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Product Reviews:
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: Some of the best of the '60's
Comments: Herbert Marcuse was1of the original members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Along with like-minded colleagues, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Marcuse emigrated to the United States where he taught at a number of universities, including New School for Social Research, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego.
Marcuse and the other members of the Frankfurt School, such as Benjamin Nelson, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, were profoundly influenced by the work of Karl Marx. In addition, however, they were indebted to Hegel, Freud, and Max Weber. This helps to explain their interest in culture as a vehicle of domination and exploitation.
During the 1960's and early 1970's, Marcuse was the almost all influential New Left philosopher in the U.S., and probably throughout the world. He voiced the suspicion, however, that he was much more often cited than he was actually read. It seems unlikely that he would be pleased to be remembered as1of the3M's: Marx the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword. This sort of mindless slogan mongering was sharply at odds with Marcuse's commitment to rigorous scholarship in the pursuit of truth.
After 40 years, I remember One-Dimensional Man best for2relatively simple however paradoxical notions: rationality in never neutral or disinterested, and freedom can be oppressive and contrary to the development of human potential.
Rationality in the service of specific interests at the expense of others is manifest in out-sourcing, down-sizing, internationalization, and technological development, all means of reducing labor costs to benefit capital and at odds with the interests of labor. Rationally calculable pursuit of profit, in other words, is thoroughly irrational from the standpoint of labor.
The oppressiveness of freedom can be seen in modern industrial society's capacity to supply immediate material and sensual gratification, contrihowevering to the creation of cultural shallowness and single-minded pursuit of the pleasures of consumption. The creation of new needs renders us prisoners of capital's productive apparatus and ideological tools.
If he were alive today,1wonders if Marcuse might have entertained the idea that our credit crisis is really a product of the contradiction between diminished purchasing power and the ever-more-effective manipulation of the culturally engendered need to consume. At this juncture the almost all we can say with certainty is that if Marcuse wanted to develop this idea he would not have written a polemic -- his commitment to rigorous scholarship was much too strong. |
Rating: 3 (out of 5)
Summary: 100-Dimensional Realities
Comments: Yes, I flipped all the pages of Herbert Marcuse's work, "One Dimensional Man," when it was 1st written. It was an interesting critique of society. Naturally, we can think of hundreds of critiques of other societies, however just looking at our own, we can admit readily that there are things that needed improvement.
A lot of that improvement has taken place, in terms of internet sites encouraging and even thriving on more individual expression. This is on a scale hardly imaginable in the 1960's and 1970's. We all knew some new things would come along, however who would've predicted YouTube and similar, take-off sites?
When reading a critique of our own society, it is important to keep perspective. All aware of the problems and benefits of our own societies, we can readily find there are problems and benefits ewhere. Erasing poverty, hunger, starvation - and even erasing wars - will go a long way towards increasing humanity.
Probably eone alive in the 1960's and 1970's would agree that it is a great thing that the New Left and the Black Panthers were not running society. We all know it would have gone the way of the Khmer Rouge and thought up some form of universal "final solution," justifying all sorts of means towards some improbable end. However, we also need to wonder, "Why are Americans underpaid and lacking in government benefits compared to Europeans?" Was something like the mind-control or public thought-control contemplated by Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" at work, keeping the public acquiescent while the taxes on the wealthy and on corporations was decreased? They listened to and accepted for a long time the arguments of the far right, all to the effect that the wealthy deserved all that and more. It was completely forgotten that the heroism of those members of the average society, our military foreparents, made their wealth acquisition possible and that they might owe more than the average person to society because of facts like that?
The well-off do not acquire their well-being strictly through their own efforts. It may be through inheritance, and other times, their own efforts, or a combination of the two. The playing field was made safe and free from Hitler and from Communism by the blood of the young people of the working and middle classes, by and large. That is why we are not all slaves of some madly-totalitarian directing our e move from above.
Freedom is not free. If you read One-Dimensional Man today, it should be largely as a historical work. It should be read - if at all - only by people who have done a significan not additional amount of reading of long, written works. Philosophy, at that. Perhaps the kind of person who could stand to get through a graduate program in something or other. Even then, it would be read with a large grain of salt. There were some great points made.
It certainly makes more interesting reading than Karl Marxes "Das Kapital," which was a real sleeper. however I would like to mix it with some Eric Hoffer.
Then, as they train in college, do not particularly "believe" in any1thing. Not too much, anyway.
Instead, think,
"It should be interesting to see how it all comes out." |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: exciting.
Comments: Not disillusioned with the central theme of Marxism, Marcuse attempts to explain the arrested development of post-Marxist revolution, along with totalitarianism of both capitalist and communist systems, production for the sake of production, the sciences infiltrated by totalitarian ideology which leads to catastrophic consequences, the dialectic which portrays man's potential and man's defeat in the face of modern society and the systematic adjustment and tolerance to rebellion against existing society, like Che Guevara designer t-shirts. |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: Trenchant social critique
Comments: I 1st read this in college, and it is still1of my favorite books, full of perceptive, although not positive insights into western society |
Rating: 2 (out of 5)
Summary: A surprisingly disappointing book
Comments: This is Marcuse's almost all famous work and1that was a major influence on and during the student revolts all over the European continent of 1968. Many of the catchphrases of that time, such as "repressive tolerance" and the like, are derived directly from Marcuse. He has since lost much of his popularity and audience, and in my view, quite deservedly so.
His main thesis is that modern man has become one-dimensional due to the totalitarian, all-encompassing exercise of power by the entrenched capitalist class. While this of itself is not such a bad idea, though certainly romanticizing and exaggerating reality, his approach to explaining and attacking it leaves much to be desired. Marcuse overuses empty or unexplained phrases endlessly (like "cutting off perspectives through an overwhelming ossified concreteness of imagery" and similar things) while at the same time hardly making use of any prior thought or philosophy on the subject at all. This makes the impression of much ranting and little content. Even worse is his general laziness as a thinker - he never actually bothers to explain why such a full-spectrum dominance has occurred or how he wants to prove its existence, he merely asserts it and then goes on about the manifold bad effects it has.
Rather bizarre in this context, and perhaps even nihilistic, is his general dislike of what he perceives as "rationality". He only uses this word in negative contexts (particularly in the context of industrial expansion) and seems to consider it the primary form of "one-dimensional thinking", affected by the symbolism of capitalism. Now it is1thing to say that the fashionable concept of rationalism is false and ill-founded, however to reject relying on rational processes altogether as he seems to do is a bit too much.
To put it bluntly, ething Marcuse has written in this book has also been written in, say, Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle", and then in half as many words and quite more philosophically coherent. The early Marcuse (of Eros and Civilization) was much better; this book warrants no more interest than a purely antiquarian historical one. |
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