[[!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.