One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content.”

Since advanced industrial society is so capable of providing freedom from wants, the critical function of previously cherished and realized freedoms—such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience—are no longer experienced as truly necessary by the people. Thus, the civilization that provides freedom from physical wants deprives the people of the freedom to criticize, leading to The Creation of a One-Dimensional Society.

“We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization turns the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities.”

Advanced industrial civilization renders the nonhuman world, both natural and unnatural, an extension of man’s desires. Thus people impose themselves to an unprecedented degree on the natural world and identify themselves with the commodities that not only claim to satisfy their desires, but which create a sense of self that becomes bound up with the status quo. This is, Marcuse insists, a form of bondage. As a result of this bondage, the necessary and “alienating” comprehension of this bondage is impossible, which makes resistance itself impossible.

“Organization for peace is different from organization for war; the institutions which served the struggle for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence.”

Advanced industrial civilization is organized for the domination of the world and the increased exploitation of all that it sees as “resources.” Such an organization may have arguably been necessary when survival was at stake, but survival is now threatened by this organization and its technics of nuclear war, industrial chemical production, and the very ideology of domination itself. This current organization refuses peace and nonviolence and thus “pacification”—a term to which Marcuse will return to in the last chapter.

“This unification of opposites bears upon the very possibilities of social change where it embraces those on whose back the system progresses—that is, the very classes whose existence once embodied the opposition to the system as a whole.”

One of the organizing principles of advanced industrial society is its unprecedented “unification of opposites” that smooths over necessary confrontation. This unification of opposites occurs, for example, in the collusion of big business and organized labor. As a result, the working class loses the power that it once had as the visible antithesis to capitalism’s promises.

“Now the laborer is losing the professional autonomy which made him a member of a class set off from other occupational groups because it embodied the refutation of the established society.”

What Marcuse refers to as the worker’s “enslavement” under capitalism is simultaneously his power to revolt under capitalism. Without the proletariat or working class’s alienation from the rest of society in advanced industrial society, however, this group loses its distinctiveness as an exploited class and, as a result, its consciousness of its ability to overthrow the dehumanizing system.

“The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a ‘higher’ order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory truths peacefully coexist in indifference.”

For Marcuse, art that does not exist in a second dimension or is not actively alienating (and thus bringing people into a recognition of their “unfreedom”) is propaganda and helps to maintain the status quo. Art’s critical function depends on not being “absorbed” into the system of advanced industrial society, which destroys the other dimensionality of “higher culture.” The neutralization of “higher culture” is a part of The Creation of a One-Dimensional Society.

“The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which repressed them.”

Marcuse does not condone the “injustice” of earlier capitalism, which made the truths of the arts available only to the wealthy and educated. This was repressive. However, he argues that advanced industrial society does not correct this repression by removing the artifacts of “higher culture” from their situatedness in a second dimension that existed in opposition to the repressive state. This alienated remoteness was the power of the arts, which has been abolished and absorbed under advanced industrial society.

“Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into his drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which remakes their content.”

Marcuse does not deny the benefits of the mass reproduction, distribution, and accessibility of the fine arts. At the same time, however, the power of art’s content as inspiring revolution is destroyed as art is remade into the fabric of society, robbed of its refusal of the status quo. With the removal of this remoteness also comes the removal of art’s critique. The “classics” have been co-opted and lost their revolutionary power.

“It seems that even the most hideous transgressions can be repressed in such a manner that, for all practical purposes, they have ceased to be a danger for society. Or, if their eruption leads to functional disturbances in the individual (in the case of one Hiroshima pilot), it does not disturb the functioning of society. A mental hospital manages the disturbance.”

Here, even nuclear war and the trauma associated with its unprecedented violence is “managed.” Advanced industrial society is organized around the irrational destruction of life, which it nonetheless presents as entirely rational, with any opposition to this horror pathologized. The individual who is disturbed by this annihilation is hospitalized rather than the larger society recognizing its annihilation as irrational violence.

“Relatively new is the general acceptance of these lies by public and private opinion, the suppression of their monstrous content. The spread and the effectiveness of this language testify to the triumph of society over the contradictions which it contains; they are reproduced without exploding the social system.”

In this chapter on one-dimensional discourse, Marcuse acknowledges that societies have historically told the public lies. Advanced industrial civilization, however, “triumphs” in these lies in a new way, as the people no longer recognize lies as such and thus easily consume them, with no eruption within the larger society.

“The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.”

Society’s discourse unifies, rather than challenges, true opposition, which is a lie. These lies are so easily consumed that protest is rendered impossible: There is nothing left to say in a society that believes that a contradiction is truth. Protest becomes literally impossible because it is unspeakable, so that “freedom of expression” or “freedom of dissent” is a moot point.

“Philosophy originates in dialectic; its universe of discourse responds to the facts of an antagonistic reality.”

Marcuse begins Section 2 with dialectical thinking as the foundation of all philosophy, arguing for Dialectical Philosophy as Necessary for Liberation. Dialectical thinking intrinsically refuses the absorption of contradiction that one-dimensional society depends on. Rather than fusing contradiction together to form a lie, dialectic seeks truth through an honest confrontation with contradiction.

“Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality.”

Philosophy seeks truth in the act of dialectical thinking, but classical Greek philosophy also turns away from the quest for truth in the submission, rather than interrogation, of the world’s denial of equality. While Marcuse admires the Greek dialectical dialogues, the contradiction that the dialogues refuse to bring into dialectical conversation is the inequality of society.

“This contradictory, two-dimensional style of thought is the inner form not only of dialectical logic but of all philosophy that comes to grips with reality.”

The confrontation of contradiction is the means by which thinking and the apprehension of reality occurs. This is in opposition to the one-dimensional thinking of advanced industrial civilization, which refuses reality in its unification of opposites.

“Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.”

Marcuse criticizes ancient Greek philosophy for its deflection away from those who most need society’s unjust hierarchy to be overturned. In not applying dialectical philosophy to the contradiction of hierarchy, philosophy itself becomes one-dimensional in its maintenance of the status quo.

“In a paradoxical development, the scientific efforts to establish the rigid objectivity of nature led to an increasing de-materialization of nature.”

Marcuse argues that modern scientific thinking deadens the natural world, insisting that it is only an object to be quantified, studied, and thus fully known. In doing so, science loses track of nature’s life: its materiality, mortality, and finitude.

“The continuous self-correction of science—the revolution of its hypotheses which is built into its method—itself propels and extends the same historical universe, the same basic experience. It retains the same formal a priori.”

While modern society insists that science is neutral and, thus, occupies truth and is “real,” Marcuse insists that it is historically situated, subjective, and extremely conservative. Its “self-correction” is not dialectical but, instead, merely a replication of its a priori insistence on the quantification and exploitation of nature.

“The point which I am trying to make is that science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man—a link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole.”

Marcuse uncharacteristically draws attention to his own repeated attempts at argument, wanting to ensure that the reader understands this particular point about the danger of the scientific method, which presents itself as above reproach and replicates itself with almost complete immunity and approbation in its “experiments.” He argues that this discourse and method are both extremely dangerous and potentially destructive of all life.

“The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience.”

Marcuse analyzes what passes for philosophy within academia, which is a hollow philosophy that proclaims itself to be impoverished and refuses the very life of philosophy, which is the encountering of new experiences and thinking. This fake philosophy needs to be thrown out, as it only maintains the status quo and does nothing radical. Instead, Marcuse advocates for Dialectical Philosophy as Necessary for Liberation.

“Such qualitative change would be a transition to a higher form of civilization if technics were designed and utilized for the pacification of the struggle for existence.”

The final chapter, “The Catastrophe of Liberation,” lays out the revolution or “catastrophe” that Marcuse has been moving toward throughout the book: the destruction of the current and violent technological system by way of a revolution that aims for “pacification,” or peace rather than war or violence.

“‘Pacification of existence’ does not suggest an accumulation of power but rather the opposite.”

Marcuse radically argues that revolution will not entail “empowerment” in any common-sense meaning of the word. Advanced industrial society prides itself in its accumulation of power through an accumulation of violent technics. For Marcuse, the revolution is in the recognition of the necessity of nonviolence. The revolution will require a radical reconsideration of Western culture’s violent capitalistic “accumulation” of power, in contrast to the pursuit of nonviolence which does not “accumulate.”

“I shall presently try to show that the reconstruction of the material base of society with a view to pacification may involve a qualitative as well as quantitative reduction of power […] the notion of such a reversal of power is a strong motive in dialectical theory.”

Marcuse here proposes that a higher civilization must refuse capitalism’s violent accumulations and instead strive for nonviolent thinking as well as real reductions in violent techne.

“The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial societies is not a suitable model of development if the aim is pacification.”

The supposedly “high” standard of living that lulls people into relinquishing their freedom without even realizing they are doing so is in itself not “high” or “advanced,” as it does not move or “advance” toward the future with vitality, but instead deadens the future in its violent excesses.