Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

The following is a review that I wrote in October 2000, several years before my blogging days began, of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. I'm presenting it here as it stood in 2000 with no current editing:

One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press; Boston; 1964)

Student revolutionaries in Paris in 1968 scrawled "Marx-Mao-Marcuse" as graffiti on the walls. The American philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse, a German immigrant who was part of the "Frankfurt School" of social research, became famous as a leading theorist of the "New Left" in the 1960s.

Previously he had developed a solid if controversial academic reputation in America as the author of an introductory text on the 19th-century German philosopher Hegel and a book applying Freudian theoretical concepts to social criticism. He had been one of the Marxist social scientists Bill Donovan brought into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, and during the Eisenhower years published a critical study on the Soviet Union. With a famous essay on "Repressive Tolerance" and his book One-Dimensional Man, he became more widely known as a political theorist with a provocative analysis of modern society.

Marcuse concentrated on criticizing the existing order of things and describing utopian possibilities in rather vague, philosophical terms. He was not given to making programmatic proposals. One may question whether his actual influence on activists of the New Left - a loose term used at that time to distinguish a wide range of (mostly) young activists, protesters and revolutionaries from pre-World War II leftists - may have been exaggerated in popular commentaries on the movement. Ironically, one of the best-known political personalities who acknowledged a direct intellectual debt to Herbert Marcuse was Angela Davis, a prominent figure in the US Communist Party, which was the pre-eminent "Old Left" bogeyman for "New Left" activists.

His actual influence was probably greater in continental Europe where Marxist ideas were more familiar in the daily political vocabulary. Marcuse, often described as a "neo-Marxist," operated from an essentially Marxist-Leninist framework in his broader perspective. He believed that capitalist society possessed basic contradictions within itself which would ultimately be resolved only by a political revolution in which the working class would establish a socialist society based on centralized state ownership of the basic elements of the economy, "the means of production," as Marx called them.

Marcuse envisioned the transformation of a socialist system also in more-or-less conventional Marxist-Leninist terms. An elite vanguard group would seize power supported by a popular revolt. They would then rule for some period of time in an authoritarian manner while taking control of the economy and re-educating the population to accept the new order.

Marcuse’s well-known One-Dimensional Man is no ringing call to class warfare. Instead it's a kind of manifesto for intellectual non-conformists. It depicts Western capitalism as a conformist nightmare, where the lives of individuals are controlled in ways both overt and insidious by largely unseen social forces that appear surprisingly benevolent but are ultimately destructive and utterly unjust. This society represses the possibility of a humane alternative order, in which "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." (p. 8)

The first section of the book consists of an analysis of social trends. The title phrase is described in the context of the pervasive intrusions of various social institutions - government, business, entertainment - into the personal privacy of the individual. Individuals have lost much of the sense of self that, in earlier stages of society, allowed them to question social institutions from a critical perspective, he argues. "There is only one dimension" of life, not a clear separation of society and self, and that single dimension is pervasive, "everywhere and in all forms." (p.11)

He proceeds to analyze long term trends in both Western capitalist and in Soviet society and how in both cases the increasing productive possibilities of the economy will create pressure for new political and social arrangements. He describes how art has lost much of its potential to create critical perspectives on society. Even the "desublimated sexuality of [Eugene] O’Neill’s alcoholics and [William] Faulkner’s savages…are part and parcel of the society in which it happens, but nowhere its negation.” (p. 77) Even language itself becomes co-opted by the administrative ethos of mass culture so that it becomes difficult to even formulate dissenting ideas into words, or to understand the contradictions in the existing order such as those expressed in a newspaper caption like, “Labor is Seeking Missile Harmony.” (p. 89, cited to the New York Times, 12/1/1960)

The next section moves to his professional field of philosophy to analyze the ways in which academic trends in philosophy and the social sciences tend to discourage broad criticisms of society. In modern society, Marcuse argues, Reason itself has been redefined and instrumentalized in such a way that it justifies a “terrifying harmony of freedom and oppression, productivity and destruction, growth and regression.” (p. 124) He argues that even theoretical scientific thought is moving more and more toward a technological orientation that tends to discourage questioning of established ideas. He focuses his philosophical guns especially on the kind of linguistic analysis associated with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which he sees as yet another reinforcement to the general conformity.

In the final section, he offers some perspectives that he believes could improve matters, i.e., lead to a freer and more just society. At the philosophical level, he considers adopting a dialectical mode of thought a necessity - not at all surprising for a Marxist specializing in Hegelian philosophy. He argues that dialectical thought reflects the actual process of history which “involves consciousness: recognition and seizure of the liberating potentialities. Thus it involves freedom.” (p. 222)

The following description of his idea of how the existing order must be challenged, which seems to contain more of Alan Ginsburg than of Karl Marx, suggest why Marcuse was seen as something of a prophet of the emergence of the hippie movement and mass student protests later in the decades:

Today, in the prosperous warfare and welfare state, the human qualities of a pacified existence seem asocial and unpatriotic - qualities such as the refusal of all toughness, togetherness, and brutality; disobedience to the tyranny of the majority; profession of fear and weakness (the most rational reaction to this society!); a sensitive intelligence sickened by that which is being perpetrated; the commitment to the feeble and ridiculed actions of protest and refusal. These expressions of humanity, too, will be marred by necessary compromise - by the need to cover oneself, to be capable of cheating the cheaters, and to live and think in spite of them. In the totalitarian society [in which he includes Western democracies], the human attitudes tend to become escapist attitudes, to follow Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide…” (pp. 242-3)

This theme of protest and dissent, the celebration of what Marcuse calls the Great Refusal, permeates this book. One of the challenges the book presents is that this tone and theme of protest can distract the reader from the fact that he is describing quite well a number of processes of social integration that have both good and bad consequences.

And while he may formulate his arguments more provocatively than others, he was not alone in pointing out potential dangers in excessive conformity. One of the books he cites in the introduction is The Organization Man, a 1956 study by William A. Whyte, a writer for the conservative business magazine Fortune, which provided a detailed look at the cost to both companies and individuals of the kind of conformity that corporate life tends to impose on employees and their families.

As quoted above, Marcuse argues that even shocking, defiant art has lost most of its power to promote discontent with the established order. On the one hand, that reminds us that it may be worthwhile to stop to appreciate a novel or a musical piece as more than just entertainment. On the other, is it bad that William Faulkner’s works are not rejected as the product of a social degenerate because they describe unpleasant sides of people’s behavior? Isn’t this aspect of the integrative force of the market basically a good thing?

Marcuse’s analysis of the vast potential of the modern economy to meet the population’s material needs and drastically reduce the labor required seemed to many critics to largely ignore the realities of poverty, even in the most developed countries. This perspective, too, was a sign of the times. It was the year after the publication of this book that President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty in America. The problem of serious want in the midst of general prosperity was an issue at that time, recently becoming a major topic of discussion once again in the United States now only after a long economic expansion had produced prosperity exceeding even that of the 1960s.

But his focus on long-range trends makes much of his analysis still relevant. The following passage could be an Internet entrepreneur of 2000 raving about the potential of technology - except that he wouldn’t likely use the Hegelian term “reified” (which means roughly, “made into an abstract form”):

Automation, once it became the process of material production, would revolutionize the whole society. The reification of human labor power, driven to perfection, would shatter the reified form by cutting the chain that ties the individual to the machinery - the mechanism through which his own labor enslaves him. Complete automation … would open the dimension of free time as the one in which man’s private and societal existence would constitute itself. This would be the historical transcendence toward a new civilization. (p.36-7)

Marcuse’s description of postwar Western capitalism as a system which had effected “the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, [and] the collusion of Business and Labor” (p. xii) certainly had some validity. The labor movement in America was strong enough in the immediate postwar era that the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith could write of labor as a countervailing power balancing off the influence of big business. In postwar Germany, Konrad Adenauer’s conservative government successfully adopted a model of the “social market economy,” in which business and labor cooperated in a systematic way, a formal “social partnership” that endures to this day.

Both Democrats and Republicans in America shared a broad anti-Communist consensus on foreign policy. And, in 1964 when this book was first published, several years had passed since the time that the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had formally accepted Germany’s role in NATO and had declared themselves a “popular party” instead of a “class party,” formally rejecting at the same time a number of their more traditionally Marxist positions on public ownership of industry. (Supporters as well as leftist critics of the SPD could legitimately argue that such a development had taken place in practice during the Weimar Republic.)

But it’s difficult to see how 1964 could be viewed in any meaningful political sense as a time of stultifying social consensus. The civil rights movement in America was openly challenging the segregation system in the Deep South in a militant way, provoking a long-term realignment of the two major political parties. The birth control pill was already undermining the social justification for the enforced inequality of women.

The debates at that time over Vietnam and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty showed that, within the broad Cold War consensus, there were deep divisions over key policies. In retrospect, one could argue that part of the problem in Vietnam was that both Democrats and Republicans were so committed to fighting Communism that policy makers were unwilling - in practical political terms, even unable - to ask basic questions about whether the American commitment to preserving South Vietnam from the North made sense for the United States. In that sense, Marcuse was identifying a real problem with the bipartisan “general acceptance of the National Purpose.”

But Marcuse’s larger case for a radical transformation of the social order rests largely on his argument for the existence of a “stupefying” social consensus that had permeated the psychological make-up of the general public to the point that no meaningful dissent was possible. It’s a thin reed on which to hang the case for making a revolution. And it was not a politically meaningful description of the Western democracies in 1964, except at a very high level of abstraction.

In fact, a great deal of Marcuse’s broad indictment of Western capitalism is based on what could be described as essentially a linguistic trick of describing things at such a high level of abstraction that different readers could read very different and even contradictory meanings into the concepts. When he describes “contemporary industrial society” as “totalitarian,” he rhetorically blurs both economic and political distinctions between the Western democracies and the European Communist nations of that time.

To be fair, this equation of Soviet Communism and Western democracy would not have seemed quite so far-fetched in 1964 as it sounds today. Some Western observers emphasized tendencies to “convergence” between the two systems that would result in the Soviet and Western economies evolving to more similar conditions over time. In the Communist world, the Sino-Soviet split was in full swing at that time, with the Chinese leaders accusing the Soviet Union under Khrushchev of reverting back to a capitalist society. It is notable that Marcuse’s view of the socialist world in this book did not seem to be much influenced by the Sino-Soviet split, perhaps a reflection of the underestimation of its importance that affected more mainstream American observers, as well.

Time has not been kind to such positions. Marcuse’s argument that Western democracies were “totalitarian” in effectively the same way as the Soviet Union is actually a variation on the standard Soviet argument that Communism protected “economic rights” ignored in capitalist countries. Marcuse dismisses electoral choice and the freedoms of speech and the press as essentially meaningless in the “one-dimensional” society.

Even at a very high level of abstraction, it’s an arguable point. But in the practice of real people living real lives, those rights are important and meaningful. Even the former eastern European Communist Parties, such as the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Germany, would have to acknowledge as much.

The enduring value of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man is its demand for critical thinking, for refusing to blandly accept the established opinions or the generally approved practices as being beyond challenge. In the age of the Internet and of dozens of TV channels delivered by cable and satellite, sorting through reams of information by critical judgment has become more important than ever. In an era of accelerating globalism when corporations still consider politicians theirs to buy, and when currency traders can cripple a nation’s economy on a whim, Marcuse’s call for individuals to reclaim their own worth in the context of seeking a more just and fulfilling social order actually seems more relevant than ever.

Bruce Miller
October 2000