The “society without opposition” Marcuse described was mobilized against the enemy to the point of threatening all-out nuclear destruction. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing.” Moreover, “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” He spoke to a deep sense of alienation. “The pure form of servitude,” he wrote, is “to exist as an instrument, as a thing. By naming it, by helping us to get conscious of it, by conveying its overwhelming power, helped us to define ourselves in opposition to it-total opposition.” A student of Marcuse’s, I wrote at the time in Radical America that the book was “a major step in our breaking out of that closing universe. We had grown up in it, we had encountered it in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl but until One-Dimensional Man, we could scarcely understand, let alone describe, it.

To many of us who were becoming the New Left, Marcuse reflected and explained our own feeling of suffocation, our alienation from an increasingly totalitarian universe that trumpeted its freedom at every moment. When Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man appeared fifty years ago, it was a revelation. Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man looks more prescient than its author could have imagined.

Marcuse the end of utopia pdf