One-Dimensional Man Read online

  For Inge

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  by Douglas Kellner

  Introduction to the First Edition

  The Paralysis of Criticism: Society Without Opposition

  One-Dimensional Society

  1. The New Forms of Control

  2. The Closing of the Political Universe

  3. The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation

  4. The Closing of the Universe of Discourse

  One-Dimensional Thought

  5. Negative Thinking: The Defeated Logic of Protest

  6. From Negative to Positive Thinking: Technological Rationality and the Logic of Domination

  7. The Triumph of Positive Thinking: One-Dimensional Philosophy

  The Chance of the Alternatives

  8. The Historical Commitment of Philosophy

  9. The Catastrophe of Liberation

  10. Conclusion

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  My wife is at least partly responsible for the opinions expressed in this book. I am infinitely grateful to her.

  My friend Barrington Moore, Jr., has helped me greatly by his critical comments; in discussions over a number of years, he has forced me to clarify my ideas.

  Robert S. Cohen, Arno J. Mayer, Hans Meyerhoff, and David Ober read the manuscript at various stages and offered valuable suggestions.

  The American Council of Learned Societies, the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council have extended to me grants which greatly facilitated the completion of these studies.

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  Douglas Kellner

  Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was one of the most important books of the 1960s.1 First published in 1964, it was immediately recognized as a significant critical diagnosis of the present age and was soon taken up by the emergent New Left as a damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist. Conceived and written in the 1950s and early 1960s, the book reflects the stifling conformity of the era and provides a powerful critique of new modes of domination and social control. Yet it also expresses the hopes of a radical philosopher that human freedom and happiness could be greatly expanded beyond the one-dimensional thought and behavior prevalent in the established society. Holding onto the vision of liberation articulated in his earlier book Eros and Civilization,2 Marcuse, in his critique of existing forms of domination and oppression, urges that what is be constantly compared with what could be: a freer and happier mode of human existence.

  On one hand, One-Dimensional Man is an important work of critical social theory that continues to be relevant today as the forces of domination that Marcuse dissected have become even stronger and more prevalent in the years since he wrote the book. In a prospectus describing his work, Marcuse writes: “This book deals with certain basic tendencies in contemporary industrial society which seem to indicate a new phase of civilization. These tendencies have engendered a mode of thought and behavior which undermines the very foundations of the traditional culture. The chief characteristic of this new mode of thought and behavior is the repression of all values, aspirations, and ideas which cannot be defined in terms of the operations and attitudes validated by the prevailing forms of rationality. The consequence is the weakening and even the disappearance of all genuinely radical critique, the integration of all opposition in the established system.”3

  The book contains a theory of “advanced industrial society” that describes how changes in production, consumption, culture, and thought have produced an advanced state of conformity in which the production of needs and aspirations by the prevailing societal apparatus integrates individuals into the established societies. Marcuse describes what has become known as the “technological society,” in which technology restructures labor and leisure, influencing life from the organization of labor to modes of thought. He also describes the mechanisms through which consumer capitalism integrates individuals into its world of thought and behavior. Rather than seeing these developments as beneficial to the individual, Marcuse sees them as a threat to human freedom and individuality in a totally administered society.

  Justifying these claims requires Marcuse to develop a critical, philosophical perspective from which he can criticize existing forms of thought, behavior, and social organization. Thus, One-Dimensional Man is also Marcuse’s major philosophical work, articulating his Hegelian-Marxian concept of philosophy and critique of dominant philosophical and intellectual currents: positivism, analytic philosophy, technological rationality, and a variety of modes of conformist thinking. In this text, he both explicates his conception of dialectical philosophy and produces analyses of society and culture which exemplify his dialectical categories and method. Consequently, One-Dimensional Man presents a model both of Marcuse’s critical social theory and of his critical philosophy inspired by his philosophical studies and his work with the Frankfurt School.4

  The Frankfurt School and One-Dimensional Man

  During the 1920s and early 1930s Marcuse studied with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany and intensely appropriated the works of Hegel, Marx, phenomenology, existentialism, German idealism, and the classics of the Western philosophical tradition. While he later broke with Heidegger after the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party, he was influenced by Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy and his attempts to develop a new philosophy. He followed Heidegger and existentialism in seeking to deal with the concrete problems of the existing individual and was impressed with the phenomenological method of Husserl and Heidegger which attempted to break with abstract philosophical theorizing and to conceptualize “the things themselves” as they appeared to consciousness.

  In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserlian and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse’s critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing technological imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior.

  Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse’s most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one’s perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way.

  Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and poten
tiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals’ full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one’s own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self-transformation.

  It is probably Marcuse’s involvement with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School that most decisively influenced the genesis and production of One-Dimensional Man. After the emergence of Heidegger’s public support of National Socialism, and just on the eve of the triumph of the Nazi party, Marcuse had a job interview with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, received a position with them, and joined them in exile after Hitler’s ascendancy to power. First in Geneva, Switzerland, and then in New York, where the Institute affiliated with Columbia University, Marcuse enthusiastically joined in the Institute’s collective attempt to develop a critical theory of society. Along with the Institute’s director, Max Horkheimer, Marcuse was one of their philosophy specialists. He began his work with the Institute by producing a critique of fascist ideology; having turned away from his former teacher, he now appraised Heidegger’s work as part of the new tendency toward totalitarian thought that was dominant in Germany and which threatened the rest of the world as well.

  During the 1930s, Marcuse worked intensively, attempting to explicate and develop philosophical concepts that would be most useful for critical social theory. This project involved the interrogation of the concepts of essence, happiness, freedom, and, especially, critical reason, which he believed was the central category of philosophical thought and critique. In each case, he took standard philosophical categories and provided them with a materialist base, showing how concepts of essence, for instance, are directly relevant to concrete human life.5 Understanding the essential features of the human being, on this view, illuminates the potentialities that can be realized by individuals and the social conditions that inhibit or foster their development.

  This concern with critical reason and Hegelian and Marxian modes of dialectical thinking is evident in Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse’s first major work in English,6 in which he traces the rise of modern social theory through Hegel, Marx, and positivism. Marcuse’s Hegel is a critical dialectical thinker whom he tries to absolve of responsibility for the totalitarian states with which Hegel was often associated as a spiritual progenitor. Marcuse claims that Hegel instituted a method of rational critique that utilized the “power of negative thinking” to criticize irrational forms of social life. The close connection between Hegel and Marx and the ways that Marx developed and concretized Hegel’s dialectical method are the focal points of Marcuse’s interpretation, which remains to this day one of the most insightful studies of the relation between Hegel and Marx and the origins of modern social theory.

  The contrast between one-dimensional and dialectical thinking is made already in his 1930s essays. For Marcuse, one-dimensional thought and action derive their standards and criteria from the existing society, eschewing transcendent standards and norms. Critical and dialectical thinking, by contrast, postulates norms of criticism, based on rational potentials for human happiness and freedom, which are used to negate existing states of affairs that oppress individuals and restrict human freedom and well-being. Dialectical thought thus posits the existence of another realm of ideas, images, and imagination that serves as a potential guide for a social transformation that would realize the unrealized potentialities for a better life. Marcuse believes that great philosophy and art are the locus of these potentialities and critical norms, and he decodes the best products of Western culture in this light.

  Throughout the first decade of their period of exile, there was constant discussion within the Institute for Social Research of the need for a systematic treatise on dialectics which would lay out the categories, modes of thought, and method of dialectical and critical theory.7 Max Horkheimer was especially interested in this project and consulted with Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Karl Korsch, and others concerning how such an ambitious project might be developed. In the United States, Horkheimer and his associates found themselves in an environment in which scientific and pragmatic modes of thinking were dominant and dialectics was seen as a sort of obscurantist thinking. Concerned to establish the importance of dialectical thinking, Horkheimer and his associates discussed how the great book on dialectics might be conceived and written.

  Marcuse was extremely eager to work on this project with Horkheimer, who felt himself to be too involved in his work as director of the Institute to be able to devote sufficient time and energy to the project. During the 1940s, however, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno moved to California where they had an opportunity to devote themselves full time to philosophical studies. Soon after, following the outbreak of World War Two, Marcuse went to Washington to work for the Office of Strategic Services and then the State Department as his contribution to the fight against fascism. Thus Adorno ended up as Horkheimer’s collaborator on the project on dialectics, which became their book Dialectic of Enlightenment.8

  The Genesis and Development of One-Dimensional Man

  In retrospect, One-Dimensional Man articulates precisely the Hegelian-Marxian philosophical project that Marcuse began developing in the 1930s in his work with the Frankfurt School. In particular, in the sections on “One-Dimensional Thought” and “The Chance of the Alternatives” Marcuse develops the modes of critical thinking and ideology critique distinctive of the Frankfurt School most fully. His analyses here exemplify Hegelian/Marxian dialectical philosophy both in his relentless critique of existing modes of what he considers uncritical thought and in his working out of the categories of critical and dialectical thinking.

  Chapters 1 through 4 of One-Dimensional Man, by contrast, connect with the Frankfurt School’s project of developing a Critical Theory of contemporary society, which they began producing in the 1930s.9 The Frankfurt School critical social theorists were among the first to analyze the new configurations of the state and economy in contemporary capitalist societies, to criticize the key roles of mass culture and communications, to analyze new modes of technology and forms of social control, to discuss new modes of socialization and the decline of the individual in mass society, and—vis-à-vis classical Marxism—to analyze and confront the consequences of the integration of the working classes and the stabilization of capitalism for the project of radical social change. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is perhaps the fullest and most concrete development of these themes within the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

  One can trace the genesis of the major themes of Marcuse’s magnus opus in his works from the early 1930s until its publication in 1964. In essays from the early 1940s, Marcuse is already describing how tendencies toward technological rationality were producing a system of totalitarian social control and domination. In a 1941 article, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse sketches the historical decline of individualism from the time of the bourgeois revolutions to the rise of modern technological society.10 Individual rationality, he claims, was won in the struggle against regnant superstitions, irrationality, and domination, and posed the individual in a critical stance against society. Critical reason was thus a creative principle which was the source of both the individual’s liberation and society’s advancement. The development of modern industry and technological rationality, however, undermined the basis of individual rationality. As capitalism and technology developed, advanced industrial society demanded increasing accommodation to the economic and social apparatus and submission to increasing domination an
d administration. Hence, a “mechanics of conformity” spread throughout the society. The efficiency and power of administration overwhelmed the individual, who gradually lost the earlier traits of critical rationality (i.e., autonomy, dissent, the power of negation), thus producing a “one-dimensional society” and “one-dimensional man.”

  At the same time, however, Marcuse was working with Franz Neumann on a project entitled “Theory of Social Change”11 which they described as

  A historical and theoretical approach to the development of a positive theory of social change for contemporary society.

  The major historical changes of social systems, and the theories associated with them will be discussed. Particular attention will be paid to such transitions as those from feudalism to capitalism, from laissez-faire to organized industrial society, from capitalism to socialism and communism.

  A handwritten note, in Marcuse’s writing, on the themes of the project indicates that he and Neumann intended to analyze conflicting tendencies toward social change and social cohesion; forces of freedom and necessity in social change; subjective and objective factors that produce social change; patterns of social change, such as evolution and revolution; and the nature of social change, whether progressive, regressive, or cyclical. They ultimately intended to develop a “theory of social change for our society.” A seventeen-page typed manuscript in the Marcuse Archive, entitled “A History of the Doctrine of Social Change,” presents an overview of the project. Marcuse and Neumann open by writing:

  Since sociology as an independent science was not established before the 19th century, the theory of society up to that time was an integral part of philosophy or of those sciences (such as the economic or juristic), the conceptual structure of which was to a large extent based upon specific philosophical doctrines. This intrinsic connection between philosophy and the theory of society (a connection which will be explained in the text) formulates the pattern of all particular theories of social change occurring in the ancient world, in the middle ages, and on the commencement of modern times. One decisive result is the emphasis on the fact that social change cannot be interpreted within a particular social science, but must be understood within the social and natural totality of human life. This conception uses, to a large extent, psychological factors in the theories of social change. However, the derivation of social and political concepts from the “psyche” of man is not a psychological method in the modern sense but rather involves the negation of psychology as a special science. For the Greeks, psychological concepts were essentially ethical, social and political ones, to be integrated into the ultimate science of philosophy.12