Herbert Marcuse

Introduction

Herbert Marcuse is the German-American philosopher whose work integrated Marxist analysis, Freudian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics, and Heideggerian phenomenology into a distinctive body of critical theory. His two major American books — Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) — made him the most publicly visible Frankfurt School thinker and the major theoretical voice of the 1960s New Left.

Marcuse occupies an unusual position within the first-generation Frankfurt School. He spent the postwar decades in the United States rather than returning to Frankfurt with Horkheimer and Adorno in the late 1940s; he taught at Brandeis (1954–65) and the University of California, San Diego (1965–76); he produced his major works in English for American audiences; and he embraced the political-activist role that Adorno conspicuously refused. The combination of Frankfurt School theoretical training with American radicalism made him a singular figure in postwar intellectual history.

Life

Herbert Marcuse was born on July 19, 1898, in Berlin to an upper-middle-class assimilated Jewish family. He served in the German army on the home front during World War I and joined the Soldiers' Council of the German Revolution in 1918–19, an experience that shaped his lifelong political commitments. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg, taking his PhD at Freiburg in 1922 with a dissertation on the German Künstlerroman (artist novel).

The Freiburg years were decisive philosophically. Marcuse returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Martin Heidegger; the projected Habilitation on Hegel's ontology was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity but not formally accepted by Heidegger, whose political turn toward National Socialism (which Marcuse had already detected) precluded any continued working relationship. Marcuse never returned to Heidegger personally, though the engagement with Heidegger's framework left lasting marks on his thinking.

Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1933, just as the Nazi seizure of power was forcing the Institute into exile. He worked in Geneva and then in New York and contributed extensively to the Institute's journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung through the 1930s. His 1941 Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory was the major English-language introduction of Hegel to American audiences and one of the most influential single books on Hegel in twentieth-century philosophy.

During World War II, Marcuse worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the State Department analyzing German social and political conditions; the position gave him direct access to the dynamics of the Nazi regime and shaped his subsequent analyses of totalitarianism. He remained in the United States after the war, taking academic positions at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis (1954–65), and UC San Diego (1965–76).

The American years produced Marcuse's two most influential books and his role as the major intellectual voice of the New Left. Eros and Civilization (1955) integrated Freud and Marx; One-Dimensional Man (1964) gave the canonical critique of advanced industrial society; the 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance and the 1969 An Essay on Liberation engaged the political movements of the late 1960s. Marcuse's public visibility brought political backlash; the FBI maintained a file on him, and the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups campaigned for his dismissal from UC San Diego.

Marcuse died on July 29, 1979, in Starnberg, West Germany, during a visit to Habermas. The death came at the end of a lecture tour and just after his work The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) had been published.

The problem he worked on

Marcuse's central project was the development of a critical theory adequate to the conditions of advanced industrial society — the postwar consumer capitalism whose institutional integration of workers into the system of production, whose culture industry of administered satisfactions, and whose Cold War militarization had transformed the conditions under which Marxist critique had originally been developed. The classical Marxist framework, with its prediction of revolutionary working-class consciousness produced by the contradictions of industrial capitalism, did not fit the postwar conditions in which the working class had been integrated into the consumer order.

Marcuse's response drew on three resources. The Freudian framework gave the analytical tools for understanding the psychological mechanisms by which the system reproduces itself: the repression of authentic needs, the substitution of false needs produced by the culture industry, the integration of erotic energy into productive labor. The Hegelian framework gave the dialectical method for analyzing how the system's own development produces the conditions of its potential negation. The Heideggerian framework gave a vocabulary for the ontological depth of the integration the system achieves.

Contributions

Reason and Revolution

The 1941 Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory is one of the most influential introductions to Hegel in twentieth-century English-language philosophy. Marcuse argued against the conservative reading of Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian state (the reading promoted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, against which Marcuse's book had already been published); the book presents Hegel as a critical philosopher whose dialectical method provides the resources for the analysis of capitalism's contradictions that Marx developed.

The book had decisive influence on the American reception of Hegel in the decades before the better-known Kojeve-influenced French reception became available in English. It also brought the Hegelian-Marxist tradition into American academic philosophy at a moment when the dominant analytic tradition was largely uninterested in either Hegel or Marx.

Eros and Civilization

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) is Marcuse's first major American book and the founding text of the Freudian-Marxist synthesis that would shape the New Left. The central thesis: Freud's account in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) of the necessary repression of instinctual life for the maintenance of civilization is correct under conditions of material scarcity, but the postwar advanced industrial society has produced the technical conditions under which scarcity could be overcome and the repression Freud diagnosed could be reduced.

Marcuse distinguishes basic repression (the repression required for civilized life under any conditions) from surplus repression (the additional repression maintained for the reproduction of specific social arrangements, especially the performance principle of capitalist labor). The contemporary surplus repression is no longer materially necessary; its maintenance serves the interests of the system rather than the conditions of civilized life as such. The recovery of erotic life from surplus repression — the liberation of Eros from the performance principle — is the substantive content of the social transformation Marcuse envisions.

The book had decisive influence on the 1960s counterculture and the sexual liberation movement. The Marcusean framework provided theoretical articulation for the connection between sexual repression and political domination that became one of the organizing themes of the New Left.

One-Dimensional Man

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964) is Marcuse's most influential single book and one of the canonical texts of the 1960s New Left. The central thesis: contemporary advanced industrial society has produced a one-dimensional form of life in which the critical dimension of thought has been progressively eliminated. The system absorbs and neutralizes opposition through the integration of workers into consumer satisfaction, the absorption of high culture into the culture industry, the technical-administrative rationality that presents itself as politically neutral, and the foreclosure of alternative possibilities through the saturation of consciousness by the existing order.

The book is organized in three parts. One-Dimensional Society analyzes the integration of contemporary capitalism; One-Dimensional Thought analyzes the philosophical and methodological frameworks (especially positivism and ordinary language philosophy) that Marcuse takes to express and reinforce the one-dimensional condition; The Chance of the Alternatives considers the prospects for genuine opposition.

The famous closing image — the Great Refusal — names the political-existential response that one-dimensional society makes possible only as a marginal act: the refusal of integration that comes not from the working class (which the system has integrated) but from the marginalized populations whose exclusion places them outside the integrated order.

The book sold over 100,000 copies in its first decade and shaped the theoretical self-understanding of the New Left in the United States, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Marcuse became, in the late 1960s, the most-quoted living philosopher in radical political publications across the Western world.

Repressive tolerance

The 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, published in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (with Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore Jr.), is Marcuse's most politically controversial single text. The argument: the contemporary liberal practice of tolerance, which extends procedural protections equally to all positions including those that defend the existing order of domination, is in practice repressive of genuine opposition. Liberation from the conditions of advanced industrial society requires liberating tolerance — the discriminating tolerance that extends protection to oppositional movements while withdrawing it from movements that defend the existing order.

The essay has been continuously contested. Critics from across the political spectrum have argued that the position licenses precisely the kind of authoritarian suppression of dissent that liberal tolerance was designed to prevent. Defenders have argued that the essay's specific conditions for the application of liberating tolerance are narrow enough to address the concern. The contemporary debate over platform regulation, hate speech, and the limits of free expression continues to engage Marcuse's argument.

The Aesthetic Dimension

The late Die Permanenz der Kunst (The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, 1977/1978) is Marcuse's major statement on aesthetic theory and his late engagement with the question of art's critical function. The book defends a Schillerian-Hegelian-Marcusean conception of art's autonomy as the source of its critical power against the orthodox Marxist demands for art's direct political engagement. Authentic art, Marcuse argues, exercises its critical function precisely through its refusal to be reduced to the demands of immediate political instrumentality; the autonomous artwork preserves the image of an unrealized possibility that the existing order forecloses.

The book's framework continues the aesthetic theory developed by Adorno but with a more positive valorization of art's utopian function than Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) had allowed.

Key works

• Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932)
• Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941)
• Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955)
• Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
• One-Dimensional Man (1964)
• A Critique of Pure Tolerance (with Wolff and Moore, 1965)
• An Essay on Liberation (1969)
• Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)
• The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)

The standard scholarly edition is the Schriften edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen (Springe: zu Klampen, 9 volumes, 1978–89, plus posthumous volumes). The Beacon Press editions are the dominant English texts; the six-volume Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse edited by Douglas Kellner (Routledge, 1998–2014) makes available previously unpublished material including the wartime OSS reports.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Hegel (the dialectical framework of Reason and Revolution and beyond); Marx (the underlying social-theoretical framework); Heidegger (his Freiburg teacher; the influence persisted even after the personal break); Husserl (the phenomenological framework Marcuse encountered through Heidegger); Sigmund Freud (the psychoanalytic framework integrated with Marx in Eros and Civilization); Friedrich Schiller (the aesthetic framework of The Aesthetic Dimension); Max Weber (the analysis of modern rationalization).

Influenced: The 1960s New Left across the Western world; Angela Davis (his Brandeis student); the Frankfurt School second and third generations through engagement with his American work; the New German Cinema (Kluge, Fassbinder) and the Group 47 writers; the contemporary critical theory engagement through Andrew Feenberg, Douglas Kellner, Charles Reitz; the contemporary radical political theory through Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, and others; the broader American radical tradition through engagement with Marcuse on culture, art, and liberation.

Reception

Marcuse's contemporary reception was wider than that of any other first-generation Frankfurt School thinker. One-Dimensional Man was a major bestseller and the most-quoted living philosopher in 1960s political publications. Marcuse appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Der Spiegel; he was the subject of media attention; he received both public adulation and political attack.

The post-1980 reception was more measured. The collapse of the political movements with which Marcuse had been associated, the rise of post-structuralism in continental philosophy, and the Habermasian reorientation of Critical Theory all reduced his visibility in academic philosophy. The recovery has been ongoing through the work of Douglas Kellner, Andrew Feenberg, Charles Reitz, and the International Herbert Marcuse Society (founded 2004).

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Andrew Feenberg's Heidegger and Marcuse (2005) and Toward Marcuse's Critical Theory of Technology (in progress), Charles Reitz's Art, Alienation, and the Humanities (2000), Douglas Kellner's editorial work on the Collected Papers, John Abromeit's Herbert Marcuse: A New Look at His Dialectical Sociology (2004), and the Herbert Marcuse Studies journal. Active scholarly debates concern the contemporary applicability of the one-dimensional society thesis under conditions of digital media, the relation between Marcuse's Heideggerian and Marxist commitments, and the contemporary status of Repressive Tolerance in the platform-regulation debates.

Further reading

• Critical Theory — the tradition Marcuse helped shape
• Adorno — the Frankfurt colleague with whom Marcuse differed on political engagement
• Horkheimer — the Institute director with whom Marcuse worked from 1933
• Hegel — the philosopher whose dialectics Marcuse made available to American audiences
• Marx — the analytical framework his work develops
• Heidegger — his Freiburg teacher, with whom he eventually broke over political differences
• Marxism — the broader tradition his work belongs to

The German-American philosopher whose Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man made him the most publicly visible Frankfurt School thinker and the major theoretical voice of the 1960s New Left.