*One-Dimensional Man* (1964) and the closure thesis: does the diagnosis of advanced industrial society as a one-dimensional system that has integrated the working class, contained Eros and Logos, and produced one-dimensional thought close off the possibility of revolutionary transformation, or is it a tendency-diagnosis whose post-1965 architecture (*Essay on Liberation*, *Counterrevolution and Revolt*) shows the closure permeable and whose 1980s confirmation (the neoliberal rollback) vindicated the thesis Marcuse's critics had attacked?

Herbert Marcuse, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

One-Dimensional Man diagnoses a tendency, not a final closed state. One-dimensionality names the integrated form domination has taken in advanced capitalism — technological rationality that has absorbed the negative thinking critique requires; the containment of Eros and Logos that integrates the oppositional energies the system depends on suppressing; the false needs generated and satisfied by the consumer society; the integration of the working class that has rendered the proletariat as proletariat unable to function as the revolutionary subject Marx's theory required.123

The diagnosis is the diagnosis of a containment that exists alongside the contradictions and crisis-tendencies the integration has not eliminated; the Introduction states explicitly that the book "will vacillate throughout between two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society" (ODM, p. xv).4

The Great Refusal of those marginalized by the system — outsiders, students, racial minorities, the unemployed, the third-world peasantry — is the revolutionary mode that one-dimensional society makes the only one available. The book is the moment of bleak diagnosis in an architecture that includes the utopian counter-tendency of An Essay on Liberation (1969) and the strategic United-Front response of Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). To read it without the architecture is to mistake the moment for the whole.

Sources

  1. The category "society" itself expressed the acute conflict between the social and political sphere - society as antagonistic to the state. Similarly, "individual," "class," "private," "family" denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated with the established conditions - spheres of tension and contradiction.
    One-Dimensional Man, pp. 10–11
  2. This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, the collusion of Business and Labor within the strong State testify to the integration of opposites which is the result as well as the prerequisite of this achievement.
    One-Dimensional Man, pp. 8–9
  3. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse 1964 Marxists Internet Archive P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA. CC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) 2012 by Marxists Internet Archive. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) 1. Philosophy, 2. Marxism, 3. Ideology, 4. Protest.
    One-Dimensional Man, pp. 2–6
  4. Social theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by historical practice. The theoretical concepts terminate with social change.
    One-Dimensional Man, p. 8

Where the argument is made

  • One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon 1964)
  • 'The Obsolescence of Marxism' (1967, in Marx and the Western World ed. Lobkowicz
  • reprinted in Collected Papers Vol. 6, 2014)
  • the 'Political Preface 1966' to the second edition of Eros and Civilization
  • 'Beyond One-Dimensional Man' (in Collected Papers Vol. 2: Towards a Critical Theory of Society, ed. Kellner, 2001)
  • An Essay on Liberation (Beacon 1969)
  • Counterrevolution and Revolt (Beacon 1972)
  • the 1978 BBC interview with Bryan Magee in Men of Ideas — 'I stick to what I wrote in One-Dimensional Man'
  • the 1978 Stanford 'Theory and Practice' address (50th anniversary of the Frankfurt Institute, in Collected Papers Vol. 2)

How the argument was received

The book has been attacked from the left as totalizing pessimism that forecloses revolutionary agency (Habermas's reading) and from orthodox Marxism as having surrendered the theory of capitalist crisis (the capital-logic reception). It has been attacked from the right as "pre-Marxist" irrationalism (MacIntyre) or anti-democratic alarmism (Cranston). Kellner's Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) Chapter 8 raises the worry that the book "exaggerated capitalism's stability" and "failed to specify counter-tendencies" — a real shortcoming the post-1965 writings address. The 1978 BBC interview with Magee — "I stick to what I wrote in ODM" — is the late retrospective. The 1980s neoliberal rollback (Reagan, the Berufsverbot in West Germany, the anti-feminist counter-mobilization, the assault on welfare programs) confirmed many of the integration tendencies the book identified. The position defends the closure thesis as tendency-diagnosis to be read alongside the architecture, refuses the totalizing- pessimism reading as misreading, and acknowledges the failure-to-specify-counter-tendencies as a real limitation the post-1965 work corrects.