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A Reply to William Leiss, “Technological Rationality: Notes on ‘Work and Freedom in Marcuse and Marx’”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Edward Andrew
Edward Andrew
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Mr Leiss has taken exception to my contention that Marcuse espouses the doctrine of technological rationality whereas Marx does not. He asserts that a re-examination of the original sources will not support such a classification. Since Mr Leiss does not. provide any sources or reasons to indicate why he disagrees with my assertion that Marx was not an adherent of technological rationality, I shall briefly recapitulate the reasons for my assertion and then pass on to his primary concern, namely, that I failed to support my view that Marcuse believes technological progress towards automation is the embodiment of reason in history.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 400 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1971

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References

1 The Civil War in France (Moscow, n.d.), 66–7.

2 One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1966), 251–2.

3 Ibid., 18.

4 Eros and Civilization (New York, Vintage Books, [1961] 1955), 142.

5 One-Dimensional Man, 231.

6 Ibid., 237.

7 Ibid., 236.

8 Ibid., 44, 251–2; Eros and Civilization, 205–6; An Essay on Liberation (Boston, 1969), 70.

9 The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), 167.

10 The Chinese and Cuban forms of socialism have been attracting an increasing number of the left, perhaps because these régimes are not as committed to technological rationality as is the Soviet régime. The greater emphasis on human will rather than on machinery as the agent of progress in these populist forms of socialism may be tiring but not tiresome.

11 The Human Condition (New York, 1959), 330–1.

12 Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow, n.d.), 389.

13 Capital, I (Moscow, 1959), 47; cf. p. 186.

14 Ibid., 364–5.