Closer Look: Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do new forms of social control under capitalism foreclose the possibility of social critique? In episode 156 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a deep dive into Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 classic, One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse analyzes how 1950s conformism narrows the private space of human thinking, turning us into one-dimensional beings. Your hosts talk about Marcuse’s diagnosis of life under capitalism, and his assessment of how analytic philosophy’s obsession with formal logic encourages conservatism and prevents us from subversive thought. In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss what freedom looks like for Marcuse and how critical Marcuse would be of Overthink.Works Discussed:

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

Stephen Whitfield, “Refusing Marcuse: 50 Years After One-Dimensional Man”

Paul Mattick, "One Dimensional Man In Class Society"

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Overthink.
0:07.0	The podcast where your two favorite philosophers put the work of other philosophers in contact with everyday life.
0:26.6	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:27.6	And I'm David Penya-Gusman.
0:29.6	And David, today we are doing our second of this new form of episode.
0:34.6	We recently have started integrating into our regular feed, which is called A Closer Look, where we focus on one particular text for the entirety of an episode.
0:45.7	As our longtime listeners know, usually our episodes are topics based, and we pepper in discussions of a few different texts at minimum.
0:53.5	And we have recently started with our
0:56.3	new series, Closer Look, to have one of every four episodes be this new format. So we talked about
1:03.6	Foucault last time. Now we're going to be talking about the philosopher Herbert Marcusa and his
1:09.0	text, One Dimensional Man. Yeah, this is a great little text.
1:13.0	And for those of you who haven't read it, it was hugely influential when it came out in the 1960s.
1:19.4	Marcusa is a figure who is associated with the student movement in the 1960s, with the new left in the United States.
1:25.8	And Marcusa is a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a group of Jewish thinkers from Germany who were writing in the early to middle of the 20th century, trying to understand how capitalism has changed since the time of Marx and what possibilities for freedom and liberation
1:45.7	might still be on the table for contemporary subjects. And the text that we are reading today,
1:51.8	one-dimensional man, became the text that introduced critical theory, Frankfurt's style,
1:57.5	to an American audience, more so than any other text. And it was so popular that in the first
2:02.9	five years after it was published, it sold 100,000 copies. You know, like all the students were
2:09.4	buying it up, people in all kinds of organizations were having reading groups about it, because
2:15.8	Marcosa, I think, gave voice in this book to something that a lot of leftists in the United States were feeling and that they finally saw articulated in a concise, understandable, but also rigorous philosophical fashion in these pages.
2:32.4	100,000 copies. A girl can dream.
2:35.2	It is impossible to oversee the cultural impact that this book had. And so I think a lot of
	...

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