Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979)

HERBERT MARCUSE was a German-born social philosopher and political activist. One of the founders of a school of critical social thought in the first half of the 20th century, he became famous during the tumultuous period of the 1960s and early 1970s as the “father” of the New Left movement, inspiring student radicals and other groups to advocate revolutionary social change. The aging professor (he was 70 years old in [Page 299]1968, at the height of the protest era) became the unlikely intellectual guru to number of young radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a group that brought about many changes in the socially turbulent 1960s. To the disdain of the conservative establishment, he introduced his young followers to the idea of the Marxist-inspired possibility of revolutionary change through a concerted collective effort to resist the oppressive forces of society, an effort he referred to as the Great Refusal.

Marcuse was born in Berlin and educated in Germany. After World War I, in which he served with the German army, he received his Ph.D. in literature and worked for a short period as a bookseller. Marcuse possessed a desire to expand his knowledge of philosophy so he enrolled in studies at Freiburg University under the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger. Soon afterward, he joined the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt. Marcuse also joined the faculties at the institute's branches in Geneva, Switzerland, and at Columbia University in the United States. He worked with other social philosophers such as T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer on what came to be known as the Critical Theory of Society, or the Frankfurt School of thought. This perspective involved an examination of society using a Marxist foundation but also focused on cultural phenomena and the active participation of individuals to promote social change.

Marcuse drew heavily on the work of social philosophers Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, and his own mentor, Heidegger. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he published a number of works (essays and a book) that provided critical examinations of the works of these philosophers. Shortly after the Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933, Marcuse fled to Geneva and later to New York, continuing his employment with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933, Marcuse published the first major review of Marx's recently published Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and devoted himself to studying Marxist philosophy.

In 1941, Marcuse joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later worked with the State Department. It was also in 1941 that he published his ideas on critical theory in a work called Reason and Revolution, his first work in English. Marcuse continued his work with the institute at Columbia University, developing his philosophical theory. He also maintained his position with the U.S. government until the early 1950s. In 1955, Marcuse published the highly influential Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. In this work, he applied Marxist thought to the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Using the position on social repression found in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents as a point of debate, Marcuse described the potential of individuals to abolish the constraints of repression to lead lives of liberation and fulfillment in areas such as satisfactory work lives, sexual freedom, and leisure time. His somewhat radical notions and underlying critique of society in Eros and Civilization garnered the attention of many people (with both positive and negative reactions) and laid the groundwork of the controversial theoretical perspective that would gain him notoriety.

...