Cohen and Serby cover a wide range of issues in a focused and informed way in their 30-page article, including Marcuse's own work and the general understanding of his work in the 1960s student movements in the US particularly. They focus seriously on the theme of how classical working-class left politics as conceived by most socialist and progressive theories seems to have been neutralized in a way that was suprising in the terms of that theory.
They explain the "two souls" of the title this way:
Though he insisted that the basic premises of Marxist social theory remained correct — a distinct and underappreciated quality of the book — a sense of futility with the theory’s practical implications in the present, as well as fidelity to a vision of social change as total historical rupture, drew Marcuse to paint an imaginative but inadequate picture of his moment as Hegel’s proverbial “night in which all cows are black,” void of possibilities for radical social transformation.One-Dimensional Man draws on a variety of major philosophical influences to which Marcuse and other Frankfurt School scholars gave particular attention: phenomenology, existentialism, Weberian sociology, amd Freudian psychology. At the time of One-Dimensional Man, debates between Frankfurt School figures including Adorno had been carrying on a polemic against Karl Popper and other representatives of philosophical positivism, a theme that echoes in One-Dimensional Man. [my emphasis]
There are, we suggest, two souls of Herbert Marcuse — on the one hand, the critical and materialist; on the other, the moralistic and defeatist — each with its own significance for today’s activists. We close by suggesting that One-Dimensional Man’s decline from its previous stardom may offer today’s Left a chance to learn from its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings regarding commodified liberation, while leaving firmly in the past its political Manichaeism and culturalist despair. [my emphasis]
Especially important for One-Dimenstional Man is Hegel's Logic, which focuses on the continual development of potential into present existence. (This lay behind one of Hegel most discussed sentences, "What is rational is actual, what is actual is rational.") Marcuse was steeped in Hegel. A later Frankfurt School thinker, Axel Honneth, once suggested that the Frankfurt School's "critical theory" was defined by being unable to decide between Kant and Hegel. ("[I]n all the productive approaches of Critical Theory: it's always an ongoing tension between Kant and Hegel. I would say that the most productive element - one of the most productive elements of the Critical Theory tradition - is to be unable to decide which side you are on here." ("Critical Theory in Germany Today: An Interview with Axel Honneth," Radical Philosophy 65:Autumn 1993)
One of Marcuse's most noted scholarly works is Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), which included original research into Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 which showed a heavy Hegelian influence and which were first published in 1932.
Edmund Husserl's last book, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaft und die transzendentale Phanomenologie (1936) (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology), was a major influence on Marcuse. Hussserl's and Heidegger's work show up in Marcuse's discussion of technological rationality in One-Dimensional Man, where he writes:
Society reproduced itself in a growing technical ensemble of things and relations which included the technical utilization of men - in other words, the struggle for existence and the exploitation of man and nature became ever more scientific and rational. The double meaning of "rationalization" is relevant in this context. Scientific management and scientific division of labor vastly increased the productivity of the economic, political, and cultural enterprise. Result: the higher standard of living. At the same time and on the same ground, this rational enterprise produced a pattern of mind and behavior which justified and absolved even the most destructive and oppressive features of the enterprise. Scientific-technical rationality and manipulation are welded together into new forms of social control. [my emphasis]Marcuse in the polemics of the 1960s and later acquired the reputation of arguing that the working class had been structurally neutralized as a force for left-progressive politics, much less as a collective actor in a revolutionary transformation of capitalist societies into socialist ones. In One-Dimensional Man, he sketches the possibily of a breakthrough in the prevailing political conformity through what he called the Great Refusal.
Stephen Eric Bonner gives a good summary of the kind of political stagnation to which Marcuse was referring when he talked about when he warned of the "closing of the political universe."
Especially in the United States, self-satisfaction girded the belief that structural conflict was a thing of the past. Not that this was the reality: McCarthyism had launched an attack against civil liberties, the burgeoning civil rights movement was battling the KKK, which still controlled much of the South, and ten million people remained poverty-stricken in what Michael Harrington termed “the other America.” But these entrenched trends were only background noise so far as the mainstream was concerned. In the United States, class contradictions had vanished and what remained were little more than simple differences in the distribution of income and wealth. The welfare state had become part of the consensus and, where social conflict did take place, it was stripped of ideological purpose and transformed into a problem of “public administration.” Thus, Daniel Bell made it fashionable to speak about the “end of ideology” in the early 1960s. ("One-Dimensional Man at Fifty" in The Bitter Taste of Hope 2017) [my emphasis]It's understandable that people in 2021 might find it hard not to be mystified by that diagnosis of conditions in 1964. These days even left economists talk about the 1945-1973 period as the Golden Age of Capitalism. In the US and Western Europe, it was the heyday of "fordism" and Keynesian economics, a period in which wages rose, prosperity increased and spread, social-welfare measures were put into place, and workers were widely represented by labor unions which were also strong and which exerted their influence effectively in politics. In the US, historic civil rights legislation was enacted and militant popular movements against the Vietnam War, for minority rights and feminism. Agreements for nuclear arms control were negotiated, Medicare was established. Mass protests became common, and a nationwide uprising in the form of urban riots occurred after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr..
So how did that period represent a "closing of the political universe"?
A big part of the answer is in Bonner's comment, "But these entrenched trends" [- deep-seated social contradictions and strong demands for equality, opportunity and justice -] "were only background noise so far as the mainstream was concerned." It's not that Marcuse thought no opposition was happening. It was that enough people were content enough, and enough people passive and resigned enough, and enough people unaware enough of the sources of their social distress, that the politics and activism of the time didn't address the full potentialities of the society and economy.
John Kenneth Galbraith addressed the American situation of a somewhat later moment in The Culture of Contentment (1992). Looking at the popular reactions to moments of economic crisis, he wrote:
There are ... some lessons in a larger frame that do endure. The most nearly invariant is that individuals and communities that are favored in their economic, social and political condition attribute social virtue and political durability to that which they themselves enjoy. That attribution, in turn, is made to apply even in the face of commanding evidence to the contrary. The beliefs of the fortunate are brought to serve the cause of continuing contentment, and the economic and political ideas of the time are similarly accommodated. There is an eager political market for that which pleases and reassures. Those who would serve this market and reap the resulting reward in money and applause are reliably available. [my emphasis]But in earlier epochs and well into the twentieth century, the group of the contented in most societies was a relatively small group. But in the US and many other wealthy capitalist countries, the effects of economic growth and the distributive effects of social-democratic type policies had provided greater material security to a wider circle of people. Galbraith:
What is new in the so-called capitalist countries - and this is a vital point - is that the controlling contentment and resulting belief is now that of the many, not just of the few. It operates under the compelling cover of democracy, albeit a democracy not of all citizens but of those who, in defense of their social and economic advantage, actually go to the polls. The result is government that is accommodated not to reality or common need but to the beliefs of the contented, who are now the majority of those who vote. A consensus old as democratic government itself still prevails. [my emphasis]This persisting state of affairs nearly three decades after One-Dimensional Man is another way of describing what Marcuse saw as a society in which issues that are critically important for the sake of human freedom and well-being were effectively marginalized. It's worth remembering that the prevailing neoliberal ideology of the Reagan-Thatcher era until now included signature tenets like TINA (There Is No Alternative) and Thatcher's famous saying, "there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
That latter declaration not only closes the door to alternatives to the existing state of social relations. It denies they even exist at all, because "there's no such thing as society." And, There Is No Alternative. That pretty much defines a "closing of the political universe."
None of this implies that we should look at the Golden Age of Capitalism with nostalgic sentimentalism, as Tom Nichols reminds us in The Myth of the Golden Years The Atlantic 08/04/2021. As he puts it, "Rosy memories of the economic condition of the working class before the 2000s seem to be tricks of memory rather than reflections of reality."
I would argue that Marcuse was proceeding from a similar premise in 1964, i.e., there are real problems that need to be addressed and neither the political parties nor ordinary people are reacting with the urgency the situation warrants. He believed that a movement of the working class, a movement of organized labor and working-class-based political organizations, would be necessary to change that political landscape. And he was focusing on the potential ways that such a movement could be brought into being.
But it's also important to remember that the defining political challenge in Marcuse's concerns was what could be learned from the period of Nazism and other forms of fascism. As Susanne Kailitz puts it, "For Marcuse, the totalitarian tendencies in the world had not disappeared with National Socialism." (Von den Worten zu den Waffen? Frankfurter Schule, Studentenbewegung, RAF und die Gewaltfrage 2007)
He wanted to understand the social basis on which such movements based themselves and how the pro-democracy forces and pro-freedom forces could be strengthened. He also thought that capitalism ultimately tended to restrict not only the material possibilities in the economy but to limit human freedom for the majority. For him, as for Max Horkheimer and others of the Frankfurt School, they took the approach that if you want to talk about the dangers of fascism, you also have to be willing to acknowledge the problems in capitalism.
In the third and final part, I address more of Cohan's and Serby's critical commentary on One-Dimensional Man.
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