Modern Society: An End to Revolt?

...This prem ise of the argument ensures that in Marcuse's perspective the differences between the political institutions of USA and USSR, or of USA and Britain, can make no or very little difference to the future of historical development of these societies...

...We should therefore note that a crude and unargued technological determinism underlies the argument from the outset...

...and it is partly a matter of its preoccupation with the nature of human action...

...Of course this inability is itself part of the total social situation...

...Austin's achievement was different, but also partly negative...

...The first concerns Marcuse's attitude to facts: in his Introduction he refers airily to "the vast sociological and psychological literature" and he protects himself against counter-examples by saying that "My analysis is focused on tendencies in the most highly developed contemporary societies...

...The problem of a politics that goes further than this is partly the problem of a working class that sixty years ago had to set itself the goals of welfare and now has to find for itself new political goals...

...But he is arguing for the truth of certain high-Ievel generalizations which need to be supported by evidence...

...The lack of an answer to this question perhaps explains the solipsistic style, opaque with academic abstraction, in which the book is written...

...And just as Marcuse ignores the selfconsciousness embodied in the linguistic concerns of contemporary philosophy, so he ignores its anti-empiricism and its awareness of the social context of thought...

...I shall begin by disputing his account of the nature of contemporary philosophy...

...to advance them without evidence is to cut oneself off from reality in the most radical way of all...

...USA, Western Europe, and USSR are all versions of this society...

...These the Welfare State has removed...

...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...

...They encounter both need and provision for it in widely separated spheres: housing, health, schools, pensions, and so on...

...This is a man talking to himself...

...What does he say...

...For in two of the characteristics of contemporary philosophy as an institutional discipline we find a combination of characteristics that pervade other areas of the life of advanced industrial society: self-consciousness about one's activities and compartmentalization that limits their effects...

...And, at worst, it is an escape into the non-controversial, the unreal, into that which is only academically controversial...

...Nonetheless from Marxism Marcuse retains the notion of a relation between the content of thought and the forms of social life of a general kind and at times he goes even further in retaining a Marxist framework...

...Thus the difference between the ideological impact of the Idealists in late nineteenthcentury Britain and the impact of contemporary philosophy is not by any means only a matter of the different kinds of philosophy involved, but quite as much a matter of the different role that philosophy has in British universities and that the universities have in British society...

...The weakness of the far Left in recent politics is that it has not been able to offer the labor movement political goals which would enable it to break the hold of the technological development upon the econ omy...

...Is it warranted by evidence...

...His interest in language was distinctively different and much more systematic than Wittgenstein's...

...In the earlier part of his book Marcuse analyzes what he calls "advanced industrial society" whose social forms he takes to be determined by the nature of its technological achievement...

...For it is the specific and differing histories of the labor movement, of political democracy, and of the welfare state in these three areas that determine the possible effects of technological innovation in such society...

...Individuals are alienated from the system not by having their wants and needs denied, but by having them gratified, the cost of such gratification is that the wants and needs shall be only what the system allows them to be...

...Neither of these characteristics is static in the face of technological and social change...

...From this theme an easy transition is made to the second part of Marcuse's book, which is an account of contemporary philosophy, attacking it as the one-dimensional, uncritical, intellectual counterpart of the one-dimensional, uncritical society...

...The linguistic character of contemporary philosophy is partly bound up with its insistent questioning of the character of its own enquiries...

...First, there is its self-consciousness...

...Herbert Marcuse's latest book is an essay in pessimism so profound that it is contradicted by the act of writing it...

...And this would have been a more illuminating point for Marcuse to have fastened upon...

...verse, a product of the higher complacency...

...To see this only as a means of dominating them is both irresponsible and per...

...and finally I shall argue that he misconstrues the nature of contemporary industrial society...

...the reality of present-day socialism makes the Marxian idea a dream...

...He works tentatively through the variety of inadequate assertions we are inclined to make...

...For to write a book presupposes at least a possible audience and yet if Marcuse's conclusions are correct his book can have almost no audience...

...Marcuse's work is only the latest in a long tradition...

...If Marcuse were to argue that these points hold good only of Britain and not of either the United States or continental Europe, I should of course, agree...

...But this is only a glimmer of chance in the darkness of near inevitability...

...The final corruption is of language and thought...

...Is what Marcuse says true...

...And yet —the questions inexorably pose themselves...

...Now one could not gain an inkling of these facts from Marcuse's account...

...The reality of the laboring classes in advanced industrial society makes the Marxian 'proletariat' a mythological concept...

...If linguistic analysis...

...Or rather, insofar as one can do this, one is always left with the denial of an error rather than the assertion of a truth...

...Even a modern affluent working-class, even a working class with a socialist tradition has to learn that a welfare state is a unity...

...rather he shows that the statement of certain errors depends partly on ignoring distinctions marked in ordinary linguistic usage...

...Those of an administered welfare society in which a rising standard of living makes compliance with the demands of the technical apparatus a rational and inevitable response...

...their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions...

...But of all this not a glimmering in Marcuse, who is not only wrong about the content of contemporary philosophy, but also and perhaps consequently about its necessary conformism...

...But this is not a hidden automatism such as informed the unplanned character of capitalist production in the nineteenth century...

...In the last few pages he envisages one possible chance—no more than a chance—of liberation in "the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable...

...It was only gradually that people in Britain became conscious of themselves as living in a society where a right to minimal standards of welfare was presupposed...

...The quotations from Adorno and Walter Benjamin help to situate the argument in that civilized, neo-Hegelian, neo-Marxist academic style of thought which has stimulated so much worthwhile enquiry...

...So far as society is concerned, Marcuse is also living a private world...

...Nothing is more deeply imprinted upon contemporary analytical philosophers of all schools than the realization that it is through language that experience is grasped, that our conceptual schemes are not passive mirrorings but active graspings of reality, that each individual is inducted into a language that preexists him, that a social framework of rules and practices provides the background against which both concepts and experience have to be made intelligible...

...What social forms does advanced technology produce, on Marcuse's view...

...But Marcuse's technological determinism could securely not allow him to concede this...

...Consider, for example, their emergence in relation to the notion of a welfare state...

...So a working-class political self-consciousness about welfare as a point at which elementary rights have continually to be reclaimed seems to be one of the preconditions of the maintenance of welfare in an advanced capitalist society...

...The philosophy is found in the whole process...

...The whole book is informed by a Stoic determination not to betray the values of either Aristotle or Marx in a hostile world...

...But because his vision of this truth obscures his vision of the nature of our society as a whole it is important to bring into the foreground those points on which Marcuse is simply wrong...

...then I shall question his actual and implied account of the relationship of philosophy to social life...

...This at least seems to be the moral of the last seventeen years in Britain...

...For whom then can Marcuse be writing...

...In so doing he omits, distorts, or simply misrepresents certain aspects of contemporary philosophy which are crucially important for social theory...

...Wittgenstein's genre here is not that of the straightforward treatise expounding a "view...

...they come to learn too that it is essentially a realm of conflict in which the real benefits of welfare are always in danger of being undermined by defense spending, by the encroachment of private interests, or simply by inflation, and thus a realm in which it needs a good deal of running even to keep standing in the same place...

...Marcuse, for example, seems to hold that we are living in a post-Marxist epoch...

...His thesis is that we live in a society capable of absorbing both intellectual criticism and working-class revolt...

...The rival and countervailing powers which make up the system form a unity in their resistance to qualitative change...

...The hero of empiricist epistemology (of rationalism too) is the isolated knowing subject out of whose experiences and thoughts the world of reality and of concepts has to be reconstructed...

...another is the nature of the unity between the inner realm of thoughts and feelings and the outer realm of behavior...

...What of course does mark contemporary society—and not only in Britain—is its compartmentalization, so that a subject like philosophy very much goes its own professional way, and what impact it has upon society at large depends not just on the theories advanced by philosophers, but also on the way in which universities have come to be organized...

...a concrete, empirical functional style of thought disables criticism by refusing it the use of concepts and categories which would enable it to transcend and to criticize the system...

...But radical as this range of disagreement promises to be, I must declare a more elementary reaction to Marcuse's book, an initial distaste, a prejudice on two counts...

...contributes to enclosing thought in the circle of the mutilated universe of ordinary discourse, it is at best entirely inconsequential...

...Yet such awareness is not enough...

...One thread running through Wittgenstein's later philosophy is the way in which the possession of language is linked up with other distinctively human characteristics...

...this is a visible process and consciousness of its automatic character is more and more widespread...

...Marcuse is, of course, right to stress the automatism of the process of investment, production, consump tion, and reinvestment as it now exists in our society...

...The driving force of Marxist revolution was to be poverty and deprivation...

...and it is important to see that it is the inability of trade unionists to ask the relevant questions about future goals that is crippling to the British Labour movement, quite as much as any domination by technologically based social forces...

...In the end I shall argue that the small kernel of truth in Marcuse's argument concerns the autonomy and the relatively blind and unguided character of technological development...

...But his attention to the distinctions embodied in ordinary speech and his attempt to classify these distinctions draw part of their importance from the prevention of plausible error...

...Is the sense of imprisonment which Marcuse conveys the product of a technological society or of his own conceptual scheme...

...The system serves the irrational ends of unchecked technological development, and continually rationalizes the means to that development...

...There are large areas within and without these societies where the described tendencies do not prevail—I would say: not yet prevail...

...The technical apparatus is a system of powers set over individuals and dominating them...

...What the coming of the Welfare State and full employment meant in Britain, for example, was that large numbers of working-class people were no longer ill, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and insecure...

...In fact he takes the views of quite different philosophers, tears them out of context, glues them together and then represents his own arbitrary construction as the philosophy of linguistic analysis...

...but it is a product of the traditional pragmatism of British social democracy which has now run out into sand, rather than simply a product of contemporary technology...

...It was always a bad tradition and his book has not improved it...

...Marcuse's talk of "domination" and "liberation" is too abstract to be helpful here...

...But the root of Marcuse's error here is theoretical as well as moral and cannot be uncovered adequately until a later stage in the argument...

...Quite as dangerous as Marcuse's cavalier attitude to facts is his attitude to the Welfare State, presented in his pages as simply a device for administering opiates to the masses...

...One cannot isolate assertions and proclaim them as Wittgenstein's standpoint...

...Britain presumably counts as an advanced industrial society in his terms, so I shall restrict myself to British examples...

...This weakness is rooted in the Left's own history, above all in its continuous preference for dramatic denunciations to undramatic factual analysis...

...On the nature of contemporary philosophy Marcuse probably presents a very convincing picture to those readers who lack any acquaintance with the texts he is discussing...

...According to Marcuse earlier philosophy provided a method for transcending and criticizing existing forms of life and thought, while such recently influential philosophers as Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin confine us to sterilized and anesthetized versions of everyday speech...

...They exist outside the democratic process...

...So in Sense and Sensibilia, for example, Austin nowhere advances a "view" on perception...

...These contentions form the substance of the book: they are supported and illuminated by a number of very briefly developed themes...