It was based on the вЂњsupreme promiseвЂќ of вЂњan ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action.вЂќ Their вЂњmany liberties and comfortsвЂќ only вЂњperpetuated and intensifiedвЂќ their вЂњsubjection to productive apparatus.вЂќДЄs we read One-Dimensional Man today, do we not again and again seem to be encountering the society in which we live? The вЂњsociety without oppositionвЂќ 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.вЂќ Moreover, вЂњFree election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.вЂќ

He spoke to a deep sense of alienation.В вЂњThe pure form of servitude,вЂќ he wrote, is вЂњto 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.вЂќ A student of MarcuseвЂ™s, I wrote at the time in Radical America that the book was вЂњa major step in our breaking out of that closing universe. We had grown up in it, we had encountered it in Allen GinsbergвЂ™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 MarcuseвЂ™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