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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-01-27 07:27:56 -0200
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-01-27 07:27:56 -0200
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Books: One Dimensional Man intro
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+[[!meta title="One Dimensional Man"]]
+
+* Author: Hebert Marcuse
+
+## Snippets
+
+### Intro
+
+ From the beginning, any critical theory of society is thus confronted with the
+ problem of historical objectivity, a problem which arises at the two points
+ where the analysis implies value judgments:
+
+ 1. the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to
+ be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is
+ the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical)
+ rejects theory itself;
+
+ 2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the
+ amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these
+ possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of
+ these judgments, and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The
+ established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of
+ intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the
+ optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a
+ minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is
+ the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various
+ possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources,
+ which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?
+
+ [...]
+
+ The “possibilities” must be within the reach of the respective society; they
+ must be definable goals of practice. By the same token, the abstraction from
+ the established institutions must be expressive of an actual tendency—that is,
+ their transformation must be the real need of the underlying population. Social
+ theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the
+ established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to
+ the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by
+ historical practice. The theoretical concepts terminate with social change.
+
+ But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation
+ which seems to deprive it of its very basis. Technical progress, extended to a
+ whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of
+ power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat
+ or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from
+ toil and domination. Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing
+ social change—qualitative change which would establish essentially different
+ institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human
+ existence.
+
+ [...]
+
+ As a technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political
+ universe, the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical
+ project—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as
+ the mere stuff of domination.
+
+ As the project 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 alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system
+ stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of
+ domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality.