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Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

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Heins VM (2017) Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. In: The Oxford Handbook of Classics
in Contemporary Political Theory, ed. Jacob T. Levy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online
Publication Date: November 2017; http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/. Book Publication:
2020.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

Volker M. Heins
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI)
Essen, Germany
volker.heins@kwi-nrw.de

Abstract: In his widely read classic One-Dimensional Man (ODM), Herbert Marcuse
offers a political anthropology of twentieth-century liberal democracy which is deeply
pessimistic and yet has been read in the 1960s and 1970s as a call to transformative
action in the fields of politics and everyday life. The chapter begins by addressing the
concepts introduced by Marcuse to explain why transformative political action is
unlikely to succeed: manipulation, false needs, repressive desublimation. It then
considers Marcuse’s search for agents of change who are nevertheless able to
undermine or circumvent the total power of contemporary society, as well as his
normative vision of a libidinal democracy based on an implicit concept of positive
freedom. Finally, the chapter assesses both the limitations of ODM and its continuing,
if unacknowledged, influence among contemporary theorists who attempt to move
beyond liberal theories of justice.

Keywords: Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, manipulation, false needs,

repressive desublimation, total power, positive freedom, libidinal democracy, theories
of justice

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1991; henceforth ODM) can be

read in a number of ways: as a dystopian narrative of post-Second World War capitalist
society, as a work of popular political theory, or as an inspirational text that exerted a
major influence on the student movement of the 1960s in the United States and
Europe. Given the extent to which the book, first published in 1964, ran counter to the
spirit of its day, its popularity at the time is something of a surprise. Traditional leftists,
who thought of capitalism as irredeemably evil but on its way to extinction, were told
by Marcuse that the dominant “system” was actually hyperstable and lacking in any
genuine opponents. Defenders of the free West, meanwhile, were confronted with the
claim that Western freedom was a tool of oppression. Drawing on modern literature,
the history of philosophy, and insights from the social sciences, ODM conveys a deeply
pessimistic message: parliamentary democracy is a sham; both the public sphere and
personal privacy are vanishing; and technological progress is resulting in the
enslavement of the individual. “Man” is born free but is still in chains—even though he
(or she) may not feel them.

1
 Many have read ODM as a call to transformative action, and yet Marcuse’s
central claim is that precisely this kind of collective action is highly unlikely to occur, let
alone succeed, in “advanced industrial society.” Modern society, it is argued, poses
structural threats to the very possibility of genuine transformative politics. Marcuse
explains why society needs to be changed, and what direction such change should
take, but before he does so, he insists that the avenues to change are blocked. This
blocking, which he describes as “the closing of the political universe” (19), does not
result either from the apathy of the masses or from relations of production. Nor is it
explicable in terms of open political repression.
Marcuse offers a political anthropology of twentieth-century liberal democracy.
At the heart of his book lies the claim that the historical figure of the citizen has been
replaced by the one-dimensional individual. The defining characteristics of the latter
are “false needs” and “repressive desublimation” (to which I return shortly). According
to Marcuse, modern individuals are living in an artificial state of nature from which,
unlike in the contractualist tradition, there is no escape. The gradual loss of capacities
intrinsic to the human species, notably the capacity for self-reflection and empathy,
and the capacity to criticize the conditions in which people live, is both the condition
and the consequence of the imposition of unprecedented imperatives of societal self-
perpetuation.
The book is divided into three parts: “One-Dimensional Society,” “One-
Dimensional Thought,” and “The Chance of the Alternatives.” Rather than looking
critically at each of these parts in turn, I prefer to pose the question of what kind of
critical theory ODM advances. The tasks of such a theory, if it is not to remain in the
realm of utopia, are three: it must identify those obstacles in modern society and
politics which need to be overcome if an alternative society is to be realized; it must
identify agents of change who are willing and able to remove those obstacles; and it
must present us with a clear vision of the goals and objectives that define the desired
society. With these three tasks in mind, I will show how Marcuse defines obstacles,
goals, and social agents of genuine transformative politics. In conclusion, I will discuss
the shortcomings of Marcuse’s classic text as well as the reasons why some of its
elements still attract attention.

The Closing of Liberal Society

Like other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Marcuse
sees the human condition as one of progressive domination by an anonymous,
increasingly global system that cuts across the boundaries of political orders and
historical cultures. Anticipating more recent theorists, he argues that systemic power
ultimately permeates all social relations. He quotes and concurs with the Romanian-
French playwright Eugène Ionesco, who characterized “the world of the concentration
camps” built during Nazi rule in Europe not as something exceptional or unique but as
“the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are
plunged every day” (80). This language is marked by the same hyperbole as is found in
the observations of like-minded philosopher Theodor Adorno, who, in the early 1960s,
also saw the Holocaust as epitomizing modern society as such and who, more

2
generally, pointed to the essential similarity between democracy and dictatorship (see,
e.g., Adorno 2000, 109).
The rhetorical power of these kinds of generalizing statements derives from the
way in which, to the reader’s surprise, they negate widely accepted dichotomies.
Marcuse’s metaphor of one-dimensionality implies not only the idea of a totalitarian
“convergence of opposites” (19) in the fields of both domestic and global politics and
economics, but also the notion that the distinction between utopia and reality,
progress and stagnation, technology and politics, and between the various levels of the
human psyche identified by Freud—the ego, superego, and id—is disappearing.1
This claim in turn rests on one crucial distinction that Marcuse needs to hold on
to: the distinction between essence and appearance. That nothing is truly as it seems is
part of the definition of the all-encompassing “system” of which Marcuse speaks.
Unlike Hegel and Marx, however, Marcuse no longer believes in a dialectical
relationship between these two entities. Rather, the essence of things is hidden behind
and beyond appearances and does not manifest itself via a historical process in the
real world and in a way perceptible to all. Individuals are robbed of the capacity, first
to distinguish between appearance and reality, and second to discern the essence of
the system behind the innocuous façade of appearance. This critical capacity is the
object of systematic “suppression” (97) by one-dimensional society and its institutions.
This suppression is the main obstacle to any comprehensive social or political
transformation.
One of the interesting aspects of Marcuse’s work is that suppression, as he
defines it, does not only touch on the consciousness of individuals but goes deeper.
The total integration of all individuals into society is not based just on “a change in
consciousness” but on a complete “[a]ssimilation in needs and aspirations, in the
standard of living, in leisure activities” (29). Even our speech, even public opinion,
science, and philosophy become functions serving the self-perpetuation of the system
and the exclusion of opposition. Marcuse ratchets the radical quality of this thesis up
another notch, holding that even people’s psychological energies and drives are open
to political manipulation. This is not entirely without precedent. An extreme
manipulation thesis had already been formulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s.
Political power, he claimed, becomes more intrusive as it moves beyond simply
learning how to overcome resistance and begins to tap into, and channel, the deep
motivational springs that feed that resistance. The result is an effective “distortion of
the drives” (Verbiegung der Triebe) (Horkheimer 1993, 108) in line with the functional
requirements of the social system. When this happens, injuries and injustices
committed by the powerful do not trigger political conflict, and indeed may not even
be recognized as such by the powerless.
Marcuse maintains that modern society is fast approaching a new stage when
“social cohesion would be strengthened at the deepest instinctual roots” (79). The
term he chooses for this enormous expansion of the reach of power is “controlled” or

1
Marcuse uses the concept of totalitarianism in the same way as Pitirim Sorokin, the founder of the
Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Sorokin (1985: 517–518) distinguishes between
“compulsory” and “familistic” totalitarianism and detects a tendency to the latter even in Western
democracies. “Familistic totalitarianism” denotes a situation in which the state or some other organized
group expands its control over the entire society in accordance with the desires of the people.

3
“repressive desublimation.” Repressive desublimation marks a situation in which, as a
result of rising incomes, mass consumption, and the freedoms afforded by the market,
individuals are liberated from the burdens of toil and scarcity, but are at the same time
condemned to a life that leaves no room for substantive alternatives. Marcuse is
expressly not claiming that individuals are able to indulge their natural needs to a
greater extent than previously—because, for example, sexual taboos have been
relaxed. He is saying, rather, that the needs which individuals are permitted to gratify
in freer societies are themselves the product of manipulation. The needs in question
are “false needs” that have been “implanted” or “superimposed” on people (4–5).
People may think they are indulging themselves, but their apparently spontaneous yen
is itself an artificial product.
The concept of false needs takes up the Marxist idea of false consciousness and
radicalizes it. “False consciousness” is taken to mean a number of different things:
seeing the world as an immutable, unquestionable given; interpreting social conditions
in individual and personalized terms; or failing to recognize one’s own interests and
being ruled by a false sense of power or powerlessness (Eyerman 1981, 268–277). The
difference between false consciousness and false needs, however, is that false
consciousness is amenable to criticism because it ultimately rests on illusions that can
be translated into falsifiable propositions. This same is not true of allegedly false
needs. The satisfaction of particular needs can have harmful consequences; but can
those needs also be “false”? By answering yes to this question, Marcuse accepts a
positive theory of human nature which, however, remains vague.
Ultimately, Marcuse’s argument rests on a political interpretation of Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s model of the mind represents the psyche as a
microcosm analogous to the macrocosm of the modern state. The inner life of the
individual is viewed not as being transparent and freely organized around self-chosen
preferences and desires, but as being a battleground of opposing forces. In Freud’s
metapsychology, it is the ego that has to assert its hegemony over the superego (the
internalized voice of society) as well as over the reckless and chaotic id. Freud refers to
the parts of the psyche as a foreign territory, a state of nature beyond civilization
which nevertheless cannot be tamed by mere repression (Brunner 1995, 75–79). The
preferable path is that of “sublimation,” which may be compared to the search for
compromise by warring powers. When everything goes smoothly, the psyche functions
like a well-ordered federation in which superordinate and subordinate authorities and
sources of power coexist under the leadership of a benevolent monarch—more or less
as in the multinational Habsburg Empire explicitly mentioned in this context by Freud
(see Brunner 1995, 58).
If we translate the term “repressive desublimation” into Freud’s political
metaphors, it means the deposition of a reasonable sovereign in favor of mob rule.
Moving beyond Freud, Marcuse takes the close parallel between psychological and
socio-political processes literally. The forces of society gain power over the human
psyche by weakening the ego, by blunting the force of the moral imperatives
represented by the superego, and by allowing the libido to be invested more freely in
social relationships. But for Marcuse, this is not good news, since he believes that a
society, if it is to be truly liberated, must be based on “the sublimations of higher
culture” (56). Whenever Marcuse evokes the “ideal” of this higher culture, he gives in

4
to the temptation of European cultural pessimism. On the side of sublimation and high
culture stand Baudelaire, Racine, Tolstoy, and Goethe; ranged in sharp contrast against
them are the depictions of desublimated sexuality that appear in Faulkner, O’Neill, and
Nabokov and “in all the stories of Hollywood and New York orgies, and the adventures
of suburban housewives” (77). Thus speaks the elderly emigré philosopher who
hankers after a long-gone European world and finds America crude and vulgar.
Marcuse’s approach differs from Horkheimer’s earlier political anthropology,
which is still Marxist in its insistence on assigning blame for the current state of society
to a ruling class opposed to the rest of the population. In Horkheimer’s view, class
conflict has been replaced by a highly symmetrical interaction between political and
cultural elites and the rest of the population. When the dominant elites face serious
threats to their rule, they appeal to collective emotion rather than to reason in order
to co-opt the masses: “With the consolidation of a small stratum of monopolists
brought about by concentration and centralization, cultural activity takes form more
and more exclusively as domination of the masses” (Horkheimer 1993, 83). Thus, the
cultural process of shaping preferences and motives is strictly top-down and
unidirectional. Leaders who represent the perspectives of the ruling classes influence
the public, but the public has little influence on the leaders. That said, even for
Horkheimer in the 1930s, the masses are far from being uniformly susceptible to such
propaganda. For him, it was largely the “lack of integration into a rational work
process” (Horkheimer 1993, 67) that rendered sectors of the population
psychologically dependent and politically gullible. This is an argument previously
advanced by Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci, who also perceived social groups not
subject to the discipline of productive labor as easy prey for ideologues.
Marcuse’s argument is a different one. He points the finger not at individual
social groups or political tendencies but at society per se, with its objective,
anonymous, technological power. It is true that he too sometimes refers to “the
Establishment” or “the makers of politics” (8, 14), but it is generally “society” as a
whole that is depicted as the active agent of repression and manipulation. At the same
time, Marcuse denies the existence of social classes that think and act more rationally
than others simply because of their social position. Older dichotomies such as people
versus government or proletariat versus bourgeoisie are replaced by the opposition
between “society” and “men” (xlvi, 15).

Agents of Change: Elites, Outcasts—or Everyone?

But even the opposition between society and individuals can only be an apparent one,
since Marcuse has already declared in his “Introduction” that modern citizens live in a
“society without opposition.” This means that individuals see no reason to flee the
artificial state of nature in which they live. They do not suffer the privations that
characterize the state of nature in Hobbes or Rousseau, and they have no sense of
“alienation” (11), since this would presuppose a distance vis-à-vis society which they
have long since lost. Time and again Marcuse uses dramatic language to illustrate the
transformation of citizens into mere objects of the administration and the market. A
vampire-like society “swallows” and “absorbs” any kind of opposition, resulting, as
Marcuse puts it (xlviii, 79), in the “atrophy of the mental organs” that are needed to

5
develop any desire for change. Given this state of affairs, it is meaningless to talk of a
“struggle for mutual recognition” or indeed of “domination” (32–33), because in a
world that stamps out the last remaining urge to resistance amongst its subjects, there
is no domination.
Instead of domination, Marcuse generally prefers the term “manipulation.”
Max Weber famously defined power as the probability that one agent will succeed in
overcoming the resistance of another. Manipulation, by contrast, implies a broader
concept of power, one that is based on the “means of undermining resistance”
(Goodin 1980, 8). It implies subtle interference, usually by unknown agents or forces.
When writing about the media, technology, or political parties, Marcuse uses many
formulations that suggest he has exactly this kind of interference in mind.
Manipulation typically causes people to behave in a manner that runs counter to their
true desires. It is a technique for luring individuals and groups away from the pursuit of
their true interests and needs. In Marcuse’s “totally administered” society, citizens
have no way of establishing what they might want, if their interests and needs were
not manipulated by the system. In this situation, “qualitative change appears possible
only as a change from without” (49, original emphasis). This spatial metaphor, familiar
from the history of the communist movement, can be read in three ways. It may imply,
first, that Marcuse is flirting with the idea of an educational dictatorship (39–41). In
this elitist attitude toward those afflicted by the “happy consciousness” of advanced
industrial society we see the belief in the civilizing power of high European culture
mingled with “latent Leninism” (Holman 2013, 78).
Second, change from outside can mean that those who are excluded from
society are assigned a historic and revolutionary mission. Hope rests on “the outcasts
and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the
unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process. . . .
Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the
system” (256–257).2
Third, Marcuse sometimes deviates from the extreme manipulation thesis,
which states that individuals are rendered incapable of articulating needs that cannot
be readily satisfied by the existing system. Pursuing a weaker line, he argues that
individuals are only seemingly happy and in fact suspect that there is something
missing in their lives, even though they cannot know or say exactly what this is. There
is artificially induced “instinctual approval” but there is also diffuse “hatred and
frustration” (79, 32). These unarticulated and inchoate feelings lie beyond the reach of
the system and form part of the unintended fallout from the latter’s operations. Since
these feelings of frustration affect every one of us, every one of us is also a potential
actor in new opposition movements.
The implication is that there is in everyone a trace of essential moral sensibility
that can be nurtured and developed through democratic practice. This is the kind of
reading which Christopher Holman (2013) has undertaken. At the heart of an
existentialist interpretation such as this—one that Marcuse himself sometimes
suggests—lies the concept of the radical act which can be born out of the rudimentary
consciousness of structural unhappiness. This concept goes back to the notion of the

2
Women are also included amongst these outcasts. On the feminist critique of Marcuse, see Benjamin
(1988) and Chodorow (1989).

6
irrepressibly “sensuous” nature of human needs, as formulated in particular by the
young Marx. Later on, Marcuse saw in the student movement and the New Left
attempts to detach the sensuous individual from the categories of class and nation and
test out a new form of aesthetic self-education. In ODM there is talk of “the first act of
the revolution” that has to be prepared beforehand in higher forms of consciousness
(41). At a later stage, spontaneous action is accorded a role even when it is not rooted
in a developed revolutionary consciousness. Radical action in the form of “wildcat
strikes, boycotts, sabotage, gratuitous acts of noncompliance” (Marcuse 2000, 83), is
possible at all times and in all places. Given this activist program, ODM can be read not
only as a political theory but also as a performative activity, one that seeks to foster
particular forms of oppositional behavior. What Marcuse says about the language of
the industrial society, namely that it is “evocative rather than demonstrative” (91), is
also true of his own language. The text has an ambivalent rhetorical dimension, one
feature of which is an actively performative use of language intended to influence the
course of events: the truths it communicates are not empirical but prophetic and
designed to mobilize the public.
ODM defines the endpoint of a tradition of modern political thought which
complains vociferously about the manipulability of the masses, moral conformism, and
the closing of the political community—and by this very rhetoric renders manipulation
more difficult, undermines conformism, and introduces new elements of opposition
into political life. Because it was simultaneously also a performative activity, critical
theory as expounded by Marcuse helped to create the opposition whose possibility it
denied.

A Libidinal Democracy

Given the closed and system-like character of advanced industrial society, in which
nothing is as it seems and people are unable to pierce through the façade,
fundamental political change is unlikely. Nonetheless, the aim of Marcuse’s critical
theory is the transformation of this society, which in turn presupposes the
transformation of individuals. The ideal of an alternative society or “new civilization”
consists first and foremost in overcoming the prevailing state of nature through the
“pacification of existence” (37, 16). Like traditional Marxists, Marcuse distinguishes
between objective and subjective preconditions for liberation. The latter include the
conquest of the false needs that trap individuals, groups, and states in never-ending
struggles for power and prestige. In general, Marcuse is pessimistic with regard to the
transformation of individuals into revolutionary subjects. He is, however, fairly
optimistic when it comes to the objective preconditions of liberation. The automation
of production processes in particular creates the material basis for a new civilization
even under the conditions of advanced industrial society. Correctly deployed modern
technology is a precondition of “genuine democracy” (47). This is because automation
would allow individuals to quit the realm of necessity and cultivate their talents and
inclinations in an entirely new way. Work would be replaced by the free play of human
capacities and the free flow of libidinal energies.
This is, of course, a vision as vague as it is attractive and reminiscent of political
utopias of earlier times. We learn nothing more about this playful state of society—

7
only that the individuals in it regain the capacity not only for non-repressive
sublimation but also for desublimation and letting-go of control. A concomitant of this
is the capacity for real happiness and real democracy. Each depends on the other.
Marcuse rejects the exclusively private pursuit of happiness that does not express itself
in corresponding political forms. At the same time, he avoids making any
pronouncements about the kinds of political institutions a liberated society might
have. By contrast—and all the more surprisingly—he is unequivocal as to the objective
nature of the functional technical conditions that will continue to limit the free play of
human capacities in the future: “To be sure, a mature and free industrial society would
continue to depend on a division of labor which involves inequality of functions. Such
inequality is necessitated by genuine social needs, technical requirements, and the
physical and mental differences between the individuals” (44). Thus, the technological
apparatus of every society necessitates the maintenance of a certain functional
authority. Holman has described this position as “political managerialism” (Holman
2013, 82) and has pointed out that it sits ill with Marcuse’s radical criticism of the
administered society and the trust he sometimes expresses in the “experimental
energies” of contemporary society (Marcuse 2002, 145).
Another peculiarity of Marcuse’s political utopia deserves mention here. The
appeal of this utopia derives from the observation that the unprecedented rise in the
standard of living that has occurred in certain parts of the world since the Second
World War has in no way been matched by a growth in individual happiness. On the
contrary, economic growth “has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation
of toil, and the promotion of frustration” (242). But from this, Marcuse goes on to
draw the reverse but by no means logically necessary conclusion that less growth and
decreased production of material goods are preconditions of increased happiness. In a
further step, the thesis is even applied to demographic growth. Marcuse flatly states
that the pacification of existence calls for a reduction in population. Society is criticized
for the “moral and religious scruples” that cause it to shrink from curbing human
procreation: “The problem is not only (and perhaps not even primarily) that of
adequate feeding and caring for the growing population—it is first a problem of
number, of mere quantity … The crime is that of a society in which the growing
population aggravates the struggle for existence in the face of its possible alleviation”
(243–244). Not only do human beings have false needs and consume too much; there
are also too many of them. Thus, Marcuse’s utopia is ambiguous: it can be read as a
precursor of contemporary concerns about conviviality and post-growth economics;
but there is also a streak of neo-Malthusianism in it.

Limitations and Legacy

The most obvious limitation of ODM is its tendency toward an illiberal kind of
misanthropy. Marcuse expresses sentiments that are not far removed from those of
the German historian Oswald Spengler, who also bemoaned the expropriation of the
free spirit by a centralized media industry and predicted that this would result in the
proliferation of modern-day “fellaheen peoples” for whom life consisted merely in a

8
sequence of events “devoid of significance” (Spengler 1928, 170–171).3 While this
misanthropic layer of ODM can be simply ignored, other aspects of the text pose a
more serious challenge to the reader. In particular three inconsistencies stand out.
First, the question arises as to whether human nature can be infinitely
manipulated or whether it is a resource for liberation. Marcuse’s concept of false
needs presupposes a human nature that is potentially a source of true needs and
hence also a threat to the system. In modern industrial society, however, this nature is
said to be formless and malleable. Second, Marcuse oscillates between the assertion
that modern technology is a mere tool and the more radical thesis that technology
creates its own world which then develops independently of relations of production
and conditions of ownership. At some point, the problem seems to lie in the
“oppressive utilization” of society’s technological potential. This is the stance taken by
Marcuse as a defender of political managerialism. At other times, technology is said to
be not a neutral tool, but “an entire culture” (35, 154) of its own, beyond the control
of those who use it. Third and finally, there is a discrepancy between Marcuse’s images
of the individual and the international situation during the Cold War. ODM
characterizes individuals and states as homologous units subject to the same
overarching trend toward the “convergence of opposites:” one-dimensional individuals
no longer wrestle with themselves and live without internal tension; and modern
states no longer face any genuine internal opposition. But Marcuse also suggests that
the international order is directly reflected in domestic relations (45). This, however, is
puzzling since Marcuse remains silent about the domestic equivalent to the Cold War
which was a mortal conflict driven and contained by the ability of mutual annihilation.
In spite of its analytical shortcomings, ODM is a deeply resonant text that has
become a classic of contemporary political theory. Not only did it strike a chord with
broad sections of the public in the 1960s and 1970s, influencing the student
movements in the United States and Europe as well as subsequent new social
movements focusing on the environment, peace, and global justice. Marcuse has also
influenced debates in political theory about the changing character of especially two
central phenomena in capitalist democracies: power and freedom.
With regard to the question of power, it needs to be emphasized that ODM was
clearly innovative in taking the role of technology and technological power in modern
society seriously. Marcuse raised awareness of the fact that it is difficult to criticize this
new type of power in terms of traditional concepts of political theory such as justice or
equality (Feenberg 2002). His book both expressed and contributed to a growing sense
of unease about the proliferation of human resource management and the
managerialization of both the private and the public sector, including higher education.
More importantly, Marcuse anticipated crucial elements of what Steven Lukes later
developed into a full-fledged “radical” conception of power (Lukes 2005). Both
Marcuse and Lukes agree that power can go beyond the ability of imposing decisions
against the interests of others and beyond constraining the decisions taken by others.
Whereas these types of power imply that people can be made to behave against their
perceived interests and needs, power can also be exercised by covertly manipulating

3
On the “sacralization” of culture, including amongst left-wing European intellectuals in American exile,
see Lepenies (2006). On the psycho-history of the antithesis between culture and the masses, see
Theweleit (1987, vol. 2, 43–61).

9
those needs and interests so that people who are subjected to power act willingly or
even happily in ways that appear contrary to their most basic needs and interests.
However, Lukes explicitly rejects Marcuse’s account of contemporary society by
arguing that even the most pervasive power “is always partial and limited” and unable
to “produce one-dimensional man” (Lukes 2005, 150).
Lukes, then, is much closer to the original spirit of critical theory than Marcuse.
The purpose of critical theory is to produce a kind of knowledge that affects the society
it explores by addressing the members of society with the goal of contributing to their
self-knowledge and enlightenment. Within the critical theory tradition, Marcuse has
become a rather marginal figure because of his dystopian concept of a total power
that leaves the powerless unaware of what is done to them and without any desire for
change. In the influential writings by critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or Axel
Honneth, Marcuse is typically not even mentioned. However, in tracing the orbit of the
influence of Marcuse’s political theory, we discover unexpected and unacknowledged
continuities between Marcuse and the French thinker Michel Foucault. The
philosopher and psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook has compared Marcuse’s picture of the
one-dimensional society to the world described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and
Punish (Whitebook 2002, 65). Whitebook goes as far as calling Foucault a “Marcusean
in structuralist clothing.” He shows that both thinkers believe in the almost infinite
malleability of our bodies and pleasures; and that both have shared and reinforced the
political agenda of social movements that aim to create new forms of life out of the
reservoir of our adaptable and “polymorphous” sexual drives (see Marcuse 1955).
This brings us, finally, to the question of freedom. ODM belongs to the broad
family of writings critical of “negative” freedom. According to Marcuse, liberation in
the form of repressive desublimation only paves the way to our more radical
enslavement to unrefined, thoughtless, and ultimately conformist drives and
inclinations. This claim is both true and in line with John Stuart Mill’s observation that
“even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of” (Mill
1998, 68). However, one of the reasons why ODM has lost much of its purchase is that
it didn’t come up with an attractive alternative concept of “positive” freedom. Rather,
it exemplifies Isaiah Berlin’s concern that the invocation of our higher self and claims
about what is objectively good for humans are vehicles for the justification of
paternalistic and elitist regimes (Berlin 1969). This is at odds with the idea of rights
which is central to most theories of justice. Marcuse puts the “interest of the happy
individual” (5) center stage, not ideas of fairness, mutual recognition, or redistribution
that have dominated more recent debates in political theory.
Therefore, ODM needs to be read against the grain in order to uncover its
potentials for contemporary theory. An example is Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right
which, without acknowledging any debt to Marcuse, can nevertheless be read as
taking up Marcuse’s idea that democratic life needs a libidinal foundation. Unlike most
contemporary political theorists, Honneth gives “relationships of intimacy and love”
(Honneth 2014, 141) at least a place in democratic theory. Reconciling justice with
happiness, Honneth develops a concept of “social” freedom modeled on Hegel’s idea
of romantic love (Honneth 2014, 45–46). By unrealistically calling for modern society
to be re-organized in light of the principle of a love-like social freedom he returns to a
utopian brand of socialism that resembles Marcuse’s concept of liberation as “the

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reconciliation of Logos and Eros” (167). Meanwhile, a younger generation of Frankfurt
School-inspired political theorists is again explicitly referring to ODM in search of a new
politics beyond liberal theories of justice that addresses the ethical “question of how
we want to live” (Jaeggi 2014, xxii; see also Loick 2017).

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