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the project of advanced industrial society unfolds, it shapes the entire
universe of discourse and action, intellectual and material culture. In
the medium of technology, culture, politics and the economy merge
into an omnipresent system whiCh swallows up or repulses all alterna–
tives."} However, Marcuse is not interested so much in causes as in
effects. "The political needs of society become individual needs and
aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and commonwealth, and
the whole appears as the very embodiment of Reason." His thoughts on
the future are equivocal, yet unequivocally and deeply pessimistic: he
is afraid that this
too
easy dissolution of individual conscience in Na–
tional purpose may, in the context of the Cold War, help blow up the
world; yet he is also afraid that it may not-that the competing
totalitarians may reconcile their differences and peaceably carve the
world up instead. (This double pessimism is foreshadowed in one pf
the great but neglected works in the history of Marxism, Rudolf
Hilferding's
Das Finanzkapital
[1910]. The ebbs and flows of optimism
and pessimism within the Marxist tradition would make a fascinating
study in the history of ideas.) It is this latter possibility, with its
disastrous implications for individuality and freedom, that
One-Di–
mensional Man
is really about.
Marcuse tries to explain advanced industrial society as a smoothly
functioning system in which every aspect of life reinforces the others,
an infernal machine in which all parts mesh together perfectly to grind
the spirit down. To make this sort of indictment stick, he has to work
it out at every level of social life: the language, truth and logic
"of domination" must be echoed by philosophers and plumbers, artists
and admen alike. This is quite a job, and one which I am sure he
would never have dreamt of undertaking until a few years ago. But
like Marx, one of his heroes, Marcuse has become more concrete with
advancing age, more involved than ever in the socio-pathology of
everyday life. Still, he is not accustomed
to
its dark and twisted ways.
As a result, the tone of the book lurches from the metaphysical to the
journalistic, from high seriousness to heavy sarcasm, moralistic indigna–
tion, and a complex and elusive irony, shifting gears with a jarring
abruptness. Nevertheless, Marcuse can operate at all these levels with
force and mastery, if not with ease. And if this is not an easy book, he
could argue, as Kierkegaard did, that much of the trouble with this
age stems from too many people trying to make life too easy, and
that it might be fruitful for a change to try and make at least the
intellectual life hard.
The first principle by which Marcuse judges all forms of life
is the Hegelian-Marxist axiom that strife (read: "contradiction") is