialectic truth (exemplified by the dialogues of Plato) and so-called "one-dimensional" truth which can be traced to Aristotelian rationality. Frankly, I didn't understand all of his argument. He presents a punishing series of intricate arguments in the middle of the book. I emerged from this experience bruised and bewildered, yet grateful for the education, because the constantly shifting terrain (from the vantage point of either one-dimensional thought or two-dimensional thought) certainly does point up the paradoxes and contradictions that reality consists of.

But, that's just the trouble. We need to live our lives and make a living, and we need to do so according to our human nature. I'm not clear on Marcuse's final word on what that nature is. Marcuse seems to reject rationality itself, on the grounds that believing in that rationality means that we are also accepting domination - the pre-eminent place that rationality has held in Western culture since the Enlightenment. But on the other hand, the alternative - the typical end of a Platonic dialogue - is bafflement. Nothing has been proven, though the players have rounded all the bases - we're right back where we started, with Socratic ignorance. So, which is better: should we accept the certainty of rationality, including its defects; or should we accept dialectic uncertainty, with its own share of defects? Beats me.

In conclusion, this is an excellent book and deserves respect and attention for its place in intellectual history, if not sustained study. Mortimer Adler insisted that we can't criticize a book until we fully understand it. That may be true for professional readers in the fields of philosophy, sociology and economics. However, as a general reader I'm just not going to put myself through the exercise. That said, I will keep this book, with many underlined passages, on my bookshelf.

This is Marcuse's most famous work and one that was a major influence on and during the student revolts all over the European continent of 1968. Many of the catchphrases of that time, such as "repressive tolerance" and the like, are derived directly from Marcuse. He has since lost much of his popularity and audience, and in my view, quite deservedly so.

His main thesis is that modern man has become one-dimensional due to the totalitarian, all-encompassing exercise of power by the entrenched capitalist class. While this of itself is not such a bad idea, though certainly romanticizing and exaggerating reality, his approach to explaining and attacking it leaves very much to be desired. Marcuse overuses empty or unexplained phrases endlessly (like "cutting off perspectives through an overwhelming ossified concreteness of imagery" and similar things) while at the same time hardly making use of any prior thought or philosophy on the subject at all. This makes the impression of much ranting and little content. Even worse is his general laziness as a thinker - he never actually bothers to explain why such a full-spectrum dominance has occurred or how he wants to prove its existence, he merely asserts it and then goes on about the manifold bad effects it has.

Rather bizarre in this context, and perhaps even nihilistic, is his general dislike of what he perceives as "rationality". He only uses this word in negative contexts (particularly in the context of industrial expansion) and seems to consider it the primary form of "one-dimensional thinking", affected by the symbolism of capitalism. Now it is one thing to say that the fashionable concept of rationalism is false and ill-founded, but to reject relying on rational processes altogether as he seems to do is a bit too much.

To put it bluntly, everything Marcuse has written in this book has also been written in, say, Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle", and then in half as many words and quite more philosophically coherent. The early Marcuse (of Eros and Civilization) was much better; this book warrants no more interest than a purely antiquarian historical one.

While some Frankfurt School critical texts failed to accurately model the experience of our times (Habermas' Transformation of the Public Sphere, for instance, predicted a decreased role of the public sphere in political decision making - a prediction ultimately undermined by the advent of the internet), Marcuse One-Dimensional Man remains a compelling and frighteningly accurate analysis, especially in the wake of the Trump election. Indeed, as many bemoan that the public sphere seems to be ignoring reported facts in voting, Marcuse already wrote up an explanation for how the reality of the system replaces objective reality, and how individuals indoctrinate themselves without their knowing it. Although the fear of mutually assured destruction has been replaced with the fear of terrorism and the "Eastern" Marxist dictatorships that Marcuse gives equal criticism to (alongside the Western capitalist society that still remains much as it was) no longer exist, or have at least adopted many of the hallmarks of capitalist society, the core of Marcuse's argument remains compelling and instantly recognizable in our own times. He also recognizes the issues of increased technological development and reliance on disposable consumer goods that have only become more noticeable since the book was written. Furthermore, because these fundamental issues are so recognizable in our society, the work remains compelling and fascinating, especially compared to most critical theory works, which can lose the reader's interest in abstract details.

Marcuse has very academic writing style, chock full of broad conceptual assertions, five-dollar words, but scant on clear analysis of specific empirical outcomes that support his high-minded theoretical declarations. The basic premise of the book, that capitalism and economic development suppress individuality, has been flagrantly contradicted in our contemporary era of social media, primacy of self-expression, hyper-individualism. I also fail to see how this need for Imagination and Individual Self-determination can only be realized by a centrally planned economy. Actual economic or historical analysis is absent. He doesn't bother to speak plainly and make straightforward conclusions, preferring to wrap his writing in obscure coinages like "repressive desublimation", which is a fancy way of saying people are stupid and lazy and prefer to consume rather than become political radicals. Marcuse was, at heart, an elitist who lived the charmed life of an prominent academic. Clearly this book failed to anticipate new forms of mass media, post-industrial "ideas economy" and their sociopolitical impact. Multinational capitalism in fact readily adapted to the artificial need of ego-identification it generated by endlessly refined consumer products and the concept of "lifestyle". 1960-70s leftists and left-liberals believed that only a revolution of consciousness, of cultural values, of heightened individuality and freedom of self could confront the diseased political system that we still live in, governed by supranational economic interest. They ended up changing nothing about the world - they were too busy changing themselves.

This book is a critique of contemporary society, in which Marcuse spells out the shortcomings of average citizens, how they came to have those shortcomings and what to do about it. In this way, it is rather standard intellectual fare wherein an "intellectual" dissects an unsuspecting individual or group, lists the problems he sees and expands on why these problems are so particularly fearful. That first part, the analysis, even if it's not all that strong, is usually the strongest part of books like this and this book is no different. The second part, the solution, is usually where books like this fall apart completely and, again, this book is no different.
When I was young, and knew much more, statements, such as the following, seemed so very insightful and attractive:
"If the individuals are satisfied to the point of happiness with the goods and services handed down to them by the administration, why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods and services? And if the individuals are pre-conditioned so that the satisfying goods also include thoughts, feelings, aspirations, why should they wish to think, feel, and imagine for themselves?"
But as I got grayer everything appeared less black and white. This wide-ranging, and vicious, attack on the average man appears, at closer examination, exceedingly hard to sustain. Everyman has thousands of thoughts, feeling and aspirations, each with differing origins. None of these spring from virgin soil but to determine their origin, whether or not they where bought and sold in the marketplace, is a hike through some very difficult terrain - no progress will be made. Don't be so quick to discount the man on the street; they are more dimensional than you imagine. Added to that, the fact that Marcuse himself was clearly in the business of marketing thoughts makes statements like this, at best, especially problematic.

Even when I was young, statements such as the following, i.e. the solution, never seemed particularly attractive:
"Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be centralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible."
His solution here is the disappearance of free enterprise and the centralized control of the production "apparatus" which will render individual autonomy possible. This is the Marxist solution. This is a solution which has been proven to be a failure of epic proportions. The implications would be laughable if not so terrifying.

Frankfurt School tripe that isn't worth the paper on which it's printed. Look, if you're an inquisitive undergrad and want to explore critical theory, then fine, have at it. But if you haven't grown out of it by the time you enter grad school, then it may be too late. I'm actually sympathetic to the thesis that mass consumer culture has an alienating effect on our existential potentialities, but that's merely a coincidental point of agreement with critical theory. Its neo-Marxian cure is worse than the disease.

With this work, Marcuse aims to construct a critique of society and to show that our society is one-dimensional, he seeks to tease out the dialectical relations between two hypotheses. On the one hand, that `society is capable of containing qualitative change' (p. xlvii). On the other, the idea that `forces and tendencies exist which may break which may break this containment and explode the society' (ibid.). To achieve his critique, Marcuse uses two criteria, namely, that human life is worth living (in the Kantian sense), and that there exist opportunities for betterment i.e. to improve human life. In consequence, he first discusses the one-dimensional society, next the one-dimensional thought followed by the chances of alternatives.

As far as the one-dimensional society is concerned, Marcuse aims at showing that plural social praxis tends to be eroded. If the ultimate aim of freedom of enterprise has been the exertion of autonomy and competition in the sense of constantly proving one self, Marcuse pushes this logic to the point where such need is no longer required. Technology does have a crucial role in this respect as it can release `individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity' (p. 2).

But to reach such a point (if at all) one needs to become aware of the current societal realities. In particular, not the disappearance of classes, but rather, their amalgamation in that they all share a drive to preserving the establishment. Marcuse explains this phenomenon by means of the concept of "introjection" which denotes the tendency of replicating societal forms of control at the individual level.

The prevailing societal forms of control are technological in the sense of an instrumentality of reason that qualifies social production in a vicious cycle that encloses dual identities in a pure form of servitude. This is on grounds that the `progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements of culture ... as they succumb to the process of desublimation' (p. 56). For Marcuse technological reality limits the scope of sublimation as well as the need for it by upsetting the channeling of socially unacceptable impulses towards (aesthetic) activities regarded as more socially acceptable. Under such conditions one is preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of whatever is offered thereby contributing to the acceptance of established general repression. Ultimately, as he puts it, `an unfree society makes for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of this society. It is the token of declining autonomy and comprehension' (p76).

Language and its manipulation under the guise of unified functionality seems to have exacerbated the phenomenon because it is `irreconcilably anti-critical ... anti-dialectical ... and anti-historical' (pp. 97-98), considering that critical thought and language are essentially judgmental.

Concerning one-dimensional thought, Marcuse attempts to show that plural thinking tends to be undermined. In particular, he brings forth the contrast between formal and dialectical logic - the former being based on the unified functionality of language that fixes meaning in its attempt to construct quantitatively objective descriptions of the world. In arguing that `the objective world, left equipped only with quantifiable qualities, comes to be more and more dependent in its objectivity on the subject' (p. 148), Marcuse argues in favor of a dialectical logic since it is able to undo the abstractions of formal logic.

What is at stake here then is `preserving and protecting the right, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage' (p. 178), which is, for Marcuse, the main task of philosophy - but not of analytic philosophy.

Finally, Marcuse offers some indication on how the alternatives mentioned in the previous two sections need to be considered with an overall focus on plurality, in particular linguistic and aesthetic following a technological rationale pushed to its extreme.

Overall, a powerful book that has lost none of its appeal and relevance to contemporary societal issues, whether political, economic, cultural or technological, despite the fact that some aspects of the discussion have evolved since. One-dimensionality seems to be here with us!

Herbert Marcuse was one of the original members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Along with like-minded colleagues, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Marcuse emigrated to the United States where he taught at a number of universities, including New School for Social Research, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego.

Marcuse and the other members of the Frankfurt School, such as Benjamin Nelson, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, were profoundly influenced by the work of Karl Marx, including his early work, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In addition, however, they were indebted to Hegel, Freud, and Max Weber. This helps to explain their interest in culture as a vehicle of domination and exploitation.

During the 1960's and early 1970's, Marcuse was the most influential New Left philosopher in the U.S., and probably throughout the world. He voiced the suspicion, however, that he was much more often cited than he was actually read. It seems unlikely that he would be pleased to be remembered as one of the three M's: Marx the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword. This sort of mindless slogan mongering was sharply at odds with Marcuse's commitment to rigorous scholarship in the pursuit of truth.

After 40 years, I remember One-Dimensional Man best for two relatively simple but paradoxical notions: rationality is never neutral or disinterested, and freedom can be oppressive and contrary to the development of human potential.

Rationality in the service of specific interests at the expense of others is manifest in out-sourcing, down-sizing, internationalization, and technological development, all means of reducing labor costs to benefit capital and at odds with the interests of labor. Rationally calculable pursuit of profit, in other words, is thoroughly irrational from the standpoint of labor.

The oppressiveness of freedom can be seen in modern industrial society's capacity to provide immediate material and sensual gratification, contributing to the creation of cultural shallowness and single-minded pursuit of the pleasures of consumption. The creation of new needs renders us prisoners of capital's productive apparatus and ideological tools.

If he were alive today, one wonders if Marcuse might have entertained the idea that our credit crisis is really a product of the contradiction between diminished purchasing power and the ever-more-effective manipulation of the culturally engendered need to consume. At this juncture the most we can say with certainty is that if Marcuse wanted to develop this idea he would not have written a polemic -- his commitment to rigorous scholarship was much too strong.

The take off point for "One Dimensional Man" is the abridgement of language concepts for purposes of social control. Orwell was right. And how far we've come since Marcuse wrote his book! Now, anyone can think of countless egregious examples of how thought is constrained by one dimensional definitions, how freedom is usually a demonstration of repression and oppression. [A minor point:I found it amusing that continually improved standards of living and a generous welfare state are described as a necessary contrivance by the ruling elite to con the subject people into sustaining their unhappy, unfree, but adequately satisfying lives without "exploding" in some form of revolution. So the liberal Democrats in the US would be the cunning villains while the tax-hating Republicans would be the self-destructive fools.] Granted, Marcuse gets a bit wrapped up in his chains of abstractions, especially in the second half of the book. "One Dimensional Man" is still a serious tool for anyone who wants to keep the machine from eating his brain.

Marcuse's most celebrated book has long been surrounded with misconceptions. It is not social science, but a prophetic text which needs to be seen in the context of late 60's radicalism and the emergence of what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle. Ostensibly a "Marxist", Marcuse was, perhaps, the last left Hegelian, who departs from Marx not just in particular prognoses but basic epistemological tenets. Marcuse's immense popularity on campus led to much resentment, hence the numerous false stories circulating about him by contemporaries ....