Essay Database

Herbert Marcuse, ONE Dimensional Man One-Dimensional Society 1: The New Forms of Control A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national …

…better suited to designate the historical alternative of a world which-through an international conflict which transforms and suspends the contradictions within the established societies-advances on the brink of a global war. "Pacification of existence" means the development of man's struggle with man and with nature, under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer organized by vested interests in domination and scarcity- an organization which perpetuates the destructive forms of this Struggle.