Customer Reviews

RC Series Bundle: One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge Classics)

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Yes, I flipped all the pages of Herbert Marcuse's work, "One Dimensional Man," when it was first written. It was an interesting critique of society. Naturally, we can think of hundreds of critiques of other societies, but just looking at our own, we can admit readily that there are things that needed improvement.

A lot of that improvement has taken place, in terms of internet sites encouraging and even thriving on more individual expression. This is on a scale hardly imaginable in the 1960's and 1970's. We all knew some new things would come along, but who would've predicted YouTube and similar, take-off sites?

When reading a critique of our own society, it is important to keep perspective. All aware of the problems and benefits of our own societies, we can readily find there are problems and benefits everywhere. Erasing poverty, hunger, starvation - and even erasing wars - will go a long way towards increasing humanity.

Probably everyone alive in the 1960's and 1970's would agree that it is a good thing that the New Left and the Black Panthers were not running society. We all know it would have gone the way of the Khmer Rouge and thought up some form of universal "final solution," justifying all sorts of means towards some improbable end. However, we also need to wonder, "Why are Americans underpaid and lacking in government benefits compared to Europeans?" Was something like the mind-control or public thought-control contemplated by Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" at work, keeping the public acquiescent while the taxes on the wealthy and on corporations was decreased? They listened to and accepted for a long time the arguments of the far right, all to the effect that the wealthy deserved all that and more. It was completely forgotten that the heroism of those members of the average society, our military foreparents, made their wealth acquisition possible and that they might owe more than the average person to society because of facts like that?

The well-off do not acquire their well-being strictly through their own efforts. It may be through inheritance, and other times, their own efforts, or a combination of the two. The playing field was made safe and free from Hitler and from Communism by the blood of the young people of the working and middle classes, by and large. That is why we are not all slaves of some madly-totalitarian directing our every move from above.

Freedom is not free. If you read One-Dimensional Man today, it should be largely as a historical work. It should be read - if at all - only by people who have done a significant additional amount of reading of long, written works. Philosophy, at that. Perhaps the kind of person who could stand to get through a graduate program in something or other. Even then, it would be read with a large grain of salt. There were some very good points made.

It certainly makes more interesting reading than Karl Marxes "Das Kapital," which was a real sleeper. But I would like to mix it with some Eric Hoffer.

Then, as they train in college, don't particularly "believe" in any one thing. Not too much, anyway.

Instead, think,

"It should be interesting to see how it all comes out."