Concept

One-Dimensional Man

Overview

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by the German–American philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both the contemporary capitalist society of the Western Bloc and the communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both of these societies, and the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. He argues that the "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrate 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" (described 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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's "Misere de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of "Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with progressive scientific…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what One-Dimensional Man is.
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A large part of the intellectual machinery by which Hegel overcame the remnants of individualism found in prior philosophy came from the idea of organic development which had been active in German thought since the time of Herder. In his chief work ("Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity"), written in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds that history is a progressive education of…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
Close in meaning to One-Dimensional Man; the term itself is not named.
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But the former has necessarily advanced with greater rapidity than the latter. The old system had so entirely declined, that a desire for social regeneration had become general, before the groundwork of the new system had been sufficiently completed for its true character to be understood. As we have just seen, the doctrine by which social regeneration is now to be directed could not have arisen previously to the…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Close in meaning to One-Dimensional Man; the term itself is not named.
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One-Dimensional Man

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