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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.
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