Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man

   Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger? The efforts to prevent such a catastrophe overshadow the search for its potential causes in contemporary industrial society.  These causes remain unidentified, unexposed, unattacked by the public because they recede before the all too obvious threat from without - to the West from the East, to the East from the West.  Equally obvious is the need for being prepared, for living on the brink, for facing the challenge.  We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for the defense which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.


  ... 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. ... and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason.

   And yet this society is irrational as a whole.  Its productivity is destructive of the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by the constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence - individual, national, international.... the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

   aim of a critical theory of contemporary society... analyzes society in the light of its used and unused or abused capabilities for improving the human condition. ... implies value judgment.

  1. the judgment hat human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
  2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities.... Social theory is historical theory, and history is the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources, which ones offer the greater chance of an optimal development?

  ... the critical theory must abstract from the actual organization and utilization of society's resources, and from the results of this organization and utilization. Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. 

   But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation which seems to deprive it of the very basis. Technical progress, extended to the whole system of domination and coordination, creates form of life (and of power) which appears to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom form toil and domination. 

   ... Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change - qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, a new modes of human existence. This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; ... the integration of opposition...