Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

MARCUSE, HERBERT (1898-1979)

Herbert Marcuse, an American philosopher of German origin, was born in Berlin in 1898 into an assimilated Jewish family and died in 1979 in Starnberg, Germany, where he had returned after World War II. He studied philosophy in Berlin and Fribourg, and his doctoral dissertation, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1987), was sponsored by Martin Heidegger. He militated against social democracy, defended a critical Marxism, and participated, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in the creation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Marcuse left Germany for the United States and taught at different universities: New York, Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego.

He had a Marxist training and in 1958 published Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis. He also harbored a passionate yet critical interest in psychoanalysis. These two facets of Marcuse contributed to his writing, where one can discern individual libidinal structures and economic, political, and social realities characterized by domination and alienation continuously coming into conflict. His best-known works were widely read by students in the United States and Europe in the 1960s. In Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and One Dimensional Man (1964), he denounced "repressive sublimation" in consumer society, where society caters to the individual's drives only to better control the individual. Ever the rebel, Marcuse also published Reason and Revolution (1941), An Essay on Liberation (1968), and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1973).

Roger Dadoun

See also: France; Marxism and psychoanalysis; Philosophy and psychoanalysis; Politics and psychoanalysis; Sociology and psychoanalysis/sociopsychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Marcuse, Herbert. (1941). Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

——. (1958). Soviet Marxism: A critical analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

——. (1955). Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon.

——. (1964). One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press.

——. (1968). An essay on liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.

——. (1973). Counterrevolution and revolt. Boston: Beacon Press.

——. (1987). Hegel's ontology and the theory of historicity (Seyla Benhabib, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nicolas, André. (1969). Marcuse, ou la quête d'un univers trans-prométhéen. Paris: Seghers.

Palmier, Jean Michel. (1969). Sur Marcuse. Paris: Union générale d'éditions. (Also published under the title Présentation d'Herbert Marcuse.)