Marcuse argues that instrumental reason in the twentieth century had become suffused with the norms and imperatives of capitalism to generate a rationality that saturated society and secured capitalism in ways Marx and Marxism could not fathom or explain. Thus, in place of a Marxist notion of bourgeois ideology in workplaces, schools, and the state, Marcuse traces the specific rationalities with which modern capitalism saturates and governs the world and the human. “Technological rationality has become political rationality” and produces “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom … in advanced industrial civilization.”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 228