The Triumph of Social Control? A Look at One Dimensional Man 25 Years Later

Nineteen eighty-nine marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of Herbert Marcuse's influential critique of "advanced industrial society," One Dimensional Man. Of the many books that Marcuse was to write during the 1960's and 70's, One Dimensional Man was the first o address the central concerns of the then emerging student and New Left movements. Ironically, a book that: analyzed the profoundly debilitating effects of technological rationality on the human capacity for critical thought, spoke of the incorporation and abnegation of the traditional "revolutionary subject," and proclaimed the seeming disappearance of organized resistance to political oppression, also influenced a generation of radicals and New Left políticos who, together with the mass movements of the 1960's and 70's, altered the political landscape of the last third of the twentieth century by challenging the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, confronting the viciousness and tenacity of American racism, and protesting the senseless and devastating effects of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.1