One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”

In the first sentence of his first chapter, Marcuse sets out to define the “one dimensionality” of humans living in advanced industrial civilization. Unlike other forms of terroristic totalitarianism that are obviously repressive, he emphasizes the insidiousness of this second form of totalitarianism that produces “smooth” pleasure and is “comfortable,” but is nonetheless an “unfreedom.” This misguided belief in one’s own freedom while actually being oppressed reflects the theme of Repressive Sublimation as False Liberation.

“To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content.”

Since advanced industrial society is so capable of providing freedom from wants, the critical function of previously cherished and realized freedoms—such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience—are no longer experienced as truly necessary by the people. Thus, the civilization that provides freedom from physical wants deprives the people of the freedom to criticize, leading to The Creation of a One-Dimensional Society.

“We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization turns the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities.”

Advanced industrial civilization renders the nonhuman world, both natural and unnatural, an extension of man’s desires. Thus people impose themselves to an unprecedented degree on the natural world and identify themselves with the commodities that not only claim to satisfy their desires, but which create a sense of self that becomes bound up with the status quo.