Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a German philosopher and Marxist sociologist who was a member of The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works are still acclaimed by the public and they are mostly giving arguments against capitalism, modern technology and the entertainment culture amongst others because they represent, according to him, a form of social control. One of his most acclaimed work, One-Dimensional Man which was published in 1962. We have to keep in mind that he was writing at a time where the welfare State was growing and ordinary people were becoming richer. He offered a lot of arguments against both contemporary capitalism and Communist society of the Soviet Union in that work. It is a remarkable work in the sense where his …show more content…
The removal of capitalism as an example will bring a certain society back to an era where there were no laws or a society with high-democracy, low-capacity. We can now conclude this first point by saying that capitalism is not the root of our problems and it yields many advantages which are a result of our current political structures. If we are to get rid of capitalism, make sure that we will have to do the same with democracy as a political system cherished by so many because one cannot exist without the presence of the other one. The second argument we are going to explore is when Professor Marcuse discusses the nature of society. During his explanations, he used two very strong words to define it which were “dominant” and “controlling”. He said, “At its most advanced stage, domination functions as administration, and in the overdeveloped areas of mass consumption, the administered life becomes the good life of the whole, in the defense of which the opposites are united. This is the pure form of domination.”, then he prescribes us with a solution “Conversely, its negation appears to be the pure form of negation. All content seems reduced to the one abstract demand for the end of domination – the only truly revolutionary exigency, and the event that would validate the achievements of industrial civilization.”