Books: One Dimensional Man intro

books/sociedade/one-dimensional-man.md

+[[!meta title="One Dimensional Man"]]
+
+* Author: Hebert Marcuse
+
+## Snippets
+
+### Intro
+
+    From the beginning, any critical theory of society is thus confronted with the
+    problem of historical objectivity, a problem which arises at the two points
+    where the analysis implies value judgments:
+
+    1. the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to
+    be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is
+    the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical)
+    rejects theory itself;
+
+    2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the
+    amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these
+    possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of
+    these judgments, and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The
+    established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of
+    intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the
+    optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a
+    minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is
+    the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various
+    possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources,
+    which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?
+
+    [...]
+
+    The “possibilities” must be within the reach of the respective society; they
+    must be definable goals of practice. By the same token, the abstraction from
+    the established institutions must be expressive of an actual tendency—that is,
+    their transformation must be the real need of the underlying population. Social
+    theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the
+    established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to
+    the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by
+    historical practice. The theoretical concepts terminate with social change.
+
+    But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation
+    which seems to deprive it of its very basis. Technical progress, extended to a
+    whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of
+    power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat
+    or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from
+    toil and domination. Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing
+    social change—qualitative change which would establish essentially different
+    institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human
+    existence.
+
+    [...]
+
+    As a technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political
+    universe, the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical
+    project—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as
+    the mere stuff of domination.
+
+    As the project unfolds, it shapes the entire universe of discourse and action,
+    intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture,
+    politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or
+    repulses all alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system
+    stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of
+    domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality.