One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

The Frankfurt School is a philosophical and critical movement that was originally based at the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute was founded with the vision of developing Marxist studies in Germany, though it critically engages with Marxist thinking.

The Institute was forced to leave Germany with the rise of Nazism, relocating to Columbia University in the United States in 1933, but moving back to Frankfurt in 1953. While the Frankfurt School references a physical location (and the Institute associated with this location), it generally refers to the intellectual work that occurred within the Institute and then spread around the world.

Though founded with the vision of developing Marxist studies, the Frankfurt School has traditionally been critical of communism as well as capitalism and fascism. Rather than developing a merely theoretical school of thinking around these issues, however, the intellectuals working within the Institute founded a school of thinking that was grounded in political change. This critical thinking not only examined what it identified as problems but proposed solutions to these problems. The Institute considered specifically 20th-century issues that Marxist texts predated. In this critical Marxist thinking, the intellectuals and political activists in the Frankfurt School relied especially on the work not only of Marx, but also Sigmund Freud and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Hegel was particularly important to the Frankfurt School’s theory of political change. Marcuse relies heavily on Hegel’s insistence that contradiction and dialectical thinking are fundamental to human comprehension of reality and, subsequently, humans’ ability to change a reality that may be oppressive. The titular “one-dimensional man” is a result of capitalistic “advanced industrial society” and its refusal of dialectical thinking, which requires two-dimensional thinking. Instead of acknowledging tensions and injustices, Marcuse insists that advanced industrial society dangerously smooths these tensions over and even incorporates injustices into its “technological system,” so that a two-dimensional world in which conflict is visible is destroyed in favor of a one-dimensional one.