But although ODM will be remembered for its sweeping analysis of the ineffecitveness of conventional politics the book’s ambition is much wider. Chapters are devoted taking on an entire philosophical tradition since Socrates death revealed how logic could be used as a form ofl oppression and how both history and science cannot be understood as neutral. Another chapter deals with the fate of the artist, their failure to create characters who oppose their societies. When he is off his central topic a crituque of how one dimensional thinking works to destroy freedom, he wanders into solipism a failure to connect with readers who have not spent a lifetime studying dialectal materialism. For these reasons in an odd way ODM maybe the most influential unread book of its era. Was this intellectual laziness or the fact that he had already been paid for his work by ironically enough as Arthur Marwick points out the American government and the Ford Foundation.”
The book inevitably became associated with the counter culture which was probably Marcuse’s wish. Theodore Roszak who did so much to cement Marcuse’s reputation and who was one of the first to popularize Marcuse phrase “The Great Refusal” wrote admiringly of a the emerging counter culture as “the embryonic cultural base of New Left politics,” with their “effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic.”(The Nation on 25 March 1968)
A year after the article was published Roszak then wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, where he sees ODM as having gained Marcuse ‘the largest following among the radical young--and deservedly so.’ He saw the author as emerging as one of the shrewdest critics of the subtle technocrtic regitimation which now bids fair to encompass the whole of our world wide industrial order.” But Roszak is puzzled why the society has become so addicted to dominating forms of social control when the “potential for liberating affluence is so undeniably apparent.” Roszak is unconvinced that Marcuse adds much to the discussion of human happiness by his reductionist treatment of art and religion.
“(H)e is a political man and he shies from any transcedence that threatens to flee the glaring oppressions and sufferings of mankind and which smacks of letting the bastards who exploit us off the hook.”
A more sobering and less admiring perspective came in 1970 when Alasdair McIntryre published his "Modern Masters" monograph condemning Marcuse's work as "incantatory and anti-rational, a magical rather than a philosophical use of language."
14