Everything about Herbert Marcuse totally explained
Herbert Marcuse (
July 19,
1898 –
July 29,
1979) was a
German philosopher and
sociologist, and a member of the
Frankfurt School. His best known works are
Eros and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man.
Life and work
Herbert Marcuse was born in
Berlin to a
Jewish family and served in the
German Army, caring for horses in Berlin during the
First World War. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted
socialist Spartacist uprising. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the
University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German
Künstlerroman, he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. He returned to
Freiburg in 1929 to write a
Habilitation with
Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as
Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity in spite of Heidegger's rejection. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, emigrating from Germany that same year, going first to
Switzerland, then the
United States, where he became a
naturalized citizen in 1940.
Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with
Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno (among others). In 1940 he published
Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying
Georg W. F. Hegel and
Karl Marx.
During
World War II Marcuse first worked for the
U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943 he transferred to the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His work for the OSS involved research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the
US Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.
In 1952 he began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at
Columbia University and
Harvard University, then at
Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he taught philosophy and politics, and finally (by then he was past the usual retirement age), at the
University of California, San Diego. He was a friend and collaborator of the historical sociologist
Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher
Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor
C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the
New Left movement.
In the post-war period, Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School, continuing to identify himself as a
Marxist, a socialist, and a
Hegelian.
Marcuse's critiques of
capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and
Freud,
Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book
One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the
New Left in the United States," a term he strongly disliked and disavowed. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on
popular culture and scholarly
popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s. He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher
André Gorz.
Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident
Rudolf Bahro (author of
Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus [trans.,
The Alternative in Eastern Europe]), discussing in a 1979 essay Bahro's theories of "change from within"
(External Link
).
Many radical scholars and activists were influenced by Marcuse, such as
Angela Davis,
Abbie Hoffman,
Rudi Dutschke, and
Robert M. Young. (See the List of Scholars and Activists link, below.) Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist-humanist
Raya Dunayevskaya, and fellow German emigre
Paul Mattick, both of whom subjected
One-Dimensional Man to a Marxist critique. Marcuse's 1965 essay "
Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist
democracies can have
totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives.
(External Link) Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance doesn't tolerate support for repression, since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as "inauthentic." Instead, he advocates a discriminatory form of tolerance that doesn't allow so-called "repressive" intolerance to be voiced.
Marcuse married three times. His first wife was
mathematician Sophie Wertman (
1901–
1951), with whom he'd a son, Peter (b.
1928). Herbert's second marriage was to Inge Neumann (
1913–
1972), the widow of his close friend
Franz Neumann. His third wife was Erica Sherover (
1938–
1988), a former graduate student and forty years his junior, whom he married in 1974.
Marcuse may have been distantly related to the Berlin
sexologist and
dermatologist Max Marcuse (External Link). Ten days after his eighty-first birthday, Marcuse died on July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany. He had spoken at the Frankfurt
Römerberggespräche, and second-generation Frankfurt School theorist
Jürgen Habermas had invited him to the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg.
Primary literature
Secondary literature
Christian Fuchs (2005). Emanzipation! Technik und Politik bei Herbert Marcuse. Aachen: Shaker. ISBN 3-8322-3999-5.
Christian Fuchs (2005). Herbert Marcuse interkulturell gelesen. Interkulturelle Bibliothek Vol. 15. Nordhausen: Bautz. ISBN 3-88309-175-8.
Douglas Kellner (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. London: Macmillan. ISBN 9780520052956.Further Information
Get more info on 'Herbert Marcuse'.
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