One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

One Dimensional Man

By Herbert Marcuse

Critical Theory

A specific range of Marxist approaches common among the members of the Frankfurt School, thus not to be confused with the generic phrases “theories that are critical” or “theories about criticism.” Critical theory rejects positivism and value-freedom in science and dogma in Marxism, advocating instead an open-ended, continuously self-critical process that will eventually contribute to social reform.

Definition

Generally, Critical Theory is a broad approach to challenging and destabilizing established knowledge. In a more focused sense, Critical Theory comes out of the German 'Frankfurt School,' (who called it Critical Theory of Society or Critical Social Theory) which emphasizes that all knowledge is historical and biased, and that 'objective' knowledge is illusory.

Discussion

Critical Theory starts from Marx and Freud and expands through the 20th century to cover areas such as literary criticism, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, feminism, screen theory, and includes methods such as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. Critical Theory is such a huge area, it is almost impossible to cover it in total depth.

The Frankfurt School

            The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification.

The Frankfurt School of 'critical theory' was regarded by orthodox Marxists as 'revisionist' partly because it criticised economism and crude materialism, and partly because of its eclecticism. In media theory it is important for offering the first Marxist attempt to theorize about the media (Gurevitch et al. 1982: 8). However, it provided no real way forward for the study of the mass media (Curran et al.1982: 23).

For Marcuse, the mass media defined the terms in which we may think about the world (Bennett 1982: 44). The Frankfurt School in general was profoundly pessimistic about the mass media. As the Janet Woollacott wrote about them that their work 'gives to the mass media and the culture industry a role of ideological dominance which destroys both bourgeois individualism and the revolutionary potential of the working class' (Woollacott 1982: 105).

The Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt in 1923, and was exiled to New York when Hitler rose to power in 1933; most writers associated with the 'Frankfurt School' returned Germany in 1949. Herbert Marcuse remained in America, and his book, One Dimensional Man, 1964, represents a critique of American 'totalitarianism', based on the notion that American society and culture denied people any real alternative to existing thought and action. It was a key book of the sixties New Left.

With the growth of advanced industrial society during the Cold War era, critical theorists recognized that the path of capitalism and history had changed decisively, that the modes of oppression operated differently, and that the industrial working class no longer remained the determinate negation of capitalism. This led to the attempt to root the dialectic in an absolute method of negativity, as in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966).

  

The Frankfurt School was influenced by predominantly conservative notions of 'mass society', though it gave this perspective a leftist slant (Bennett 1982: 42). The 'father of the New Left', Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1972), presented the media very pessimistically as an irresistible force:

The means of... communication..., the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers... to the producers and, through the latter to the whole [social system]. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood... Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour. (Marcuse, cited in Bennett, 1982: 43).

Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964, felt that the apparent logic of the capitalist system, including the output of the 'entertainment and information' industries, bound consumers to the system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate, promoting a false consciousness.

Herbert Marcuse Structure Analysis

The Great Refusal                   Eros & Civilization                 One Dimensional Man

(1941)                                      (1955)                                                  (1964), (1972)

The Frankfurt School try to define the fate of reason in new historical period and Marcuse do this through analysis of structural changes in Labour process under capitalism & inherent. Herbert Marcuse drawing on Hegel, Marx, Freud, put forward a theory of “The Great Refusal’’, meaning that individual should reject the existing social order as repressive & conformist without waiting for a revolution.

Marcuse wrote the works which are most influential among young radicals today – is marked by two principal features. There is a growing concern with the possibilities of man as they might be realized in a genuinely human society. This is the central theme of Eros and Civilization (1955), in which Marcuse, developing some concepts of Freud, projects the image of a “non-repressive civilization.” At the same time he exhibits growing doubt that the working class remains capable of playing the role assigned to it by Marxist theory, of fundamentally transforming basic social institutions so that these as yet unfulfilled possibilities of man could begin to be realized.

The Marcuse’s thought has found its most systematic formulation in One Dimensional Man (1964). There Marcuse develops the concept of a contemporary industrial society exempt from basic change, and seeks to explain how it has happened that the once revolutionary working class has become a prop of the existing order.

"If we attempt to relate the causes of the danger to the way in which society is organized and organizes its members, we are immediately confronted with the fact that advanced industrial society becomes richer, bigger and better as it perpetuates the danger. The defense structure makes life easier for a greater number of people and extends man's mastery of nature. Under these circumstances, our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason."

Herbert Marcuse
One Dimensional Man

Herbert Marcuse's philosophical treatise examines the political, social, and cultural controls that reduce the dimensions of individuals in an industrial state. He perceives the association of capital and technology as constituting new forms of social control and domination—

A One Dimensional Man formed from a One-Dimensional Society that frames a One-Dimensional Thought.

"The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than before--which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man)

Marcuse also analyzed 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 inevitability of capitalist crisis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, Marcuse championed non-integrated forces of minorities, outsiders, and radical intelligentsia, attempting to nourish oppositional thought and behaviour through promoting radical thinking and opposition. He considered the trends towards bureaucracy in supposedly-Marxist countries to be as oppositional to freedom as those in the Capitalist west.

One Dimensional Man offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the society in the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. He argued that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.

• Advance industrial Society produced 
•      False Needs , which results into 
• Integrated Individuals into the existing system of production and consumption

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

The Search for Freedom

According to Herbert Marcuse the people will free, when they can determine what they really need or want to be, and we are not yet free, we have false needs.

Marcuse believes that people are not free because they function within systems such as the economy. If people were really free, they would be free from these systems. For example, people would only have to work as little as possible to provide for their needs, not an established amount of time. He states that only when people are free from these systems can they determine what they really need or want. Because we are not yet free, we have "false needs". These needs are exemplified by the range of choices which we are offered in our economy. However, each of these choices reinforces the social norms that now exist. Because each choice has the same result (reinforcement of social norms), there is no real choice. Marcuse says highly advanced societies are welfare/warfare states. Welfare states restrict freedom because they limit free time, access to necessary goods and services, and citizen's ability to realize true self-determination. The warfare state hinders a true analysis of society because it keeps people focused on fighting the "enemy" instead of focused on internal social problems.

Marcuse's analysis of highly advanced societies is accurate and useful. However, he does not provide realistic solutions to the problems he raises. His point seems to be that if societies can learn to use technologies in ways that benefit citizens, instead of restricting them, then the problems of humans will be solved.

Marcuse’s central theme is that the two-dimensional society of the past has been converted into a one-dimensional apparatus. The basic dimension of previous society was the material domain of production and reproduction; its second dimension was a mental sphere where men could dream, think and imagine a better world and thereby recognize the misery of the existing circumstances. This dimension was potentially profoundly critical of the existing social world, because within it men could confront reality in the light of their unactualized possibilities. In this historical situation, the conditions of the revolutionary socialist movement were created. Philosophy found its material weapons in the proletariat, and the proletariat found its mental weapons in philosophy.

But today, in the emerging advanced industrial society, all this has changed. The two sources of two-dimensional life have been destroyed. Through compulsive consumption and the implanting and satisfaction of “false needs,” through an erotic engineering, through the media which manipulate the mind, the instinctual drives which once tended to throw the individual into opposition to his society have been transformed into the very means of binding him to it. At the same time, the rising standard of living and the improved working conditions progressively diminish the misery suffered by the workers.

In such a one-dimensional society, the sense of alienation, hostility and aggression do not disappear. But they lose their potentially oppositional character and themselves become elements of manipulation, whether by the ruling social groups or by the autonomous functioning of the totalitarian administrative apparatus itself. Aggression is channelled against international communism – the permanent “Enemy” – as well as against racial and cultural minorities: blacks, hippies and radicals. Through such diversion hostility becomes strong cement rather than a threat to the existing order.

Such a society tends to become an apparatus in which all men, things and processes are objects of total, rational administration, and all social relations tend to become technical relations. Men are increasingly related to one another as parts of a coordinated and well-functioning mechanism rather than as conscious creators, co-operators and contestants. Spontaneity is liquidated, in consciousness as well as in personal and social behaviour.

The theory of capitalist society as developed by Marxism and Marcuse’s theory of industrial society are in contradiction at a basic point. Capitalism itself sets a limit to the trend toward total administration. In capitalist economy, one can only immediately administer what falls within the circle of one’s private property, either as a thing one owns or as a man whose labour-power has been purchased. Capitalist economy remains private and anarchic, not subject to an overreaching administration, however much the scope of state intervention may have expanded. Yet Marcuse, while proclaiming that advanced industrial society is a specific and necessary stage of capitalist development, systematically ignores the regions of contradiction that arise from its very structure.

How One Dimensional Society formed? (Marcuse view with the help of passages’ taken from One Dimensional Man)

Democratic revolutions ushered in the industrialized capitalist system and succeeded because of their recognition of rights and liberties. Rights and liberties outdated the feudal systems and protected self-powered enterprises. After the completion of the democratic revolutions--that resulted in the demise of the feudal systems and the establishment of the industrial systems--rights and liberties became less vital.

"The rights and liberties which were such vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society yield to a higher stage of this society: they are losing their traditional rationale and content. Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were--just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect--essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premise." (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man)

An extensive prosperity satisfies basic wants. The satisfaction distracts people from argument--from observation and critical analysis: "Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way it is organized." Advanced industrial societies harness technology, science and mechanics to increase their production capacity. The machine becomes the most powerful political instrument and surpasses the political power of any individual or group. Marcuse treats this phenomenon in a positive manner. "To the extent to which the work world is conceived of as a machine and mechanized accordingly, it becomes the potential basis of a new freedom of man." This does not imply the socialization of economic life. Those who operate in the workplace are the masters of the machine. By combining their efforts they can replace the power of the managers and corporate leaders and super cede those who use profits for exercising political control and use the control for their own advantage.

The needs of the One Dimensional Man are pre-conditioned. The pre-conditioning is subjected to additional indoctrination by a standardized media. The media teaches " to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate... "Social interests impose "false" needs. The "false" needs can gratify the individual but they "perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery and injustice." The endless drives for these endless "false" needs require additional efforts, and brings frustration and despair that create hostility.

Liberty gives a wide range of choices but does not permit the individual to determine what can be chosen and what is chosen. Liberty cannot define the number of hours people are willing to work to fulfill their needs. Products serve to indoctrinate and manipulate. The indoctrination "becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life--much better than before--and as a good way of life it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought... One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information."

The One Dimensional Society Frames the One Dimensional Thought

Herbert Marcuse wrote in his book:

"The technological and the pre-technological stages share certain basic concepts of man and nature which express the continuity of the Western tradition. Within this continuum, different modes of thought clash with each other; they belong to different ways of apprehending, organizing, changing society and nature. The stabilizing tendencies conflict with the subversive elements of Reason, the power of positive with that of negative thinking, until the achievements of advanced industrial civilization leads to the triumph of the one-dimensional reality over all contradiction."

The American democratic society moves forward with two prominent features; (1) as a "warfare state" for expanding economic reach and preventing external challenges to military might, and (2) as a "welfare state" for distributing prosperity and preventing internal challenges to social and economic dislocations. Thoughtful responses to these challenges, such as pacifism, end to permanent mobilization, more direct distribution of wealth, etc., are regarded as a social and unpatriotic. Even those who believe they express their own thoughts, often have these thoughts unknowingly shaped by covert domination and manipulation: "For the established universe of discourse bears throughout the marks of the specific modes of domination, organization, and manipulation to which the members of a society are subjected. People depend for their living on bosses and politicians and jobs and neighbours who make them speak and mean as they do; they are compelled by societal necessity, to identify the 'thing' with its functions."

            Increased prosperity has brought increased uniformity of thought. Large scale protests against U.S. government policies have declined dramatically since the Vietnam War days. Continuous military solutions to disputes, that feature attacks on defenceless nations, are supported by a society that has narrowed the dimensions of its reasoning. The university, previously a multi-dimensional depository of youthful criticism and movements, has become prominently directed to a singular purpose--to educate for incorporation into a corporate society. Marcuse predicted these occurrences. He takes liberties with language, and uses a rhetorical strategy to reach significant conclusions:

"The totalitarian dimensions of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective--perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. This illusion contains some truth: 'the people', previously the ferment of social change have 'moved up' to become the ferment of social cohesion. Here rather than in the redistribution of wealth and equalization of classes is the new stratification of advanced industrial society."

Criticism

Orthodox Marxists and academic theorists criticize the work of the Herbert Marcuse on the following grounds;-

Pessimism approach

Herbert Marcuse's (1972) portrayal of the power of the mass media tended to cast audiences as passive victims, neo-Marxist stances have typically come to grant more active roles to audiences. As Curran et al. put it, whilst dominant Meaning systems are seen as 'moulded and relayed' by the mass media, they are also seen as 'adapted by audiences and integrated into class-based or "situated" meaning systems' (Curran et al. 1982: 15).

Difference in Method between Marcuse and Marxists 

The proposition of Marcuse that the working class has become such a conservative element as a consequence of structural changes in capitalist society – is not the result of any new theoretical discovery. Nor is it a further consequence of applying the Marxist method which earlier enabled Marcuse to recognize the working class as a revolutionary agent. His change of view comes from the fact that by and large for the past 20 years the working class in the most advanced capitalist countries has shown few signs of any revolutionary activity. By accepting this fact as the overriding reality to guide his analysis of social phenomena, Marcuse departs from the method of historical materialism.

Marcuse himself apparently does not recognize his shift in method. He asserts in good faith that he remains a Marxist; that it is objective social reality and not his method of thought that has changed. In fact he does cling to the Marxist tradition in two important methodological respects as well as in one important theoretical conclusion. First of all his method is dialectical, in the sense that it is aimed at the discovery and exposure of contradiction. However – and this point is of decisive importance for the difference between Marcuse’s present method and that of Marxism – the sphere within which he now seeks to lay bare contradiction is much narrower and even of another order than the sphere in which the Marxian dialectician pursues the moving forces of things.

Secondly, Marcuse shares with Marxism the mandate to unite theory with action. For him, the function of theory is to produce true consciousness where hitherto false consciousness prevailed, so that men can act against their enslaving social conditions. Marcuse frequently defends himself against charges of “quietism,” of cultivating a purely contemplative attitude. But his activist intention is continually frustrated by the image of the social world that is presented in his theory. That rests on the conception that the social world has become, in principle, unchangeable.

Finally, Marcuse shares with Marxists the conviction that the only potentially, ultimately world-transforming agency in the modern world is the working class. Only, contrary to Marxism, he holds that this force can no longer realize that potential. This is the source of his almost unrelieved pessimism: If the working class will not change the world, the world will not be changed.

This difference in method between Marcuse and Marxists is detectable in a passage from One Dimensional Man where Marcuse states his view on the difference in the “position” of social theory, that is, its relation to reality, today and at the time when Marx was first developing his doctrine:

“At its origins in the first half of the 19th century, when it elaborated the first concepts of the alternatives [to the prevailing social order], the critique of industrial society attained concreteness in a historical mediation between theory and practice, values and facts, needs and goals. This historical mediation occurred in the consciousness and in the political action of the two great classes which faced each other in the society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the capitalist world, they are still the basic classes. However, the capitalist development has altered the structure and function of these two classes in such a way that they no longer appear to be agents of historical transformation ... In the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of social change, the critique is thus thrown back to a high level of abstraction. There is no ground on which theory and practice, thought and action meet.” (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man)

The theory of capitalist society as developed by Marxism and Marcuse’s theory of industrial society are in contradiction at a basic point. Capitalism itself sets a limit to the trend toward total administration. In capitalist economy, one can only immediately administer what falls within the circle of one’s private property, either as a thing one owns or as a man whose labour-power has been purchased. Capitalist economy remains private, not subject to an overreaching administration, however much the scope of state intervention may have expanded. Yet Marcuse, while proclaiming that advanced industrial society is a specific and necessary stage of capitalist development, systematically ignores the regions of contradiction that arise from its very structure.

The sometimes extensive, but always limited, degree of control that monopolies have over their markets presupposes the basically uncoordinated, anarchic character of the economy. The administrative efforts on the part of the state to regulate and control the crises caused by the anarchy of production presuppose this anarchy of production.

And the conflict between capitalist nations, which is perennially reproduced, sometimes in the form of open military conflict, sometimes in more subdued and subtle forms, testifies to the contradictions that arise between antagonistic national capitalist interests.

But in Marcuse’s theory, all these areas of conflict which are beyond any central administrative control, national or international, appear as incidental “frictions” slightly disturbing the smooth functioning of the mechanism, or as archaic residues of a past society, which are only temporarily beyond the administrative reach of advanced industrial society.

Even if it is difficult to accept all the propositions of Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man," its discourse freshens thought, illuminates life and brings us all to a more meaningful dimension.