One-dimensional human

Herbert Marcuse : Author's name

In "One-Dimensional Man," the author explores the underlying causes of contemporary industrial society that underlie the East's threat to the West and the West's threat to the East. In his quest to present a critical theory of contemporary society, he sees the need to analyze how society uses (or does not use) its potential to improve the human condition. The author's analysis focuses particularly on the tendencies of the most advanced contemporary societies, as there are broad sectors within and outside these societies where these tendencies are still far from apparent. He attempts to shed light on these tendencies and offers some hypotheses. In discussing the one-dimensional society, he notes that the rights and freedoms that were essential factors in the early stages of industrial society diminish in importance and vitality in a more advanced stage and are emptied of their traditional content. He also argues that the society of mass mobilization that is emerging in the most advanced sectors of industrial civilization is a productive synthesis of a welfare society and a war society, and when compared with the societies that preceded it, it appears to be a truly new society. The author argues that the guiding principle for planning and developing resources that will be available to all members of society can only be provided by technological rationality, provided that it is freed from its exploitative elements.