Abstract

I discuss how I came to read, interpret, understand, critique, and use One-Dimensional Man, and I consider the book’s reception and relevance in the 1960s when it appeared, suggesting how its ideas relate to experiences and developments within US society and global capitalism from the 1940s and 1950s. Then, I examine how the model of one-dimensional society was put in question by the struggles and upheavals of the 1960s, how Herbert Marcuse revised his model in the 1970s, and how it fares in making sense of developments in the succeeding decades, up to the present. Thus, my interpretation will be philosophical, historical, and political, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse would want it to be.