Herbert Marcuse
| Western Philosophy 20th century | |
|---|---|
| 200px | |
| Name: Herbert Marcuse | |
| Birth: July 19, 1898 (Berlin, Germany) | |
| Death: July 29, 1979 (Germany) | |
| School/tradition: critical theory | |
| Main interests | |
| social theory, marxism | |
| Notable ideas | |
| The Totally Administered Society | |
| Influences | Influenced |
| Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Lukacs, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl | Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jürgen Habermas |
Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898 – July 29,1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist and a member of the Frankfurt School.
Biography
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898 to a Jewish family. He served in the German Army during the First World War and became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist uprising of November 1918, which was crushed by the German Freikorps.
After the war, he attended the University of Freiburg, where he studied Marxism, but never took part in the Communist movement. After completing his Ph.D. thesis in 1922, written on the German Kunstlerroman, he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. He returned to Freiburg in 1929 and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger. In addition to his Marxist leanings, he was greatly influenced by the existentialism of Heidegger. In order to qualify to become a professor in Germany, Marcuse wrote a habilitation entitled Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. Although it was published in 1932, Heiddegger did not accept the completed manuscript, and Marcuse's academic career was blocked.
In 1933, Marcuse was invited to join the Institute for Social Research, founded by the Frankfurt School. He then left Germany, following the members of the institute to Geneva and Paris before finally settling in New York, where he worked at the institute's Columbia University office. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States for the rest of his life. In 1940 he published his first English work, Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying Hegel and Marx.
During World War II, Marcuse 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 (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency), where he did research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the United States Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.
In 1952, Marcuse began a teaching career as a political theorist, teaching briefly at Columbia and Harvard University and then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he was a professor of philosophy and political science. During this time, he published Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His last position, teaching at the University of California at San Diego from 1965 to 1970, gained him notoriety as the intellectual head of the nationwide radical student movement. He was a friend and collaborator of the historical sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff.
Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960's. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a term he disliked and rejected. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the United States and Europe in the late 1960's and in the 1970's. He died on July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany for a speaking engagement. Jürgen Habermas had invited him to speak at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg.
Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School in the post-war period, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian, while Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly conservative.
Influence
Many radical scholars and activists were influenced by him, for example Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman. Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist-Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, and fellow German emigre, Paul Mattick, who both 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 vilified by conservatives. Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not 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 discriminating tolerance that does not allow repressive intolerance to be voiced.
Major works
- The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State (1934)
- Reason and Revolution (1941)
- Eros and Civilization (1955)
- Soviet Marxism (1958)
- One-Dimensional Man (1964)
- Repressive Tolerance (1965)
- Negations (1968)
- An Essay on Liberation (1969)
- Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972)
- The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
External links
Credits
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