MARCUSE’S ONE-DIMENSIONAL SOCIETY IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN

Nowadays, Marcuse’s main book One-Dimensional Man is almost obsolete, or rather passé. However, there are reasons to renew the reading of his book because of “the crisis of capitalism,” and the prevailing framework of technological domination in “advanced industrial society” in which we live today. “The new forms of control” in “advanced industrial societies” have replaced traditional methods of political and economic administration. The dominant structural element of “advanced industrial society” has become a technical and scientific apparatus of production and distribution of technology and administrative practice based on application of impersonal rules by a hierarchy of associating authorities. Technology has been liberated from the control of particular interests, and it has become the factor of domination in itself. Technological domination stems from the technical development of the productive apparatus that reproduces its ability into all spheres of social life (cultural, political, and economic). Based upon this consideration, in this paper, I will examine Marcuse’s ideas of “the new forms of control,” which creates a one–dimensional society. Marcuse’s fundamental thesis in One-Dimensional Man is that technological rationality is the most dominant factor in an “advanced industrial society,” which unites two earlier opposing forces of dissent: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.