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MARSHALL BERMAN
we most admire, feel radical impulses, think radical thoughts, make
radical gestures, strike radical poses, adopt radical attitudes, propose
radical solutions, Marcuse, almost alone in the English-speaking world,
has radical
Ideas.
Radicalism in America has never been long on
Ideas-anyway, not since the time of Jefferson, which is time out of
mind. It has been polarized between moral protest (usually impotent)
and interest-group machination (compromising when successful). As
for traditional Marxism, historically the most impressive attempt to
bridge the gap, in the American climate it has grown almost entirely
in narrow and vulgar forms, and has justly come to nothing. More–
over, the History of Ideas, as taught in American universities, has
tended (with a few notable exceptions) to have a conservative in–
fluence, buttressing the great, continuous Basic Values of Western
Civilization against the "nihilistic" attacks they have suffered in the
past hundred years. Marcuse, however, has tried to give our spontane–
ous, impulsive protests an intellectual status, to connect our concrete
complaints with world-historical developments. To be radical, young
Marx pointed out, means, after all, to get to the root of things; it has
been Marcuse's heroic enterprise to pursue the roots of radicalism it–
self into the very Ground of Being. For this he deserves all Our thanks
and admiration, but also the most intense critical scrutiny we can give.
One-Dimensional Man
describes and analyzes a regimented, stan–
dardized, conformist "totalitarianism" which is coming more and more
to pervade advanced industrial societies, East and West alike. In itself
this is an old story, a staple of modern social criticism, whether con–
servatively or anarchistically inspired. But Marcuse is not too worried
about either a populist "tyranny of the majority" or a brutally repres–
sive police state; both of these, he thinks, are passing phases, mostly
past, in our evolution. The specter that haunts him is a totalitarianism
that is benevolent rather than repressive, embraced joyously by the
people rather than imposed by force, built on the lines of the
Brave New
World
rather than those of 1984. Sometimes Marcuse speaks as if there
were a military-industrial Power Elite behind it all; though he is never
very explicit as to who these sinister interests (the "interests of domina–
tion," as he puts it) are, or how they operate. At other times he
al–
ludes to a "web of domination" in which everybody, from top to bot–
tom, is fatally entangled: "The world tends to become the stuff of
total administration, which absorbs even the administrators themselves."
The source of this total power is not made any easier to locate by
Marcuse's adaptation of the later Sartre's notion of an "historical
project," which obscures just those problems of individual freedom
and responsibility on which the early Sartre shed so much light. ("As