Marcuse’s aborted ‘Operational Thinking’ essay was an early draft of One-Dimensional Man

Evidence

An article by Marcuse on `Operational Thinking and Social Domination’, following on from his last contribution to the SPSS, was to have appeared in the yearbook. It represented an early stage of what later became One-Dimensional Man; but he was not able to complete it. The failure of the plan for a yearbook also meant that Marcuse was never named as a collaborator on the dialectics project. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 321

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates One-Dimensional Man, and connects to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s contemporaneous work on instrumental reason.
• SEED: Angle: how the Institute’s abandoned projects and Marcuse’s wartime propaganda work fed into the origins of One-Dimensional Man.