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.
The books’ opening paragraph sounds the key chords that those who were witnessing the transition to a more turbulent period could easily recognize,
“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources. That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development.”
The use of the ugly non word ‘unfreedom’ taken from Orwell’s 1984 strikes the right discordant note. Marcuse personae seems to fit the role of ancient sage or prophet who has come down to let us know that although we might be living in the land of plenty our material comforts have been obtained at an unfortunate price. The style is mildly ironic, “what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality” he asks. Have we made a pact with the devil? Who is the devil in this case? The object of his attack is what Marcuse terms “one dimensional thought.”
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations. For example, "free" are the institutions which operate (and are operated on) in the countries of the Free World; other transcending modes of freedom are by definition either anarchism, communism, or propaganda. "Socialistic" are all encroachments on private enterprises not undertaken by private enterprise itself (or by government contracts), such as universal and comprehensive health insurance, or the protection of nature from all too sweeping commercialization, or the establishment of public services which may hurt private profit. This totalitarian logic of accomplished facts has its Eastern counterpart. There, freedom is the way of life instituted by a communist regime, and all other transcending modes of freedom are either capitalistic, or revisionist, or leftist sectarianism. In both camps, non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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