One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge Classics)

Unlike his equally alienated colleagues Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Marcuse never lost his revolutionary outlook. He insisted on the technical and historical prospect of human liberation, even if no movement was demanding it. He believed even Marx’s eschatological vision was not radical enough: the society’s actual capacities far exceed any emancipation Marx might have imagined. In spite of the book’s negativity, it is not hard to find the utopianism underlying One-Dimensional Man. In this sense An Essay on Liberation, published five years later, was already implied in 1964. Referring to Civil Rights demonstrations, Marcuse writes hopefully of “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders”: “The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.”