This article engages a central argument of One-Dimensional Man: that a core register of power rests at the sensible level, within desires, needs and pleasures. Although this line of argument has been targeted by many readers as particularly problematic, this article proposes that it possesses significant resources for contemporary political thought. Where Marcuse has been described as a thinker of a bygone age, his reflections on power and sensibility possess vital resources to cognize power and agency in late modernity.

In this essay, I defend the legacy of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the relation it sketches between art, politics, and human instincts against detractors who see the work as defeatist. Through an examination of Marcuse’s use of ideas drawn from biology and aesthetics, I outline a creative politics that illustrates the manner in which new forms of human life might be created from the “bottom up,” through political struggle and artistic practice. I further compare these ideas to those of Jacques Rancière, Autonomist Marxism, and epigenetics in order to better understand the prescience of Marcuse’s thought and its continued relevance.

This paper examines the contemporary social context in order to consider why Marcuse’s ideas, specifically those represented in One-Dimensional Man, do not resonate in the United States in the same way that they did when the book was published a half century ago. Although much of Marcuse’s analysis continues to be relevant for contemporary society, a fear of one-dimensional thinking has diminished. This is due, firstly, to scholarly defenses of populism. And secondly, it results from changes in international relations, the social and economic status of youth, and a more uniform reverence for technology.

Today’s Left has inherited and internalized the rift that split the New Left. This split led to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, a book that angered many because of MacIntyre’s harsh treatment of Marcuse. I situate MacIntyre’s engagement with Marcuse against the background of the split in the New Left: on the one side, E. P. Thompson, MacIntyre, and those who then saw the revolutionary class in the proletariat, and on the other side, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, and Marcuse who seemed to put their faith in radical student intellectuals, Third World movements, and identity politics. I examine—without polemics— this rift in search of a new basis for Left unity, particularly as regards the question of radical, working class subjectivity. I argue that we must draw from MacIntyre his concept of revolutionary practices and from Marcuse—in One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization—the analysis of technological rationality, aesthetic reason, phantasy, and imagination.