Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: The Great Refusal Lives on A Half Century Later
Is Marcuse irrelevant today 50 years after One Dimensional Man hit the campus bookshelves and seemed to change the dynamics of the student movement forever? An informal analysis (reviewing the excellent Google search engine “trends”) suggest that interest in the sixties philospher of liberation who reshaped Marxist ideas to form the New Left is at an all time low.
But his work today in the wake of numerous banking scandals, an economic system that has teetered towards collapse, a mainstream media that is ever more committed to selling consumers on more products they dont need, while billionaires get to set the political agenda and defense spending continues to climb, would seem even more relevant. Marcuse asks the great question--how is all this insanity, Marcuse would call it irrationality possible, One Dimensional Man (ODM) was the German born philosophers’ effort to pose an answer.
But despite some penetrating ideas that went straight at some of the tensions of the 1960s, the frustration that neither political party was going to extract the US from Viet Nam or end the Cold War, the existence of dire poverty within the richest society ever known, the book is not an easy read. Marcuse style was honed in the lecture halls of Germany where professors felt free to wander from lofty generalization to obscure philosophical reference without fear of interruption. However, despite some of the impenetrable Germanically structured sentences, the pendantic style the obscure references, Marcuse provided a new and different voice one that came dressed in the authority of a survivor from the shipwreck of the old Europe, someone moreover who had clearly not just absorbed its key thinkers, Marx, Freud, Nietzche but had also lived its bitter twentieth century history. Secondly he ‘walked the talk.’ Jeff Weinstein a student at the University of San Diego University where he taught remembers that he “was important beyond his writing, because he was a very brave man. He put body and soul on the line in demonstrations and sit-ins, stood up to threats from opposites of all stripes (even of death, from the Klan) with unfailing energy and wry humor. He was an authority utterly unafraid to stand up to dominant authority and the pernicious powers that fed it.” A third factor is that the sixties had already started to happen and the counter culture was already partly under way, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by 1962 had signed off on their Port Huron Statement and 1963 saw the March on Washington; in January 1964, the year that One Dimensional Man (ODM) was published, Bob Dylan released his Times they Are a Changin album, an anthem of sorts to a whole new world of protest and change that Marcuse was interested in helping to birth.
8