Marcuse, Herbert

Marcuse, Herbert 1898-1979

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herbert Marcuse was a German American social theorist and activist who gained prominence in the 1960s as “the father of the New Left.” Born in Berlin to a prosperous Jewish family, Marcuse served in the German army during World War I and then studied in Berlin and Freiburg from 1919 to 1922. After working as a bookseller in Berlin, Marcuse returned to Freiburg in 1929 to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Although he was enthralled with Heidegger’s thought, he was deeply dismayed by his teacher’s political affiliation with the Nazis. Though his habilitation, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), was not accepted because of the rising influence of nazism, Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1933 and became associated with the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school of critical social theory. In 1934 Marcuse fled Nazi Germany and relocated to Columbia University in New York, receiving U.S. citizenship in 1940. He published Reason and Revolution (1941), which established him as an insightful interpreter of the Hegelian-Marxian tradition of dialectical thinking.

Wanting to aid the war effort against the Nazis, Marcuse joined the Office of Strategic Services as an intelligence analyst in 1943. After the war he worked for the State Department until he returned to academia in 1952 and eventually landed a position at Brandeis, where he taught from 1954 to 1965. In 1955 he published Eros and Civilization, which argues, contrary to Freud, that civilization is not inevitably repressive, but that the unconscious harbors an instinctual drive toward happiness and freedom that is evident in works of art and other creative cultural products. While a “basic repression” of drives is necessary for civilization, Marcuse criticizes contemporary society’s “surplus repression,” especially its exploitive economic organization and unnecessary restriction of sexuality. He outlines an alternative form of social organization in which labor is non-alienated and sexuality is free and open.

In 1964 Marcuse published his most influential work, One-Dimensional Man, which argues that the technology and consumerism of advanced industrial society enables it to eliminate social critique and conflict by assimilating traditional voices of dissent, for example, the voice of the working class. The result is “one-dimensional man,” who cannot think critically about society because it integrates him by continually creating and satisfying “false needs.” Genuine social critique must therefore come from nonintegrated, socially marginalized voices. Marcuse’s supplemental essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), argues that the liberal conception of “tolerance” blunts social critique by demanding tolerance for oppressive speech. He insists upon a discriminating tolerance that prevents certain forms of intolerance from being voiced. Although criticized by Marxists, One-Dimensional Man was a seminal work of 1960s radical thought, and Marcuse began publishing articles, giving lectures, and advising student protest groups all over the world. He influenced such activists as Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis, who was his student at Brandeis.

Marcuse died on a lecture tour in Starnberg, West Germany. Although his work has been criticized for its lack of empirical analysis, his provocative blend of Marxism and libertarian socialism has inspired much political activism and social critique.

SEE ALSO Davis, Angela; Frankfurt School; Repressive Tolerance

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bokina, John, and Timothy J. Lukes, eds. 1994. Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Kellner, Douglas. 1984. Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1991.

Pippin, Robert, Andrew Feenberg, and Charles P. Webel, eds. 1988. Marcuse: Critical Theory & the Promise of Utopia. London: MacMillan Education.

William M. Curtis