Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School who studied with Heidegger, emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and later taught at Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego. In One-Dimensional Man he argued that advanced industrial society absorbs opposition through technological rationality and consumer satisfaction, flattening critical thought into a one-dimensional acceptance of what exists. His work was widely read by the New Left in the 1960s.

Key ideas

• Technological rationality becomes a form of social domination that presents itself as neutral efficiency.
• Advanced industrial society integrates opposition by creating false needs and satisfying them.
• Critical thought depends on a second dimension, the capacity to measure what is against what could be.
• Freud's theory can be read to show that much repression is surplus, imposed by social domination rather than by civilisation as such.

Major works

• Reason and Revolution (1941)
• Eros and Civilization (1955)
• One-Dimensional Man (1964)
• "Repressive Tolerance" (1965)

In the conversation

• Discussion Automated cranes at the port, and Ellul’s idea that efficiency decides for us Hugo Marchetti · 5 replies