Review of Critique of Advanced Technological Society
Herbert Marcuse — ETEROTOPIA France, Rhizome Collection, October 2024.
Foreword by Benakis Matsas — Afterword by Michael Löwy
The reissue by ETEROTOPIA France of Critique of Advanced Technological Society brings together a partially unpublished essay that, according to the publisher himself, serves as the central thread running through Marcuse’s entire body of thought: the one that connects One-Dimensional Man (1964), the manifesto of the 1968 protests, to his later reflections on the political implications of techno-science. Moving between social critique and philosophical reflection, Marcuse engages in dialogue with Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, and Bridgman to pose questions that have lost none of their urgency.
Born in Berlin in 1898, a student of Heidegger in Freiburg, Herbert Marcuse joined the Institut für Sozialforschung (the Frankfurt School) before emigrating to the United States in 1937, where he taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and San Diego. A central figure in Critical Theory, he distinguished himself through a tenacious commitment to the possibility of historical transcendence—whereas his fellow travelers had gradually abandoned any attempt to give it a political foundation.
I. Domination Without a Visible Master
How can a society be dominated without that domination appearing as such—or worse still: by passing off its domination as freedom? This is Marcuse’s opening question, and he poses it bluntly:
“It seems that industrial society, in its advanced stage, and by virtue of its very efficiency and rationality, eliminates or nullifies all transcendence; the faculties of transcendence and negation atrophy.” — p. 28
This is not ideology in the traditional sense—a lie superimposed on a reality that could be unmasked. Domination operates through the rational organization of needs and satisfactions. It becomes all the more stable as it appears to effectively meet everyone’s expectations.
The old bourgeois freedoms—conscience, expression, political opinion—had historically served to assert the subject against the feudal order. They survive, but emptied of meaning: the “inner freedom” that founded the autonomy of the modern economic subject becomes, once material satisfaction is assured, mere accommodation to established institutions. Nonconformity is no longer a force—it appears useless, even pathological. This is what Marcuse sums up with relentless precision:
“Established industrial society generates an enormous social need to waste; it generates illusory forms of freedom, contentment, and individuality. These manifest themselves in an absurd and deceptive freedom of choice—absurd and deceptive because it serves to perpetuate and conceal profound servitude: man’s submission to the apparatus of his labor. Freedom can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. It is not the range of choices offered to the individual that determines the degree of real freedom, but what one can choose and what one chooses. […] The free election of masters abolishes neither masters nor slaves.” — p. 33
The menu is vast; the map of the world, narrow.
II. Rationality as an Instrument of Enclosure
Marcuse rejects all anti-scientific nostalgia. What he questions is the direction taken by technology: not its nature, but its history. Technicity, as a project, should aim to free man from labor and pacify the struggle for existence. In advanced capitalism, stripped of any final cause, it turns into a universal means of domination.
Marcuse sees the most complete philosophical expression of this closure in Bridgman’s operationalism: concepts are valid only if they are defined by concrete and verifiable operations. Anything that exceeds the functional framework is disqualified. If the Good and the Beautiful have no ontological status, established reality—however ugly and repressive it may be—always prevails over any value that would claim to challenge it.
This is what Marcuse calls one-dimensional thinking: not the end of ideology, but the end of the capacity to transcend the existing state of affairs. Opposition is undermined at its root; refusal appears neurotic. And thought itself changes status:
“Thought is abstract in its very nature, insofar as its abstractions are accused of inhumanity, of negating the ‘concrete evil.’ Empiricism, which reduces abstract concepts to operational definitions—to definitions verifiable within the terms of the established order—deprives thought of its therapeutic function, namely, to help liberate what is from what it is. The act of thinking seems essentially linked to suffering. By transcending reality toward transcendent truth, thought expresses the “discomfort of civilization”; it bears witness to misery, inadequacy, and anxiety. It is perhaps here that we must seek some of the deepest roots of anti-intellectualism. Those who truly think, who think as if thinking were their true vocation, have the privilege of participating in a different (and perhaps better!) world.” — p. 108
III. Language as a Field of Domination
Language is not spared. Marcuse describes a ritualized, abbreviated, advertising-driven language, whose very structure prohibits dissident expression by compressing meaning into the operational. Words—happiness, freedom, democracy, peace—are not eliminated; they are redefined, turned into instruments of normalization.
The example of the “clean bomb” is, for him, the most eloquent symptom of a consciousness immunized against moral contradiction. The word “clean” does not abolish the moral referent it invokes—it absorbs and neutralizes it. The same mechanism applies to democratic discourse: procedural designation erases the question of content. What matters is only the pragmatic validity of words—“behavioral” definitions that designate what happens, and nothing else.
Marcuse precisely identifies what this linguistic shift destroys:
“In pre-industrial culture, the term ‘spirit’ had a very specific meaning. It was conceived as the leaven of society, as an expression of the memory of ‘lost time’ and of all hope for ‘time regained’ and, above all, as the Great Refusal, a revolt against inhumanity.” — p. 86
Injustice and inequality are now rationally administered by a rationally organized bureaucracy. The Soul has scarcely any secrets left that cannot be measured statistically. Solitude—the very condition of all transcendent thought—has become virtually impossible. These trends contain something truly liberating; they are simultaneously altered and perverted by the institutions of the status quo.
IV. Technology, Nature, Slavery
The ecological dimension of the work is remarkable for its time. Marcuse establishes a structural equivalence between the domination of nature and the domination of man: the same technocratic rationality treats both as materials for repressive productivity. There is no human liberation without the liberation of nature—but technocratic capitalism has achieved only a mastery that prolongs enslavement. Simondon, whom Marcuse invokes, articulates the internal logic of this impasse:
“The machine is merely a means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces through an initial enslavement: the machine is a slave used to make other slaves. Such an inspiration may coincide with a demand for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by transferring slavery to other beings, humans, animals, or machines; to rule over a people of machines enslaving the entire world is still to rule; and all rule presupposes the acceptance of the patterns of enslavement.” — quoted on p. 55
One does not liberate oneself by shifting slavery. Technicity perpetuates the oldest transformation there is: life as a means to life.
V. The Dialectic of Progress and the Socialist Horizon
Marcuse never succumbs to fatalism. But he rejects easy consolations. Technical progress, even in its alienated form, objectively lightens the burden of labor—and it is precisely this fact that makes domination so tenacious:
“But we must once again emphasize that unmastered history reinforces this fatal dialectic according to which progress itself contains its own negation. This dialectic has never been more concrete and evident than in advanced industrial society and technical progress.” — p. 117
In contrast to institutional definitions of socialism, Marcuse proposes a radically different one:
“Socialism: it is neither nationalization nor the management of production under the control of the working class; it is reversing the ratio between working time and leisure; it is human existence beyond the realm of work. As a development of human existence, socialism presupposes a revolution in needs and aspirations. Technological domination, technology as a political instrument, produces (and satisfies) the needs and aspirations that hinder such a revolution.” — pp. 70–71
This shift—from the economic realm to that of desires and ways of life—is one of the most fruitful moments in the text. And its corollary can be summed up in a single line:
“After the free satisfaction of vital needs, free time rather than working time would be the content of life.” — p. 65
On the question of the integration of opposition forces, Marcuse rejects any explanation based on individual betrayal. History proceeded differently than theory had predicted:
“The integration of forces opposed to the established society takes place as a fundamental process that can no longer be explained in terms of ‘betrayal’: betrayal by the leaders of the working class, by intellectuals, by Stalinists, etc. If there was betrayal, it was an ‘objective’ betrayal: history proceeded differently than historical theory had predicted.” — p. 59
Entirely new factors have shaken the theory: the unleashing of labor productivity beyond the internal limits of capital, the coordination of individuals brought about by technological sophistication, and the interplay between organized capitalism and the communist world, each reinforcing the other’s capabilities. The technical foundation shared by both systems in no way guarantees political rupture—on the contrary, it nourishes what Marcuse calls “affirmative” consciousness: this disposition to say yes to what exists, to defend the system as one defends what sustains us. It does not result from brutal indoctrination, but from the ordinary satisfaction the system provides—and this is precisely why it is so difficult to shake.
VI. Theory as a Project
Marcuse never separates thought from practice—not out of militant confusion, but because every theory, through its very concepts, projects new practices and institutions. Critical Theory is not a commentary on the world; it is a way of altering it:
“Theory projects, with and through new concepts, a new practice and new institutions. Often, the historical project is explicitly and essentially linked to the most abstract concepts of theory: Plato’s authoritarian-philosophical republic; the technical transformation of the world in Descartes; the ‘determined negation’ of the French Revolution in Kant and Hegel.” — p. 114
The question of utopia follows directly. Historical change cannot be conceived as a mere byproduct of economic changes: it must be preconditioned by its antecedents. The forces that tend toward the leap are the same ones that bring it about—they must be there before it. But their emergence is opposed by the very rationality of the existing order.
VII. Rejection and Opening of the Possible
The most common argument against utopia is that of urgency: there is too much immediate misery to allow for visions of transcendence. Marcuse turns this on its head:
“We must do away with these ‘utopian’ speculations—there is too much very present and imminent misery, which renders visions of transcendence meaningless. However, a troubling question arises: — it may be that the suppression of such images of transcendence serves to perpetuate misery and restrict the struggle against it; — it may be that utopian possibilities contain the most realistic possibilities and that the defamation of Utopia is a powerful instrument of domination.” — p. 56
It is not Utopia that is unrealistic—it is managerial realism that is irrational in light of the possibilities that technical civilization itself has generated.
“What we reject is not without value or importance. It is precisely for this reason that rejection is necessary. There is a reason we will no longer accept, there is a semblance of wisdom that horrifies us, there is an offer of agreement and conciliation that we no longer heed. A rupture has occurred. We have been brought back to this frankness that no longer tolerates complicity.” — p. 60
This is not the tone of despair. It is the tone of a lucidity that knows exactly what it rejects—and in the name of what.
Conclusion: Why Read Marcuse Today
Fewer than 140 pages, but with a density that demands a slow reading. The rigor of the theoretical framework is inseparable from a political frankness that never seeks to disguise itself as neutrality. Marcuse is not an observer: he considers that analysis itself is a form of action, a way of opening up the space of the possible where technical rationality tends to close it off.
The question he poses—how to reopen the possible in a society that absorbs negation?—is raised today with redoubled acuity. The political imagination seems continually reduced to the technocratic management of the present; alternatives are conflated with managerial adjustments; forms of protest are integrated into the spectacle of market democracy.
Reading Marcuse in 2024–2026 is less an exercise in intellectual archaeology than a way of equipping ourselves with the tools to think precisely about what we are experiencing. And perhaps—this is his most radical wager—to begin desiring something else.
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