One-Dimensional Man

Introduction

Marcuse published the book in Boston in 1964, subtitled “Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”. Its first part describes a society that delivers goods and comfort and thereby absorbs opposition: even sexual freedom becomes a form of “repressive desublimation”. The second part attacks positivism and the ordinary language philosophy of Oxford as one-dimensional thought that accepts the given as rational. The third asks whether historical alternatives remain. The book ends with a sentence from Walter Benjamin: it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us. It made Marcuse one of the best-known thinkers of the New Left.

Connections

Builds on

• Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno

More works by Herbert Marcuse

• 1955Eros and Civilization