PARTISAN REVIEW
405
themselves totally, singlemindedly, with its ruling aims and values;
between them and it falls no shadow.
This
is why it
is
legitimate
to
call them "one-dimensional." Now it
is
obvious that people like these
will be unable, by either inclination or insight, to liberate either their
slaves or themselves.
If
hope for human freedom and happiness de–
pended on these one-dimensional men, it would be a lost cause. But
this is not the whole story. For, according to Marcuse, even in
America, there is more to the human race than is dreamt of in their
dimension:
... underneath the conservative popular base
is
the substratum of out–
casts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and
other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside
the democratic process; [they feel) . . . the most immediate and the
most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus
their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their
opposition hits the system from without and
is
therefore not deflected by
the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the
game, and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. . . . The fact that
they start refusing to play the game may
be
the fact that marks the
be–
ginning of the end of a period.
The American people, and the peoples they control, may yet become
free; but the liberating force will have
to
come, somehow,
from out–
side,
that is, outside the American system.
It
is clear, however, that Marcuse was using the word "out–
side" in a complex metaphorical way. He did not mean to deny that
there could
be
fruitful contradictions "inside" the American system.
His one example of radical action (immediately following the long
passage quoted above) involves the civil rights movement: a move–
ment which, when the book appeared in 1964, included whites as
well as blacks, middle-clas!i as much as lower-class people, students
from the most prestigious universities alongside "the unemployed and
the unemployable." In other words, large groups within the Ameri–
can system could,
if
they tried, get into the revolutionary "outside."
One-dimensional men might yet discover - or create - new dimen–
sions in themselves. Of course, once we grant the complexity of Mar–
cuse's idea here, new problems arise.
If
it
is
really possible for a
great many "insiders" to join the "outside" forces, without giving up
their positions within the system, we might wonder whether the in–
side-outside dualism
is
a helpful way of talking about social reality.
