Quotes from book
One-Dimensional Man

One-Dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Communist society of 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 argues 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.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" 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 made Marcuse famous.

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 147

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 8

Herbert Marcuse photo

“In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an “untrue” and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the “natural” function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. … Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 127-128

Herbert Marcuse photo

“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, … the extent to which this civilization transforms 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; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 9

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The radical empiricist onslaught … provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 13

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 32

Herbert Marcuse photo

“By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 5

Herbert Marcuse photo

“Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 164

Herbert Marcuse photo

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 9-11

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The higher culture of the West—whose moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values industrial society still professes—was a pre-technological culture in a functional as well as chronological sense. Its validity was derived from the experience of a world which no longer exists and which cannot be recaptured because it is in a strict sense invalidated by technological society. Moreover, it remained to a large degree a feudal culture, even when the bourgeois period gave it some of its most lasting formulations. It was feudal not only because of its confinement to privileged minorities, not only because of its inherent romantic element (which will be discussed presently), but also because its authentic works expressed a conscious, methodical alienation from the entire sphere of business and industry, and from its calculable and profitable order.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 58

Herbert Marcuse photo

“the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things””

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

on economic laws, the market etc.
Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 144

Herbert Marcuse photo

“Society … can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 72

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the “meaning” of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 71

Herbert Marcuse photo

“To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 145