A society can absorb its opposition more effectively by satisfying people than by repressing them.

Herbert Marcuse published that in 1964 and it has aged better than anything else the Frankfurt School produced. The mechanism he described — dissent converted into a product, criticism given a comfortable place in the system it criticizes — is now so routine that the argument reads as description.

One-dimensional society

One-Dimensional Man asks why an affluent society produces so little pressure to change, and rejects the easy answers. People are not being deceived, exactly, and they are not being coerced.

What has happened, on his account, is that the capacity to think of an alternative has been eroded. A society that delivers rising consumption, technical achievement and genuine comforts makes the question "could things be arranged completely differently?" feel unserious rather than dangerous. It does not need to suppress the thought. It has made it unavailable.

He calls this one-dimensional because the second dimension — the standpoint from which the existing order could be judged as a whole — has gone. Criticism continues, vigorously, within the terms of the system; criticism of the terms has no place to stand.

His account of needs is the sharp part. Some wants are yours and some were installed by the arrangement that then satisfies them, and a society that is extremely good at meeting the second kind can look like it is serving people while foreclosing what they might have wanted instead.

Repressive tolerance

The 1965 essay is his most attacked piece and the argument deserves to be stated properly rather than through its reputation.

Tolerance is normally defended on the grounds that truth wins a fair contest. Marcuse's claim is that the contest is not fair: when one side owns the channels and the other does not, formally equal tolerance of all positions functions to preserve the distribution that already exists. Neutrality between unequal parties is not neutral in effect.

His conclusion — that tolerance might justly be withdrawn from movements of the right — is the part people remember, and it is genuinely dangerous, because it requires somebody to decide which positions qualify and he does not say who. The premise is much harder to dismiss than the conclusion, which is why the essay is still argued about sixty years on.

Freud, and why the optimism

The third strand is what separated him from Adorno and Horkheimer, who found no way out.

Eros and Civilization (1955) argues against Freud's claim that civilization requires permanent renunciation of instinct. Some repression is necessary for any society, Marcuse grants — but a great deal of what exists is surplus, required by a particular organization of work rather than by civilization as such. And a society productive enough to meet its material needs with far less labor could release what it is currently spending on discipline.

That is why he became the Frankfurt figure the 1960s actually read. He offered liberation where his colleagues offered diagnosis, and he was correspondingly criticized for the utopianism — most pointedly by Adorno, who thought naming the alternative was precisely the mistake.

The distance between the two is the tradition's own argument about whether critical theory should say what it wants.