I reread the first 50-pages of One-Dimensional Man and the 9-page introduction with Rosenberg's critique of Mills, Packard, Riesman, Spectorsky and Whyte in mind. That is a fair sample given that Marcuse repeats his basic thesis ad nauseum in various "negative" formulations. Rosenberg's essay almost qualifies as a critique of Marcuse's book even though it wasn't to be published for another five years. The essay was also published as "America's Post-Radical Critics," a less inscrutable title than "The Orgamerican Phantasy." The two qualifications I would offer to my claim is that Rosenberg never mentioned the underlying Veblenism of his targets and merely alluded to Weber by way of referring to Whyte's nostalgia for the "Protestant Ethic Person." The gap left by absence of a critique of
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I reread the first 50-pages of One-Dimensional Man and the 9-page introduction with Rosenberg's critique of Mills, Packard, Riesman, Spectorsky and Whyte in mind. That is a fair sample given that Marcuse repeats his basic thesis ad nauseum in various "negative" formulations.
Rosenberg's essay almost qualifies as a critique of Marcuse's book even though it wasn't to be published for another five years. The essay was also published as "America's Post-Radical Critics," a less inscrutable title than "The Orgamerican Phantasy."
The two qualifications I would offer to my claim is that Rosenberg never mentioned the underlying Veblenism of his targets and merely alluded to Weber by way of referring to Whyte's nostalgia for the "Protestant Ethic Person." The gap left by absence of a critique of Veblen by Rosenberg can be filled in by Adorno's essay, "Veblen's Attack on Culture."
Below I have summarized Rosenberg's essay with excerpts that, with one exception, seem to me as pertinent to One-Dimensional Man as they are to the books Rosenberg was criticizing. The one exception is that Marcuse frequently registered nostalgia for the "old class struggle" and "the ideological Passion Plays of Marxian condemnation and conflict."
It goes without saying that the Other-Directed Man, the Exurbanite, the Organization Man, [the One-Dimensional Man!] is a type... The type or character is deficient in individuality by definition.
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All our authors are at one in conceiving the flattening of personality in America as a universal effect of our interrelated economic and social practices.
What the Orgman-critics expose is not a flaw in society but the injurious realities of its normal everyday life. ... The emergence of the Orgman is conceived in terms far more deterministic than those of the "historical materialists."
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Before the Orgman can feel put upon, it is only fair that he consider the advantages gained. "It is not," explains Whyte, "the evils of the organization that puzzle him, but its very beneficence."
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The drama of history has been replaced by a pantomime in which, freed of individual or mass conflicts, bewildered, adjusted beings respond as in a narcosis to mysterious signs, whispers, hints, and shocks, which each receives on his Riesman "radar mechanism."
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Extremist but neither radical nor conservative, the Organization criticism is inspired not by a passion for social correction but by nostalgia. A sigh over the lost person mars the phantasy of American unanimity which has supplanted the ideological Passion Plays of Marxian condemnation and conflict.
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Loosed from action, for which it can see no aim, the post-radical criticism often exaggerates its complaints, producing a worse impression of conditions than is warranted by the facts, at the same time that it seeks remedies in the wrong direction.
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But there is more to the conception of the Orgman than regret for an older social type. As the representative of the new post-war employed intelligentsia, the post-radical critic suffers also a nostalgia for himself as an independent individual. For his former abstract sympathy with a nominal working class, the intellectual of this decade has substituted an examination in the mirror of his own social double as insider of the Organization and the Community. It is what he sees there that has caused him to project a morbid image of society compared with which the old "class struggle" America seems not only naif but as relatively healthy as a war with rifles and cannons.
For in regard to the misery of alienation who is a greater victim of what Whyte calls the split "between the individual as he is and the role he is called upon to play" than the member of the intellectual caste newly enlisted en masse in carrying out society’s functions? As writer, artist, social scientist, he is one with his talents and his education for creative work; in playing his part in the service of the organization he must eliminate any thought of functioning for himself.
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The intellectual employee also accepts a more total identification with his role than other workers, in that the editorial director, the designer, the copy writer, etc., sells himself more completely in terms of both psychic energy expended and in number of hours worked. With him the division between work and leisure, discipline and freedom, has truly been erased. If the free artist or the founder of a great enterprise builds his life exclusively out of the substance of his work, today’s intellectual unbuilds his life in order to live his job.
Besides being the prime victim and exemplar of self-loss in contemporary society, the “organized” professional cannot escape a conviction of guilt for his part in depriving others of their individuality. He has consented to use his capacities as a tool and to approve in practice the proposition recorded by Whyte that "all the great ideas have already been discovered."