One-Dimensional Man

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in a Ideology of contemporary Industrial Society is the 1964 book by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the author permits a wide-ranging critique of both innovative capitalism and the Communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies, as alive as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. He argues that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production as well as consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.

This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behavior, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behavior wither away. Against this prevailing climate, Marcuse promotes the "great refusal" planned at length in the book as the only adequate opposition to all-encompassing methods of control. Much of the book is a defense of "negative thinking" as a disrupting force against the prevailing positivism.

Marcuse also analyzes the integration of the industrial working class into capitalist society and new forms of capitalist stabilization, thus questioning the Marxian postulates of the revolutionary proletariat and the inevitability of capitalist crisis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, Marcuse champions non-integrated forces of minorities, outsiders, and radical intelligentsia, attempting to nourish oppositional thought and behavior through promoting radical thinking and opposition. He considers the trends towards bureaucracy in supposedly Marxist countries to be as oppositional to freedom as those in the capitalist West.

One-Dimensional Man bolstered Marcuse's fame as a contemporary Western philosopher.

Reception

The critical theorist Douglas Kellner wrote that One-Dimensional Man was one of the nearly important books of the 1960s and one of the nearly subversive books of the twentieth century. Despite its pessimism, represented by the citation of the words of Walter Benjamin at the end of this book that "Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben" "It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is precondition to us", it influenced many in the New Left as it articulated their growing dissatisfaction with both capitalist societies and Soviet communist societies.

The philosopher Ronald Aronson wrote in 2018 that One-Dimensional Man is more prescient than Marcuse could construct ever realized and that this is the more relevant today than ever.