Herbert Marcuse Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German-Jewish social theorist and political activist. He was a member of the majority faction of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) between 1917 and 1919. After World War I (1914–1918), he participated in Berlin’s revolutionary Soldiers’ Council. However, he resigned from both the SDP and the council, ending his only organized political affiliations, and in 1919 resumed studies in German literature, philosophy, and political economy at the University of Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate.

In 1928 he began work as an assistant to well-known German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In 1933 Marcuse became a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research at the institute’s Geneva, Switzerland, branch. The following year he immigrated to the United States and continued his work with the institute at Columbia University in New York City. Between 1942 and 1950, Marcuse was a research analyst for the U.S. government. His first permanent academic position was at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. After his retirement from Brandeis, he became a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Between the mid-1960s and his death, he attained his greatest fame as both an advocate and critic of new left theories and practices. He died in Starnberg, West Germany, in 1979.

Marcuse’s first published works dated to his period with Heidegger. Marcuse attempted to synthesize Marxism with existential philosophy. When he joined the Institute for Social Research, he participated in the collective effort to develop a “critical theory of society.” His primary task was the philosophical articulation of the fundamental principles of this critical theory, which culminated in his book Reason and Revolution (1941). When Marcuse resumed his academic career in 1950, one of the thrusts of his work was the analysis of the ideological obstacles to revolution. His book Soviet Marxism (1955) traces the Soviet transformation of Marxism from a form of critical thinking designed to guide revolutionary political practice into an ideological prop to the existing status quo. His controversial 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” analyzes the degeneration of the liberal idea of tolerance. The masterpiece of Marcuse’s ideological criticism was One-Dimensional Man (1964), his most famous work. Here Marcuse describes the smooth and comfortable totalitarianism of advanced industrial societies— including the development of the welfare and warfare state, the mass media, and modern technology—which he believes has engendered a mass conformity and suppressed the development of genuine alternatives to the status quo.

If Marcuse’s criticism of ideology emphasized the obstacles to revolution, the Freudian-Marxist thrust of his postwar work raised the stakes involved in revolution. In Eros and Civilization (1955), he put forth the belief that true revolutionary emancipation went beyond political and economic change to include the social, sensuous, and sexual emancipation of the instincts. Marcuse’s critique of society exerted some influence on the protean movement of dissent known as the new left. The new left was opposed by the old socialist and Communist lefts and disavowed by most established intellectuals. But in An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse took a more favorable view. He never minimized the power of the forces opposed to revolutionary change, nor did he uncritically endorse the new left, but he was attentive to the spark of genuine human emancipation in the movement’s goals.

Marcuse’s last works explored the theme of art and revolution. He argued that art preserved an image of human freedom and happiness. His last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), combated the orthodox Marxist tendency to trivialize art by reducing it to the status of a mere ideological reflection of social classes.

Bibliography:

Abromeit, John. and W. Mark Cobb, eds. Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bokina, John, and Timothy J. Lukes, eds. Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994.
Feenberg, Andrew. Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Lukes,Timothy J. The Flight into Inwardness: An Exposition and Critique of Herbert Marcuse’s Theory of Liberative Aesthetics. Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1985.
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
“Repressive Tolerance.” In A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, 81–117. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.
Pippin, Robert, Andrew Feenberg, and Charles W.Webel, eds. Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia. Houndmills, U.K.: Macmillan Education, 1988.
Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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